24 Hour Commerce People

Update: After my last post, I managed to sing a song. A little Korean children's song my grandma taught me as a kid. This made my aunt especially happy.

Just got in from the night market and am posting direct from my new pink long johns!

The stalls at the market are seemingly dominated by the ajumma which is the vernacular term for a woman who is married and has children. The ajumma is selfless and industrious and in Korea, ubiquitous. They outnumber the men about 5-1 at these markets. The stalls are all jam packed with clothes and as messy and chaotic as it appears, many of these people are actually on the road to riches. They live 24 hour lives - sell merchandise all night, supervise factories during the day that copy clothes their husbands have sourced in Paris and Milan. The night market is actually for the retailers who come from all over and buy wholesale. Needless to say, the prices they quote them were not the ones we were getting. You can see them loading big bundles of clothes into trucks. We stopped for food at around 1am at a place run by about five ajummas and ate some amazing fast food - udon, hot rice cakes in chilli sauce, fried squid and noodles wrapped in seaweed and fish cakes. Then we did more shopping. We bought some pretty random shit that I won't go into here. This night market goes on until around 6am when the day shift arrives and switches back into normal retail mode.

I saw my first Korean dyke too. My aunt and my mother were grilling her on her gender. I stood right back and watched the scene unfold. Hilarious. My mother was completely unrepentant when I told her what the deal was: "How was I supposed to know? Pffft. She probably gets it all the time."

I'm off to bed for a few hours until our ki massage guy comes at 10am. More shopping is on the cards tomorrow and then a traditional Korean samul nori show in the evening with the family.

p.s. China was a blast - too much to post here and now though. I'm tired. Have to go to bed. Good night.