I'm a celebrity! And I want cake.

There are a few things that I have neglected to mention in my previous entries. I am still amazed at how many hello’s and hi’s I get while walking down the street. Mostly, if not only from younger children. They see my skin colour and frantically wave and say “HIIII”. Then giggle and run away. Almost celeb status. I can get used to that. Also, I am baffled at how Koreans navigate through the cities. First of all, when a light is green, the crosswalk light does not change with it. Some weird set of rules dictates that only at certain times can the little man turn green and permit me to cross, and it is never when I think it will happen. Koreans also drive like mad people. A sidewalk can be their street if they need it to be. And pedestrians, well, don’t really matter. Needless to say I have been exercising more caution here than I would back home. Also, you cannot push a button as a pedestrian here to make the light change for you, either. Then there’s street signs! Apparently do not matter here. The first few days we were here, we had to find the school on a map provided to us. What seemed logical, to try and match up the signs on the map to the signs on the road, proved futile. Nothing was the same. We later found out that those signs really don’t mean anything, that Koreans find things based on landmarks and things like that. At least that is what I got from the conversation. Nonsensical! Why would street signs even exist then? What if you had never been somewhere before? How do you find an apartment? A store? Anything? I plan to get to the bottom of this mystery somehow. One thing that is so lovely how many Parisienne bakeries exist in our little city, and all the way through Seoul even. They are even decorated to look like something one might find in France. Cobblestone exterior, names like “Tous Les Jours” and the store owner wearing a chef hat and coat. At pretty well every corner you can find a shop outfitted with miniature cakes decorated so intricately that, I think if I were to receive one or buy one, I would have a tough time cutting into it. They are that pretty. So far I have managed to fight the temptation to buy one, or two, or a doughnut or cookie, but let’s face it, I am only in week one of my fifty two weeks here. I don’t know how much willpower I will have once the initial appeal of Korean food wears off.