Private Murphy Comes to Thanksgiving Dinner

As it is the holidays, I’m going to indulge myself in the gift of self-pity for a moment.  This is my first holiday season away from home, the first time I won’t be able to spend Thanksgiving and/or Christmas with my family, our first holiday season away from our three children and almost everyone we love,  So, we’ve been just a little blue, even though we’ve been trying to keep a stiff upper lip.

Tomorrow is American Thanksgiving, and we live in a country that essentially doesn’t eat turkey.  You can’t find them in the regular grocery stores (not even as sandwich meat), and at Costco (our source of all American delicacies here in Busan), they are  heinously expensive.  However, even assuming we could locate a turkey at a reasonable price, purchase it, and manage to lug it home, we would be completely unable to cook it because our kitchen, like most South Korean apartment kitchens, lacks an oven.

So, a home-cooked, traditional Thanksgiving meal is out of the question.  Several area restaurants catering to expats are serving full traditional Thanksgiving lunches and dinners on Thursday, too, but we won’t be partaking.  Ever bastions of cultural sensitivity, our Korean employers have scheduled mandatory teacher training that day for all native English speakers.  Unlike American schools, Korean hagwons don’t give students the day off to train teachers.  They just make the teachers work extra hours.  So, in addition to teaching through dinner, which we normally do, we’ll be in staff development through lunch as well.  Guess who’s going to have to skip Turkey Day this year?

Now, those of you who know us well know that this is a big sacrifice on Ric’s part because the kid loves a turkey and ham dinner almost as much as he loves me.  Sometimes during the Christmas season I would come home to find him face down in the remnants of a plate of Christmas ham.  However, Thanksgiving meats don’t really hold the same allure for me.  I find the smell of roast turkey kind of repulsive, and, aside from occasional exceptions for bacon, I don’t eat pork at all.  On Christmas and Thanksgiving, I’m all about the sides:  broccoli casserole, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, baked green beans and all the Lebanese delicacies my family only trots out for special occasions like baklava, stuffed grape leaves, and kibbe.  Without an oven or access to an Arab grocery, most of these are rendered an impossibility.

So, we started off today little bit bummed because of all the fun, food, and family we knew we’d be missing in the States this week.  We figured we’d ranger up, though, and get through this first major holiday abroad together.  We figured it wouldn’t be any worse than a couple hours of being a little lonely and homesick.

Then all the bus drivers in Korea went on strike.  Starting on Thanksgiving.  See, we don’t have a car here in Busan, so we use the bus to get anywhere too far away to walk or bike.  Now that the weather’s cold, we frequently also choose to take the bus places we would normally walk or bike.  An alternative would be the super-clean and convenient Busan subway trains (which will still be running), except for the fact that the nearest underground station is about a twenty-five minute walk from our apartment.  To get there, we normally take—you guessed it—the bus.  We also take the bus to hapkido lessons three times a week, to the bank, and to the movie theater.  Our current best transportation alternative is to hail a cab, which is generally three times more expensive.

Despite the fact that I’m a supporter of labor unions and worker’s rights, I am a little more than miffed at the bus drivers for putting us personally in such a bind, on top of our already disappointing Thanksgiving non-plans.  The issue, like most, boils down to money.  From what we can gathered (translated into broken English from a variety of sources), the Korean government has issued some new law or edict or strongly worded letter designating taxis a form of public transportation.  Now, if a Korean bus driver hates anyone more than those Dokdo-stealing Japanese, it’s a Korean taxi driver.  Taxis are always driving in the bus lanes, blocking buses from getting to their stops, pulling out in front of others, and generally wreaking all kinds of automotive havoc on anyone who dares get in their way.  In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a Korean bus where the driver hasn’t honked at a taxi at least once during the trip, and those beeps of frustration are usually accompanied by some choice words whose meaning I can only begin to guess.  So, for the government to suggest that taxis are also public transportation vehicles and are entitled to share the federal funding allocated to buses and bus drivers is an outrage worthy of a walkout.  I guess I can understand this.  I’d be just as pissed at the concept of splitting our paltry public school funding with private schools and their teachers, especially if those teachers ran red lights and cut me off on a daily basis.

So that’s where we are.  In the middle of a city of four million in the middle of a sudden  bus workers’ strike with no apparent end in sight.  This holiday season just got a lot more expensive and stressful.  Let’s hope it’s over soon and we’re back on the bus again before Christmas rolls around.


Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Busan, Korea, public transportation