Sun-Hee was one of my students in Korea. She was in her late 40s and introduced herself with a clear tone of voice: “I’m Sun-Hee and I have 2 children. I used to be a nurse and followed my short professor husband to Germany and lived for 10 years.” We all laughed at the word, “short”. Later I saw her husband on local news on TV and saw that he was quite shorter than his wife SunHee.
Whenever I went to the class, I was excited to hear her funny stories.
One of her stories started when she went to a market not long after she went back to Korea from Germany. She went to a local market to buy a live octopus. The seller put the octopus into a plastic bag with some of ocean water to keep it alive. She had bags full of groceries in both hands, so she couldn’t find a spot for the octopus. She put it in her shirt pocket! Then she took a bus to come home to save taxi fare. She fell down on the bus when the driver quickly stopped and the octopus popped out and crawled on the floor of the bus.
She seemed to think of herself as a kind of woman with tons of wisdom, especially when it came to the topic of how to save money. All the other students were fascinated with her “saving money wisdom.”
One day, when one semester finished, we decided to go mountain hiking.
When we were almost on the top of the mountain, she said, “Everybody! Let’s have a coffee break. I brought coffee!” Everybody sat around her on the rock. She took a thermos bottle and several empty yogurt cups out from her backpack. She poured the coffee into the yogurt cups for us. Everybody gave her compliments for her way of saving money. I thought it was very funny.
When we came down to the valley of the mountain, we went to a restaurant. We ate “Bibimbab”, mixed rice and vegetables with hot sauce. The restaurant was popular for providing many kinds of organic vegetables. When we finished the lunch, Sun-Hee took out an empty plastic bag and put the leftover vegetables into the bag to eat them later. I felt a little embarrassed when I saw the waitress’ look.
When I was invited to her house later for lunch, I realized she never threw away any plastic bags, bottles, or containers. I found some seaweed and tea leaves in potato chip bags labeled with small letters in Korean, “Seaweed” “tea” She was using empty hot pepper paste container as a pickle container. Others invited to her house with me gave her more compliments, “We have a lot of things to learn from you!”
One day she missed the class. I was wondering what happened to her because she had never skipped the class before. A week later, she came to the class and told us why she couldn’t come to the class. She was laughing to tell us this, “Ho ho ho…you want to know why I skipped class last week? Oh my goodness! I had to go to the emergency room! I totally mixed up my real eye drop bottle with the bottle where I keep my herb oil. I put some drops in my eyes and realized it was herb oil.”
I was too surprised to close my mouth for seconds. Of course, l laughed loudly afterwards.
That is some wise advice- know where you keep stuff
A great story as well, thanks