On the 11th day of the 11th month...

...South Korea celebrates Pepero Day! Pepero are thin cookie sticks that are dipped chocolate and sometimes more. Strange that when the US and Canada are remembering the fallen on the day of the WW1 armistice, Koreans give each other cookies. There are 2 theories to the coming about of Pepero Day. Some say that it started in Busan when middle school girls would give each other the cookies so that they would "grow to be tall and slender like a Pepero". The other, more realistic theory is that the Pepero company wanted to boost sales so they decided that "hey, the number 1 looks kind of like a Pepero!" and that what better day to celebrate a 1 shaped cookie than on 11/11. That sounds like a pretty good marketing strategy to me. It worked too. 55% of all Pepero sales occur in the month of November. Gotta love corporate designed holidays.

One of the teachers was giving out boxes of Pepero to all the other teachers, and then on my desk I found a box of almond Pepero with a note on it in Korean. Too bad I'm allergic to nuts because the almond ones look really good. In my extra class one of my 3rd graders (9th grade) gave me a Pepero stick. Its really funny, this kid will give me some sort of candy every few days.

In addition to getting snacks, the students are also good for figuring out things on TV that I can't understand. There is this cell phone service called NATE advertised on TV and the commercial plays a really catchy song. I tried searching for it on youtube and various other ways to figure out what the song was called. When all else failed, I just asked Jason Statham (yeah, one of my studetns gave himself that as his English name) and he was able to figure it out. The video reminds me of one of those random parties at 241.