Just the other week or so, it was localized election time in Seoul, which meant driving box-trucks of placards and loudspeakers speaking garbled Korean, blasting throughout neighbourhoods as if they only need YOUR vote for them to win. I was feeling somewhat left out, as I didn't do my civic duty and vote in Canada's last elections. Sure, I probably would have voted randomly, which means it's probably better that I didn't vote at all. Anyways, I digress.
I was feeling like I wasn't actively participating in trying to make Korea a better place, and then last Sunday, I felt redeemed for an entire year.
I went out to meet a friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a while, and as I'm walking back to my apartment building, I can hear this child just wailing as if someone just took his lollipop- he was loud. So I walk up, to find a queue of almost ten people waiting for the elevator. Living on the 13th floor, I felt justified waiting (while I knew that more than half probably lived on the 3rd floor - side note - Koreans will wait ten minutes for the elevator to take them to the second, or even third floor of a building, when the stairs are RIGHT BESIDE the elevator..) So the child is just wailing, and the parents seem to be beyond caring, and two old people are losing patience with the kid, telling him to stop it. We all cram into the elevator (sure enough, six people push the 3rd and 4th floor). Sure enough, the child's even louder in the elevator. All of the sudden, he just stops, completely. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and two people mention (I'm assuming) "Wow, I wonder why he stopped?". Sure enough, the kid was staring at me, with a mouth wide enough to fit a soccer ball through. The mom just about wanted to crawl into a hole, the dad just shrugged his shoulders. The woman standing beside me, who had no idea that I (a foreigner) was standing beside her, almost fainted when she saw me (I've been living here for nine months - you'd think she would have recognized the ONLY foreigner living in the building). Needless to say, two people said "thank-you" as they walked out of the elevator, and I felt like I had just done a powerful service for the country.
Welcome to Korea - where even foreigners have more power over children than a Tootsie Pop.