Meghan은 간다, Meghan ya no esta aqui

The land of the gift sets

Korea has been dubbed (or has dubbed itself) "The Land of the Morning Calm". While this is very nice and peaceful sounding, I have decided, just today, to give it a new name, and that is "Land of the Gift Sets". Gift giving is a very large production here, and is taken fairly seriously (from what I hear), and you cannot bypass a store without seeing gift sets, especially around the holidays.

There are juice gift sets, food gift sets, and hygiene gift sets. These aren't little baskets that have been wrapped in cellophane, but always come in boxes. I think the most popular item is the hygiene gift set- multiple bars of soap, bottles of shampoo, toothbrushes, and so on and so forth.

This weekend is the Lunar New Year. While I have no idea how one goes about celebrating this holiday, nor have I ever honored this holiday before, I'm okay with the fact that I have a three day weekend. I'm also okay with the fact that our director decided to give us presents. Now, the gift was given to us today and has solidified in my mind notion that Korea is most definitely "The Land of the Gift Sets". Why? Because every teacher at our school (six of us) received a Spam gift set today. I am not even joking. Not only did we receive gift sets, but that means that since Stephanie and I live together we had the great opportunity to bring TWO gift sets home. Well, our director told us we could take our gifts back to E-Mart and exchange them, and that sounded good to us. These sets are fairly expensive (in my opinion), so we ended up with a little pocket cash for the both of us and still have one gift set, so that means a big supply of the pink stuff.

Now, I have never knowingly eaten Spam before, and I definitely have not ever bought it for myself, so this was a big day. I captured the moment in a lot of pictures for you. Another picture will be forthcoming from our coworker who took a camera phone picture with us and our gift sets.

Here we go.

I love my gift. See how it even comes in a Spam bag so you can carry it? That's awesome.
Stephanie loves the Spam gift set also! She's amazed.
This is the box that was inside the bag.
Ooo!! Inside the box. I know you are jealous that we now own that much Spam.
Stephanie holds the Spam to show you the relative size of the cans.
I am happy about the Spam.
I am showing you the Spam.
Stephanie cooked her first Spam meal tonight: Spam and eggs.
Opening the spam.
It smells like cat food.
The other side of the can says Spam in Korean. That's pronounced: "Suh-pam"

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

posted by Meghan @ 5:46 AM