Chapter 16: The Shopping Cart

They spent Monday wandering the streets of Gunsan-si (Kunsan) in the oeguk jiyeok (foreigner area) through the blustery snow. Normally the shops would have been closed on Monday, but being a week from Christmas, they remained open, and the shopkeepers were happy to see Roxie and her “shopping cart.” Both Roxie and Wedge picked up a few packages from shops where they had ordered items for Christmas and the shopkeepers gift wrapped their purchases for free.

It was getting late when they ended up in a shopping district that didn’t cater to the American servicemen, and it was an entirely different world. There were street vendors that were selling all kinds of foods, generally meat on a stick grilled and eaten steaming hot, but there were a few vendors that had huge pots of Beondegi, huge pots of bugs that were served in a paper cup with toothpicks (they later found out they were silkworm pupae) and it smelled like dog food to Wedge. “I’m going to try that before we leave.”

“Why would you want to eat that?” asked Roxie.

“You see a lot of Koreans eating it,” insisted Wedge.

“They also eat dog, are you ready to give Labrador Retriever a try?”

“We eat a lot of things they would find weird,” he insisted.

“Name three,” she demanded. He never found three. Actually, he never found one. In the first half of the twentieth century Korea had been so maltreated by Japan, then by China, that famine lasted for generations. Koreans learned never to turn their noses up at anything.