Anyone heard about the cabbage shortage in Korea? Yes? Oh, YOU didn’t? Let me tell you.
Koreans LOVE kimchi. Oh, you knew that already? Anyway, some people just like the taste, some people just eat it because that is what Koreans do and some people actually believe it is super healthy, so healthy, in fact, that is basically the cure for AIDS and SARS and anything else you can think of. There are very few of the latter, mind. Whatever the reason, most Koreans have kimchi pretty much with every meal.
With the recent rains that just did, not, want, to, stop, there’s been issues with rising fruit and vegetable prices in Korea. One of the vegetables that is pricy now is the Chinese cabbage. “Why, what, so?” you might say, to which I will replay “The most popular type of Kimchi, Baechu Kimchi, is made from this particular vegetable”.
Over the last few weeks we have seen quite a few articles in the English news regarding the rising price of cabbage and this will affect the service of kimchi in the restaurants and what not. If there were that many in the English language news, then I can only imagine what the Korean language news was doing. There’s even been a government task grout assigned to this. National disaster, I tell you.
Yesterday one of the students from the adult class was late and someone decided to call her. Turn out she was queuing outside a local super market with a special on, wait for it…CHINESE CABBAGE!
YES! She was queuing, and being late for class because of a special on a single vegetable! It gets better.
There were only 100 boxes of cabbage, each box containing 3 heads. Each person was only allowed to buy one box, so my students did the only things she could…and asked two friends to go with her so that she can get three boxes, i.e. 9 heads of cabbage.
Now, I completely understand the situation and how important it is to get her hands on that particular box of cabbage, but I am a foreigner and from my point of few this is just too funny not to write about. Lucky my students understand that I am not making fun of them when I laugh, but merely relating how it looks from my point of view. We had a good old giggle when she came back.
p.s. I asked her to take photos, but I forgot to ask her if she did. Hope she did so that I can add the Koreans queuing for cabbage.
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