Stranger than Sci Fi

Alex's son and a worm- before he tore it in two.

Sangnamdong a few hours before neon.

When I learned that I would be an alien from the future (thank you Dad for the title), I had no idea that I would really step into a science fiction novel. In Sangnamdong, the neighborhood where I live, there are buildings called officetells. The businesses are randomly  interspersed throughout many stories, and on the other floors there are apartments. You have to constantly look up to see the signs for restaurants and shops. Underground, the basements are a web of bars, and convenience stores. At night, the place looks like the epitome of overcrowded-neon-glowing-sci-fi-land. The only thing missing is the hover crafts that get you directly to the tenth floor norabong (karaoke). 

In Korea, it is impolite to use the given name of someone older than you. So women call older women une (older sister) and older men opa (older brother). It's as if the society grew knowing that no sci-fi world would be complete without a big brother. There are cameras everywhere. The classrooms have cameras, the convenience stores, elevators, and hallways. Korea has special traffic cameras that monitor you when you go through red lights, and through bridges. They watch people on the street, and you can tell someone is watching, because if you're parked illegally too long the rotating cameras start to fix on you and stare. Big brother really is always watching.

When we went fishing today, I thought it would be a brief reprieve from the sci-fi scare, but things only got scarier. I was confused as to why Alex (the woman who took us fishing) was afraid of the worms. Some women are squeamish, so I did the natural thing and chased her around with a worm. All was going well, until her husband told me I was putting the worm on the hook incorrectly. Unbeknownst to my backward thinking Western ways, it seems worms have mouths here. Not only do they have mouths, but they also have teeth- and bite. Ignorance really is bliss, because afterwards I was not nearly as confident handling the spineless creatures as I shoved hooks down their mouths.  I'm still waiting for the mutated ones (I know they're out there. I am entrenched in science fiction land, after all) to come and eat me in my sleep.