Free Fridge Art

I get flyers on my door at least a few times a week. Always for restaurants offering delivery and take-away, and though sometimes they are just taped to my door, they usually have a magnet. I guess most apartment doors in Korea are metal, or at least have a metal layer on the front, otherwise I don't know why restaurants would print out so many advertisements with magnets on them. Sometimes the flyers are a single piece of thin paperboard for a single restaurant and sometimes they are booklets with a ton of restaurants in them. I simply threw these away at first, but decided a more worthwhile use would be to put them on my refrigerator and think of the brightly colored advertisements as decorations rather than junk mail. Most of the print is meaningless to me anyway as my grasp of the Korean language is feeble at best. I'm hoping to fill up the white space on my fridge and maybe be able to arrange them so that there is some sort of order or color progression.




In this instance it may be a good thing that I can't understand or speak Korean since otherwise 1)I would not be able to look at these flyers as anything but trash and thus my fridge would be that much less colorful, and 2)I would probably be tempted to call out and order food if I was able to communicate with whoever answered the phone, and would thus be that much lazier and poorer. On the bright side, I have one from the pizza and fried-chicken place across the street from me that has the menu on it, so I suppose I could study that until I memorized what I wanted and go order some take-out without pointing and gesturing for once.

From what I can gather, food delivery here is a big business. Anytime I walk down the sidewalk, I have to remember to be on the look out for delivery scooters whipping past. Driving on the sidewalk is no big deal, nor is using crosswalks, driving on the wrong side of the road, or doing any of the above with one hand on the handlebars because they have to hold the huge insulated steel delivery box with their other hand. I've been told the delivery men whip around the city like this even in the dead of winter which must be absolutely miserable. I've already seen a lot of scooters with what I can only describe as handlebar muffs installed. These things are a warm covering for the hand grips with a short sleeve for your hand and wrist to go into. Rough job.

I actually got a knock on my door one time when I was not expecting anyone, and there was a woman standing with some food. She said something in Korean, I stood there like an idiot, she said something else and gestured with the food, I took a box of pizza in confusion, and then gave it back realizing that she was a delivery woman and that I had not, in fact, ordered any food. She showed me the address, which was correct, and she seemed to figure out I hadn't ordered anything and that was the end of the interaction, a bit perplexing for us both, I'm sure.