Uncle Know-All

Nina left yesterday after a long, looooooooong Sunday coming home from Gyeongju. It was Parents Day on Saturday, which meant that everyone whose parents live in a different city goes to visit said parents, resulting in terrible, turtle-pace traffic on Sunday up and down the peninsula.

It didn't help that Uncle Know-All took the wrong freeway onramp and unwittingly drove for 30 minutes in the opposite direction of Seoul when we left Gyeongju on Sunday afternoon. We ended up in the southern port city of Busan before he realized his mistake, and took another 30 minutes to find our way out of the city.

Uncle Know-All is an affectionate secret nickname for my dad's friend, who is prone to "self-serving bias error" (taking credit for successes but no blame for failures). (Sidenote: Why do I know this term for a principle of management? Because it was on the sample job knowledge portion of the Foreign Service Written Exam. Why was it on the FWSE? Because the testmakers amuse themselves by writing questions that have no possible earthly connection to anything even remotely related to the actual job you would do if you were selected for the foreign service. Why do they do this? Because they are fucked up, man. Fucked. Up.)

So we were on the road for a good eight hours on Sunday, inching along so agonizingly slow that I felt like I was going to fly out of my skin with impatience. Uncle Know-All, despite his predilection for making self-serving bias errors, was a trooper, complaining not at all about the long haul. Overall, I have to give Uncle Know-All major props, because he did a similar trip to Gyeongju a month ago when BC was in town, and didn't even blink about going again. Since he's seen them so many times, he didn't even go into the some of the sights we saw (Bulguksa Temple or the Gyeongju National Museum, for example), instead waiting without complaint in nearby coffeeshops.

Why would Uncle Know-All do this? Because he's an old-style Korean ajoshi (middle-aged or married man), which means he is loud, brusque, abrupt and by our standards rude, but at the same time patient, loyal, uncomplaining, self-sacrificing, and filled with a deep love and compassion for his friends and family.

This means that I suffer from extreme whiplash in his presence, because when he's asking: DO YOU KNOW WHAT GI-WHA IS? YOU DON'T KNOW? YOU DON'T KNOW EVEN THAT? IT'S A ROOF TILE, A BLACK ROOF TILE! and continuing on to a long explanation that has no connection to anything we have passed, seen, or heard in the last half hour, I fight desperate battles with impatience and the urge to kick something very hard. But when he drives without complaint for eight hours straight and waits for an hour outside the museum while we look leisurely around, I feel grateful. And humbled.

Uncle Know-All knows both my parents from college, and while he might boast for twenty minutes about how he was singularly responsible for getting them together, his love for them is far beyond anything we modern young folk could dream of in a friendship.

Well! I was going to write about our stay in the wonderful temple of Gi-rimsa, but that'll have to wait til next time. I shall try to be more regular in posting for the next two weeks, until my mother/aunt/uncle arrive for their 10 days in Korea. The fun don't stop, I tellya.