Elderly women in Korea are known as ajumas and many of them look just like this. (Photo taken by a friend during our vacation to Jeju Island. It's one of my favorite photos from the entire year.) They often carry half-size straw brooms, pull carts full of bottles and other recyclables, and like to have roadside picnics of soju and squid jerky. And they're generally very wary of foreigners.
One fall morning I was Skyping with my parents from my bedroom and heard the sound of running water. It was loud and sounded almost like it was inside the house. Fall is a very warm season and in warm weather it wasn't unusual for my neighbor to hose down the inside of her summer kitchen. It's a sort of noisy chore and I could always hear her cleaning from inside my own house. I ignored it for a while but the noise didn't stop so I went to see what was going on. I opened the bedroom door to a kitchen filled with water and a little old ajuma standing at the window spraying a hose directly inside. Water under the refrigerator and running all the way to the bedroom door frame; water in the stove burners; all the mail on my kitchen table, soaked. I started shouting a [probably incoherent] stream of Korean and English - telling her to stop and utilizing the vocabulary of swear words I'd learned from the kids. And that woman shouted back something very angry, then took her hose and sprayed me. And she didn't stop spraying and yelling until I dove (swam?) across the kitchen and closed the window on her.
To this day, I have no idea why she did that. Was she cleaning the outside of the house and didn't realize my window was open? Would a general cleaning have filled my kitchen with so much water? Was she my landlady (who I never actually met) and was she expressing her anger over something I might have done? Did she spray me because my outburst scared her, or because I made her angry? Who knows.
Just home from trip to Nova Scotia. More on that later.
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