Le Weekend

This weekend I went to Home Plus for some canned food and stopped at the park on the way back. I was watching some families by one of the ponds and realized I was sitting like twenty feet from a friend of mine. So I went over and we continued watching the pond together. This family was trying to get a baseball out of the water, which Sam told me had been purposely thrown in by the like ten-year-old daughter (what a bitch, we both said). The baseball was no more than three or four feet away from the shore, but the dad was trying to get it in the most retarded ways ever. He was using this kids' bat to try and reach it, but it was too far out, so he started trying to move the stagnant water in a way that created some minor current to push the ball toward him, but that wasn't very effective. The whole time I'm looking at one of his sons, who's wearing sandals with no socks--really, just one sandal--and I'm thinking, why the hell doesn't he just walk in and get it? I knew why, though. The water had some yellow dust in it that we get from China every spring, and Koreans are obsessive about anything being dirty, or getting dirty. Even though there is a footwashing station nearby (really? In a park?), they still wouldn't sully themselves for a ball.

The father finally got sort of savvy and changed his current method to bring the ball in from the side, and it eventually worked, except that he just kept moving the water, even when the ball got into reach with the bat itself. When they finally got the ball I saw him still doing the same batting of the water, and I found out why that kid only had one sandal on. I bet his sister had thrown that in the water, too.

We watched similar things happen three or four other times, too, with other baseballs and soccer balls. One guy was really smart and used the life preserver to get his ball when he lost it nearer the middle of the pond, and another one just waited on the little bridge for the water to push his soccer ball to within reach of him. That took several minutes. The life preserver method would have been faster, but he didn't think of it.

And then of course there were the obligatory family photo ops. On any given day you can count hundreds of people at the park with huge professional cameras and tripods, taking all sorts of ridiculous photos. Today there was a really cute family with the mother wearing a dress that looked like it was made with a quilt, and a toddling daughter with a matching dress, and they both had these bright green shoes on. The walked back and forth across the bridge as the father took pictures. I joked that any father would take up photography just to be able to stay 50 feet away from his family for the whole day.