11/11. A sombre occasion in the UK. A time for remembering the dead and maimed in wars all over the world and buying poppies to help those that gave their lives for us. Not so much in Korea, where Pepero is a national day dedicated to...chocolate covered biscuit sticks!!!! Yep, you heard me. Chocolate covered biscuit sticks!!!
Rumour has it that Pepero day was started in Korea by a few schoolgirls, who gave Pepero to each other in the hope that they would all grow as tall and thin as a Pepero. Whether they gave the knobbly ones to each other in the hope that they would become disfigured and bumpy remains unknown. When Lotte, the (ahem), Japanese company (anyone Korean who is reading this, I jest. Lotte are Korean, yes, Korean. It's ok. Don't worry), heard about this they decided to fully endorse the idea and make every 11/11 a special day dedicated to consuming as many sticks as you can, resulting in a kind of Valentine's celebration. The shops are filled with as many different kinds of Pepero as you can imagine, strawberry flavour, multicoloured sticks, massive boxes set into heart shapes for couples, Pepero in mugs, as Catriona got from Patrick. It's rather sickening really, in all senses of the word.
On the positive side, I got about a million boxes from my kids. Which was rather nice. I've still got quite a few in my cupboard too, though the tasty little morsels are pretty hard to put down once you've opened a packet. Most of my boxes were covered in declarations of love and devotion, which, although I truly appreciated, were ripped up to enable me to get a quicker sugar rush - I need it when at work, ok? Those little beggars are such a handful. This meaning though, that by the end of this so sacred of days, I felt rather sick and much in need of some savoury foods. Or at least food that doesn't contain a high quantity of melamine. Yummeh.
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