Gifts

I have lived in Saipan for one year and a half. People who live in the small island are very kind and cheerful for me, and there are great landscape beaches, but the weather is more humid every day than the rainy season in Japan, so I used to be very exhausted for a while until I grew accustomed to the environment. A few months later, I started going to Northern Mariana College to study English. Then I met Dana, who was sitting next to me in my classroom. 

One day I went to a shopping mall with Dana to look for a birthday present for Joel who is a mutual friend. She showed up wearing a casual T-shirt, short pants and a cap. On the other hand, I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, long pants, sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat. We tried or sampled several kinds of fragrance on each other’s wrists and finally chose one we both liked. Then we looked for a T-shirt from the abundance of patterns. I hesitated to select only one which would fit him, but Dana chose one quickly. After we decided to buy the presents, we brought it to the cashier.

“Please erase the price before you wrap these as birthday presents,” I said to the cashier when I paid for the cologne and the T-shirt.

“Wait, wait… You don’t need to erase the price!” she corrected confusingly.

“Why?” I didn’t know why she didn’t want to erase the price. “Is it good for you that he knows how much the present cost? I don’t think so,” I said hesitatingly.

              “No, it is OK!” I just obeyed her because she said proudly, “We selected and bought the present for him as a precious thing, didn’t we?”

Now I know that there is a different cultural thing between Korean people and Japanese in giving gifts.

On the other hand, American people put the receipt in a gift box when they buy a gift for somebody, 

so they can easily return or exchange the gift. I was also surprised about it. Therefore, there are 

varieties of habits in general polite behavior in the world.