Xylitol

This blog is going to be weird. For aperitif, here's some wisdom provided by Wikipedia. "Xylitol, also called wood sugar or birch sugar, is a five-carbon sugar alcohol that is used as a sugar substitute." As we Finns know, it is extracted from birch. The thing we use in many mints, chewing gums, and even candy. But here's some information to which I personally was not privy; it can also be extracted from "raspberries, plums, and corn and is primarily produced in China". Nice. But that's not the reason why I wanted to write to you about Xylitol. Did you know:"In Japan and South Korea, xylitol is found in wide assortment of chewing gums." Why would I mention this then, you wonder? The answer, suprisingly enough, is not Japan.
In ryugakusei-kaikan, we have a lot of nationalities. Perhaps the largest group is the Koreans, the South Koreans, to be exact. In the past couple of weeks I've gotten to know a few of them. Koreans seem to be (and I believe they truly are) very friendly and helpful people. The funny thing is, every time I've met a new Korean person, something quite bizarre happens. As we all know, the almost obligatory procedure of getting to know someone of another nationality or cultural background is to ask certain questions pertaining to their place and time of birth. We do this for various reasons, of course; sometimes it's genuine interest towards the other person, sometimes it's just casual, even trivial conversation. In any case...During this procedure of getting to know each other, every time I've said I'm from Finland, the Korean person says something that to me sounds like "Chai Little", followed by "Huba! Huba!" Luckily, after a few moments of quiet reflecting, I was somehow able to retrieve the word "Xylitol" from some dimension of my amazingly erratic stream of thought, and so I learned that in South Korea, Xylitol was a Big product. And that was probably the only thing they knew Finland for. Cute. But what was still bothering me was that I had no idea whatsoever what on earth the phrase "Huba! Huba!" might mean. But then, I stumbled upon this..

Hyvä! Hyvä!