aggression

I'm the member of a gym. I work out there. Yes, I, the scrawniest guy you know, have begun lifting weights and doing various other muscle building activities. You want to know why? Well, I weighed myself not long ago and found that I was slightly over 55kg. 55kg is 120 pounds. I'm a fully grown 25 year old male. This cannot stand.

As a part of my exercise routine, I play squash. Squash is basically racketball, but with a less-bouncy ball. It's fun.

My gym is on the 5th floor of a building nearby. On the 3rd floor is a bar. Almost every time that I get on the elevator to go up to my gym, a few drunken men get on with me. Sometimes they talk to me, as they did the other night.

"Where are you from?" one of them said to me in barely discernible English.
"USA," I replied, after which followed a moment of awkward silence. "Mi-guk-saram," I said, saying the Korean word for 'American.'

At this, the question asker flipped the hell out, and began yelling at me. I believe the gist of what he said pertained to a foreigner attempting to speak in his native tongue, rather than relying on his knowledge of what 'USA' means. His friends quickly apologized, and we went on our separate ways; them to get more drunk, me to play squash.

A few days later I was at my local watering hole. After a few hours of drinking awful Korean beer, we were ready to call it a night, when a couple of Koreans the next table over struck up a drunken conversation with us. They proceeded to buy us many, many more beers, as we tried to get past the language barrier between us. One of the Koreans in particular was especially drunk, and often referred to us as "ssibal-may-ya," which can most literally be translated as saying, "hey you, motherfucker." We knew this fact, and every time he said it to us we responded with a puzzled expression, while saying the Korean word for "why?" He never explained himself, and went on for the next hour or so calling us motherfuckers.

So, if you ever come to Korea and encounter a drunken Korean man (odds are you will, since most of them are), try to get on their good side.