annoyances

Maybe I've been here too long, because this place has really been getting on my nerves lately. Recently I wrote about an incident at a corner store in which a guy cut in line on me, mid-transaction. It's been happening a lot lately.

I was at a grocery store today. The cashier was ringing me up and bagging my stuff. (Brief aside: Koreans bag groceries horribly. They always put soft stuff on the bottom, which then gets crushed. I don't know why, but they always do that.) Anyway, the cashier gets about halfway through ringing me up when some lady comes up with three bottles of makgeolli. She attempts to hand them directly to the cashier, while asking "Eul-ma-ye-yo?", or "How much?" To the cashiers credit, she basically responded with "Wait a minute" and finished our business at hand. Meanwhile, I stood staring at the lady, trying to make her as uncomfortable as possible.

I bought a TV two weekends ago, but as you are probably anticipating, it didn't go off without a hitch. Mi-Hyun came with me to assist, plus I bought a pair of shoes with her once and she haggled the price down 10 bucks for me, so I was hoping that maybe she had some more of that magic in her. We went to the store and found a TV that looked good. It was about 100 bucks cheaper than all the other TVs like it, so we found a clerk to ask why that was. Mi-Hyun was in the middle of speaking with the guy when some fat dickhead interrupted her and began asking the clerk questions about the same TV we were interested in. In the past, I've always tried to be on my best behavior in Korea, because I don't want to give other white people a bad name here, but I can't deal with this shit anymore. The problem is that I can't mouth off at the guy in a way that will entirely satisfy me, since we speak different languages. So I just stare at him incredulously for a few seconds, then re-interrupt him whilst mumbling under my breath something along the lines of "Fucking prick."

On another note, I drove a car in Korea for the first time a few weeks ago. I drove Mi-Hyun's car about a mile, from a restaurant to her apartment. I've made note here before about Korea's less than orderly driving habits, so I was equally excited for the challenge and terrified for my life. In the maybe 4 minutes I was driving I had a car in front of me quickly stop and make a U-turn in the middle of the street, and had a taxi driving down the road toward me in reverse.