西洋오랑캐

Ah another fine Saturday afternoon has come and gone here in lovely Seoul, South Korea. 진희 had to work in the morning, so the plan was to met up in 혜화 (Hyehwa) at 1:00, get our lunch on, and then head off to a museum.

As is the case everywhere in the world, a customer came into 진희’s place of employement with a massive problem 2 minutes before she clocked out for the day. Damn I hate those kind of people. So I sat in a pidgeon invested park and awaited 진희’s arrival. As I sat on this bench not only did some stupid pidgeon land on my knee, but some bum came up to me and in bad English asked if I could give him, “one dolla please.” I have a couple American dollars in my wallet from my trip this summer and was tempted to be an asshole and fork over a Washington, but instead I just ignored him.

진희 arrived around 1:20 and we chowed down on some 쌈 (lettuce that you wrap rice and meat and other junk in), and then headed off to The War Memorial of Korea. I had been here once before with Darrell, but we kind of treated that trip like some sort of speed trial, and got through the entire museum in about an hour and a half in memory serves me correctly.

Anyhow, 진희 and I toured around the museum and took pictures of tanks, swords, and dioramas of the horrors of wars…all with us standing in front of them with inappropriate smiles. More pictures can be seen here if you are into such things.

As is par for the course, anytime I travel to a museum, folk village, or palace, I learn one or two fairly useless Korean words, that naturally I am able to retain better than something useful, like the word for “to put something in” (it’s 넣다, but I only recently began to retain this word). Anyhow, like I said I learned some totally useless terms. First up is 문 (門 / moon). “But Wyatt, any first year Korean student knows that means ‘door.’” That’s very good! Yes, 문 does mean door, but I learned yesterday that it is also the counter for cannons. Korean (like Chinese and Japanese) use special words for when then count units. So when you are counting cannons you would have to count 1문, 2문, 3문…like that.

The second word I learned was 등패, which is a “rattan shield.” Like I said, completely useless. It looked like a wicker basket. Awesome!

After the museum closed, 진희 and I headed out to get some dinner. After dinner, we headed to my neighborhood to rent a DVD. Renting videos, DVD, or comic books is incredibly easy, and I can’t believe it’s been more than 2 years before I did this. I had to give the lady at the video place my phone number and alien id number, and 2,000원 for video.

진희 and I picked up some beers and then headed home to check out 지구를 지켜라! (Save the Green Planet!), which 진희’s friend recomended…claiming it was really funny.

I seriously need to meet this friend, because they are seriously fucked up. To say the movie is insane would be an understatement. I don’t know how they could think it was funny. It wasn’t a bad movie, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a comedy. After the film we parted ways…another Saturday in the can.