Friday, March 2, 2012

Club Phantom - I Should've Learned Korean

The last weekend in January turned out to be quite the adventure.  A group of us traveled into Seoul to celebrate a birthday and spend some quality time at one of Korea's infamous dance clubs, Club Phantom.  It's your typical night club, but they play mostly old hip-hop tunes.  And if you know me at all, you know that this is just, like, my favorite genre...

Bottle service at Club Phantom



...after jammin' to some old-school R.Kelly (Remix to Ignition, anyone?)  We decided to head back to our homeland.

The only problem?  No one knows where in the world Suji is located.

After piling four girls into the fourth cab we asked to take us to "Suji/Jukejeon", we were on our way.  I repeated where we needed to go about a million times, and the driver typed some things into his navigation station.  We figure everything was hunky-dory when the driver stopped asking questions.  Wrong.  By the time we were in the car for about half an hour (the amount of time it usually takes us to get home via taxi), we knew something was wrong.  No one recognized one single thing.

My arms flew up in exaggerated motions, and I somehow got our driver to pull to the side of the road.  One more time I told him where we needed to go, in the same exact way that I had so many times before.  I'm not sure if it was my exasperation, or if I somehow magically dropped my foreign accent in that single moment, but suddenly the dude knew what exactly what I was saying.

Needless to say, when we found something that looked even vaguely familiar a few minutes later, we had him pull over and immediately hopped out.

40 minutes and 50,000won later, we made it home.

....I should've learned Korean.


UPDATE:  May 2012
I asked a Korean coworker for some help, and have since learned the polite ways to say "left", "right", "straight", and "stop here, please" in Korean.  This has made my life SO much easier.  Taking time to learn the language has turned out to be one of the most beneficial things I've done in the past few months.

No comments:

Post a Comment