reasons why I need to learn Korean...

I desperately need to begin learning more Korean. I’ve been here about a week and have thus far only managed to learn to say “hello,” “goodbye,” “yes,” “no,” “thank you,” “excuse me/I’m sorry,” “Chilgok – Dong Pyung elementary school, please,” “tuna stew,” and “please don’t clean my ears.” It’s enough to get by for now, but I’m frankly growing tired of feeling a constant sense of shame and embarrassment every time I show my face in public. For the first three days of being here, I just smiled and nodded a lot whenever any non-English speaking person addressed me. I got laughed at by the sushi guy and the bakery guy for putting their respective products directly into my cart rather than into a small box to be priced. I got laughed at by the taxi driver for being too incompetent to form a coherent phrase in Korean. I got laughed at by a group of teenage boys who said “hello,” followed by an extremely rapid sentence in Korean, followed by a simultaneous burst of hysterical giggles. I routinely confuse the expression for “excuse me/I’m sorry” (mi-an-ham-ni-da) with the expression for “thank you” (kam-sa-ham-ni-da). What this means is that occasionally when I run into someone with my shopping cart, I say thank you, and when I have money transactions with the cashier, I apologize.

But the defining moment of my idiocy occurred when I was trying to purchase garbage bags. Waste removal in Korea is, in a word, complicated. You don’t just fill up trash bags and throw them into a dumpster whenever you feel like it. Waste in my part of the city is removed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays between the hours of 8:00 P.M.-12:00 A.M., and if you put your bags out on the wrong day, you could potentially face a fine. Food waste is put into a red bucket that must have a prepaid ticket around the handle to be removed. Certain recyclables are put into a mesh bag (which I am yet to find). Other recyclables are bundled up individually. Everything else is put into a regular bag that cannot be purchased on the shelf of a store but has to be asked for specifically at the counter. And this is where my moment of idiocy occurred. I got to the counter and said “suregi bongtu juseyo.” The cashier understood “bongtu,” as she held up and pointed to a shopping bag. I attempted to explain through exaggerated gestures and a picture of a garbage truck that I did not want a shopping bag but instead wanted garbage bags. She did not understand, and she called over three coworkers to try to interpret my desires. Meanwhile, a small crowd of onlookers began forming around me, all of them trying to be the first to crack the code of what the strange and exotic white person wanted. I left the store with half of what I came for: food trash tickets. However, it took me three days to go back and muster up the courage to ask for trash bags again. Evidently I would rather wallow in my own self-imposed filth than willingly submit to mild forms of public torture and humiliation…