::A Geek in Korea::

My wife, determined not to spend another day in the house, decided we were going to take a walk to one of the larger stores a few blocks away in the rain. We had some fun while we shopped.

One of the differences between shopping in Korea and the United States is the fact that you must purchase your own plastic bags when you go through the cashier. This greatly reduces waste, as each bag is something like 50 won (~5 US Cents). People cram everything into one bag to avoid paying for more. Trying to get two bags for one trip to the store makes people look like you arrived in a limousine. People usually opt for the free cardboard boxes also provided by the store for larger loads.
Before we went shopping, she went to the consumer return area to cash in some of her plastic bags.  My wife went to the woman with a few bags and said in Korean, "How much do you get for each Plastic Bag?" She used the English word "Plastic Bag", instead of the Korean word "bi-nil bong-chi ".

The woman at the counter didn’t know the word "Plastic" in English, and said, "Plastic bag? What’s that? Home Plus…you are shopping at Home Plus. I think you mean to say "PLUS bag" in English." Way to correct someone’s English counter lady! People speaking with an air of superiority that make such mistakes are always a source of entertainment living in another culture. I’m guilty of this 99 times out of 100, but I never correct people’s Korean. Jeeze.

(Fun Fact: Green houses used on Korean farms are called "bi-nil houses", not "bi-nil chibs". They use the Korean word for "plastic", but the English name for "house". What the hell? I’m sure this sort of inconsistent language makes everyone more confused in the end.)

The language barrier grew even greater as we walked around the electronics section. We saw people frantically grabbing English dictionaries, and there were no less than four people slowly speaking Korean to a confused foreigner. I heard the man speaking in slow, confused English, which would get translated into even worse Korean. It was painful. I decided to see if we could help everyone involved and sort out what was going on. The women at the counter looked like they wanted to do backflips when we showed up offering to try to translate for them.

Alas, the man spoke Russian, and according to him only, "Basic English". Lovely, this would be a challenge.

He wanted to make a phone contract, but was having trouble understanding that no Korean would ever let him sign a contract involving credit. The only contracts available for people without a Korean co-signer are "debt" style where you pay up front, get minutes, then used them up before your phone deactivates, and those usually aren’t handled by stores selling typical phones. We knew of a place in our neighborhood where he could probably get some sort of contract sorted out, but it was closed for the weekend. We tried explaining how to get there, but his eyes sort of glazed over. The next idea was to give him a paper that read, "Give this to a taxi driver." We wrote detailed directions for the taxi driver to drop him off in front of the exact building we were talking about.

It was clear this Russian man didn’t understand any Korean and even my basic English (as slow and basic as I was willing to go without risking offending someone anyway), wasn’t getting through. We saw him trying to convince people after we left, but a second attempt to convince him to just go to the place we told him just left everyone more confused. I have no idea what it must be like for someone that can’t even scrape by with English. The size of the Russian speaking community in Daejeon is much smaller than what it would be in say, Busan or Seoul, or even Incheon where sailors are more common. How this guy ended up in the middle of Korea is a bit of a mystery. Maybe even he didn’t know.