Today, being my wife’s birthday and all, we needed to call my parents. They had called her yesterday, but she was on the bus and was unable to hear very well. Plus, everyone cues in to listen to people speaking English on the bus, so she didn’t feel like she was getting any privacy. Due to the time difference, as we were preparing for bed, my parents were actually at work, so we couldn’t give them a call back. This led me to ponder our options about the high rate long distance fares.
I had a calling card with time on it given to me by a friend, but it turned out to be unable to call the United States. Go figure. Next up on my ways of saving money was Internet telephony. Voice over IP, as it’s otherwise known, is a method of taking someone’s voice, breaking it down into packets, sending it via TCP/IP, and having it seamlessly delivered to a phone number on the other end. If my parents were more technophiles like myself, they would be more willing to install such software on their machines to try such a thing for free.
Instead, I downloaded Skype and bought some minutes. 9 hours for 12 dollars charged to my account. Since I was calling a landline phone instead of another computer Skype, I got charge a $.02 cent a minute rate. This is so much cheaper than what I would usually pay it’s absurd. I’ve managed to break a hundred dollars on a single call when talking to my parents on the occasional holiday call home. The quality wasn’t perfect, and my parents complained of an echo on their end, which might have been the acoustics in computer room, but otherwise, the call home went well.
After work, I bought her flowers and we celebrated with dinner at Bennigan’s, an Irish themed family restaurant in Korea. It was the first time for either of us. It’s probably the best of the American owned family themed restaurants that have popped up in the city. (The others being T.G.I.Fridays, and Outback steakhouse.)
During our meal, the couple next to us had been set up on a blind date. We occupied ourselves while waiting for the food by making up stories about each of the people and if they were a good match for one another. The man was clearly dressed to impress. He wore each item in his closet that were individually most expensive, with no concept of how they would work together. Thus he had on a grey flower print shirt, grey pin striped slacks, and neon blue Nike basketball shoes. He also wore jewelry and eye wear that was probably best forgotten by the rest of the fashion world after the 1970’s.
My wife thought he was fashionable, but I thought he was trying too hard to make the impression of money, when it was clear he had none. He took off his nice shirt when eating ribs so he wouldn’t get a stain on it!
The woman was dressed in slacks and a conservative top, little or no makeup. She didn’t spend any time on her hair (for Korean date standards at least), and looked as if she had just gotten off work. She listened politely to his conversation, but didn’t lean in when he spoke. Was she tired from just getting off work? Was her friend that set her up doing her a favor, or was she simply playing hard to get?
Once our food arrived, we forgot our diversions and had a nice meal together. We got home a little late, but Yoshi didn’t complain with even a whimper when we let him into the house. Now we’ve retired to our usually activities for the evening. I’m writing, and she’s doing evaluations and preparing her lessons for tomorrow. It was a good day.
