Working for the Weekend

Today was all about shopping and walking..

Headed towards .. well.. I wasn’t sure.. took the same bad route I took last Saturday (without the intestinal complications), but cut to the left and followed signs to the Daejeon train station. There I found all the photo-shops that, I had been assured, would not have a battery charger for a Canon camera.

These assurances were 100% correct.

So I got some more hangers, some diet coke, some of the red bean paste, and headed home. On the way back I ate a slice of…

Of…

Well, pizza I suppose.

Very much like it but also not like it. It was something like the kind of “pizza” you’d get charged extra for in the Bay Area – under the cheese lay corn, peas, all kinds of things that are normal in Korea but not so much in pizza. As I walked along the dead river I pretended I was eating at some snooty restaurant in Berkeley and enjoyed it tremendously. Mostly because it would have cost me 5 bucks in the gourmet ghetto on 6th st Bezerekely.

An old man came up to me as I waited for a green light and gave me the kind of up and down that you’d get in a gay bathhouse. I mean.. you know.. I imagine you’d get that in a gay bathhouse.

Anyway, he pointed at my wrist and gibbered in that language they gibber around here. Something like Japanese.

I pulled my hand out of my pocket and showed him I had no watch. He nodded sadly. A few seconds passed until I realized I had the time on my ipod. I pulled it out and showed him that it was 11:34. He nodded ecstatically. For one brief second I thought I had created a moment of intercultural amity. Until he rolled out the only word of English he probably knew.

“Money?”

Ah.. the iPod had only convinced him I was some rich easy-mark from the Occident.

Fortunately, on my first Korean trip the BKF’s first Korean lesson to me was on the subway when a beggar hit me: “obseyo” – “don’t have”

I popped that out on the old dude and watched his toothless mouth cave in a bit more.

I had assumed the White Man’s Burden!

Later, I purchased some sliced octopus.

Well, it was octopus until I got it home and cooked it up when it turned into… well .. similar to the “pizza” it was very much like octopus but also not like it. I have included a picture of it here in case BKF can identify it for me. It has an octopus-like taste, but it cooks up like some kind of bread item.

I dunno, if it doesn’t turn out to be something like pattied octopus crap I’ll buy it again as it cooks up well with other foods despite the fact the I fried it and the pictures on the back pretty well indicate that I was supposed to have boiled it.

Who am I lying to? Even if it is octopus crap formed into patties I’ll buy the.. er.. “shit” … since I can identify it in the store (there are many boxes and bags of ferocious looking stuff that I can’t identify) and it hasn’t killed me yet.

This is the life of the expatriate.