Today began with a man coming to set up internet - a man who knew about six words of English: "intahnet," "computah," "name," "sign," "Katelyn Lanigan," and, I think, "passport" (by which he meant Katelyn's ARC card.) It's possible he knew more than that, but those were the only words his conversation this morning showcased. Fortunately for us (since Katelyn's taken her mad Korean-speaking skills to China for the week), the situation didn't really require much more than that. The job was quickly finished and I sent him on his way with a cheery "감사합니다" - at least, I hope I did, I don't actually remember, but that would have been the polite thing to do. :) He did say quite a few things to me in Korean, so hopefully he's not counting on my having understood any of them. I *think* I made it pretty clear that I was more or less a dumb brick, so hopefully he was just trying to fill what he felt was an awkward silence and not giving me tips on the prevention of modem explosion, or anything really important like that.
In the afternoon I went shopping and had a lot of fun. Most of the time (weekdays) it's only at night that I'm outside for more than 2 minutes at a time, so it's harder to see stuff, plus I'm usually scurrying as fast as I can to get inside out of the freezing cold. So it was really nice to have a more leisurely look around the neighborhood in the daylight. It was a gorgeous sunny day - like most days here. I got birthday cards and presents for Eilie, Elise and Olivia, a $6 skirt and some mittens, some things from the drug store and some bread - not white! It's been a while since I had brown bread. Everything was really cheap, except for the bread. Haha. I browsed through lots of clothing stores and saw several sweatshirts with very interesting messages printed on them... the top two being "in style goodness oh surely possibly," and "just only good things are going to heaven." I also saw "Happiness does not accord with grades, it lies in your heart" printed on a pencil case. =) I went in lots of different shops and it felt like I went all over the place, but really I only walked up and down a couple blocks.
After I came home I got to talk to Dorothea! :D On the phone and then on Skype - we discovered that the camera at our house actually still works even though we thought it was broken, which is great, 'cause there's WAY less of a delay on skype. Then tonight I did my first *real* grocery shop since coming to Korea, which took a while. Even at home I can easily spend a while wandering around Superstore browsing and pondering what to buy, but when everything is so foreign it's that much easier to get sidetracked. It was nice to be there later in the day when it wasn't quite so busy - there was a lot more Korean pop music playing and a lot less yelling over the PA... haha. I bought more food than I've kept in the house all month... I couldn't find rice though! Well, that's not strictly true... I did see some bags of rice, just not any that would fit into our kitchen. =)
