Day One, Me Pretty Talk-yo.

On my first morning in Korea, I was a bit hungry as people often are and wanted to eat something before work. "Bread" was one of the only food items I was comfortable with saying aloud. "Bakery" (lit. "bread house") was the only place to get food that I knew, other than "bar" (lit. "booze house") and they weren't open yet. It was super early, and the only man I saw on the street was this frail old man. Apparently, I could say "where" and "exist"/locational "is" well enough to convey that I saw looking for something. Word-initial frontal consontants are a bitch in Korean, so I totally used the wrong p/b in "bread." There are three different consonants in Korean that exist somewhere on the English p/b continuum, and even with some schooling in phonetics I still can't really distinguish two of them. I picked the wrong one. And the ch/j continuum is also a bit hard for me to hear, and when teaching myself Korean phonetics this summer, I got the characters for almost-ch and almost-j mixed up, apparently.

Anyway, there was about two minutes of charades and rerepeating of my simple request before something clicked. There was a lot of sniffing, nose touching, and belly rubbing on my end. For awhile, he seemed to think that I had the trots and a runny nose, and was asking me if I needed a pharmacy. I looked like a FOB, so perhaps it was a place to sleep that I needed, and he made a hand-pillow charade. I could smell bread, but where exists the house from which the smell of food eminates? Eventually, he got it. "Bread house!" "Yes, bread house! Where exist?" Then he got really excited, made a 10 second phlegmy noise, and pointed me in the right direction with all kinds of other instructions that I didn't understand.