I’m slowly getting settled in here. I went shopping for basic living materials today. I had a success rate of 3/4 today for getting my meaning across in Korean. First getting my luggage from the hostel to the dorm I had to navigate a taxi driver. I would like to thank my old 初めての韓国語 textbook that I studied in Japan for the taxi survival Korean needed to achieve this miracle. My second conversation was to ask where they sell lots of electronics in Seoul since my friends and I all need adapters for our computers fit the wall outlets. I knew there was a place full of stuff like that from my last trip here but couldn’t remember where (it was Yongsan Electronics market).
My third conversation was a complete failure. In my painfully broken Korean I tried to explain to a bewildered electronics salesman that the outlets in the wall are different in the US and Korea and we wanted to buy a little piece to make our electronics (which can handle the conversion without a transformer) fit the wall here. The poor attendant stared at me throughout the entire exercise like I was asking him for directions back to the moon. When I finally finished what I thought was an explanation, and asked him if he had such adapters, he said, “Ya ya, show me your camera.” I tried again but he had this look in his face which seemed to say, “If I just stay completely still maybe this freak will not know I’m still here and will go away.” Ok, I completely botched that one.
I moved onto fresh prey at the next electronics store. After drawing a detailed, albeit barely recognizable collection of pictures of the plugs and wall outlets in Korea and the US and a picture of how the adapter would fit together with our American plug, I showed it to the next attendant and said, “I want to buy this.” He said it was called a Pig’s Nose or something and pulled out one from under the table. When we said we wanted several he ran around to other stores and collected them up and sold them to us for a thousand a piece. Excellent.