The Subway Hand Writer

After two weeks in Daejeon (minus two days for my visa run) biding my time until my new job started, I finally headed down to Busan. I was certainly ready. My time back in Daejeon was rather odd. I didn't have much to do during the day (all my friends were at work), so I mostly just played a racing game on Darryl's PS2. I met up with old friends in the evenings, but a lot of that was strange. I reconnected with a of the couple old friends (which led to one really, really odd misunderstanding that's better left off the blog), and I met one really cool new friend (who's visiting me down here soon). Amazing what can happen in a couple weeks. But the drama was enough for me, and I wanted to get started.

I left very early in the morning so that I could take the slow train and save myself a couple bucks. Oddly, the bullet train in Korea isn't much more expensive, but at that point, every dollar counted. Again, to save money, I took the subway with all my luggage in tow. It's a long subway ride from the train station to the university, but I had time.

As soon as I got on the subway, this older Korean man smiled at me. He was missing one of his front teeth and was pretty odd looking. When he spoke at first, I honestly couldn't tell if he was speaking to me in Korean or English. It was English, but his accent was really THAT bad. He was talking so loud, that Koreans turned to look and smile. That in and of itself is odd: Koreans generally try to ignore anything that might be embarrassing to the person.

The man talked to me all the way until his stop, which was about 15 minutes from where I got on. First off he jabbered in his unintelligible English. When I had trouble understanding, he wanted to write on my hand, but his spelling was as bad as his accent. He wrote "Amiricn" on my hand when I told him I was from America. Oddly, this was one of the few words he said that I DID understand. The other word he wrote was "peple"--people--which I also actually understood, so the writing didn't help much. When he wrote on my hand, I noticed that his hand was missing a couple fingers. His hand kind of looked like Danny Devito's from "Batman Returns," ya know, that penguin claw thing.

He was trying to convey to me two major points. One thing about four body parts: as far as I could tell, they were hand, heart, mind, and something else. The other point was something about black people and the fact that my hair is a little curly. I have no idea what that was about.

After him talking to me in his broken English for a bit, I let him in a little secret: I speak some Korean. After that, he broke into Korean that was almost as unintelligible, partly because spoke so fast, but also because he seemed to have some sort of speech impediment in any language.

I was relieved when he finally got off. Usually I love trying to communicate with older Korean guys, but I got nothing from this conversation except confusion and a decent story.