Tuesday night I had dinner and a drink with Ajay, an Indian American guy in my class, and I realized that visiting Korea is a different experience for a man. Ajay, who's 29, has a master's degree in engineering, and decided on a bit of a lark to live and work in Korea for two years. He worked for a company here for about a year and a half and quit to take the language program at Sogang.

Over beer and squid, we talked about funny moments in Korea. "I'm glad I came here," he said, "I mean, now I have so many interesting stories to tell. Like the time my coworkers invited me to go to a hostess bar. We got seated in a private room, and then eight women came in and they were like, 'Which one do you want?' So I said, 'Uh, I guess I'll take that one?'

"The thing is, my Korean was pretty limited at that point, and I couldn't really talk to her. I knew how to ask her where she came from, what she majored in in college -- all the things you're not supposed to talk about! The other women were feeding their partners snacks and pouring them drinks and stuff, and here I was asking where she grew up."

[I'll interject at this moment to describe more fully what hostesses do (gleaned from a recent movie I saw). Hostesses sit next to their partners and basically act as their dates. They giggle, pour drinks, smile, give food, and generally stroke egos. I know. Gross. Anyway, back to Ajay's story. -hk]

"Anyway, closing time came, and we were presented with the bill. It was 200,000 won per person! [about $170] I paid 200,000 won to be bored.

"But that wasn't all. When the host or whoever came to give us the bill, he said that if we wanted the night to continue, it would cost another 200,000 won. I didn't understand what he meant, so I asked, 'Wait, what do you mean?' Everyone just kind of looked at me, including him. So he made this pumping action with his hips, and I finally got it. I was like, 'Oooooh! Yeah, no, that's okay.'"

I said that my workplace had a good number of women employees, so that was probably why I'd never seen any of this kind of thing. "Well," he laughed, "it's not like they'd tell YOU about it if they went!" True, but the three or four times I've gone out with the team, the men dispersed when the women did.

"That reminds me," Ajay said, starting to laugh again. "There was a time when a woman in the company did go to one of these hostess bars with the men."

"What?" I asked. "Why?"

He shrugged. "I guess they thought it would be funny, or that she would think it was interesting."

"Did she pick a hostess too?"

"No, I don't think so, I think she just sat there while the men sat with their hostesses."

According to Ajay, there are host bars as well, where women can choose an attractive man to sit with them. "Probably popular with ajummas [older or married women]," he conjectured.

My automatic reaction: Ew.

And then: I hope those girls are getting a LARGE cut of the price.
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Funeral
Part 3: Tedium and Thumb Wars

Sitting on the floor for hours hurts.

I was wearing a black jacket, tights and heels, and a below-knee length skirt, so I couldn't sit cross-legged as my hanbok-clad relatives could. Even if I could, my western joints and butt get to feeling achey and creaky before long. So after a while, it felt better to stand than to sit on the floor.

In the evening, someone from the hospital came to deal with dinner, so my cousins' wives and I sat in the reception room, away from the madding crowd. Occasionally they would have to get up to take care of something.

At one point, Hee-jye, the older of the two sons, asked if I'd take his 8-year-old son, Gyu-hyun, to the convenience store. Trying to be helpful, I agreed, and followed Gyu-hyun to the store, where he settled on a toy cell phone that made real noises when you pressed the keys. I bought it for him.

A little later, as we all sat around doing nothing in the reception room, Gyu-hyun asked me to hold the phone for him. I took it and pretended it was ringing.

"Hello? No, he's not here. Okay, okay. Right." Then I handed the phone over and said, "Spiderman called for you."

At least his dad laughed.

After more sitting around, I decided to teach Gyu-hyun how to play Thumb War. So for the next 30 minutes, we worked on "One, two, three, four/Let's start a thumb war." He actually got it down pretty fast. We played about 20 times. Then he showed his mother. Then he showed his father.

I apologized to his mom.

Trying to think of other things to pass the time, I came up with the tried and true "Gimme a five/ Up high/ Down low/ Too slow!" and even managed to explain it in Korean.

We did that about 30 times. He showed his father. He showed his mother.

I apologized again to his mom.

After that, I taught him one of the "daps" that John showed me when he was working at the Tomb, and for the rest of the evening, it was a combination of Thumb War, Gimme Five's, and daps. Oh, and when Gyu-hyun's 3-year-old cousin came, we also played "Crash the toy cars." It was darn fun.

I had fun playing with kids!

Watch out for flying pigs next.

Tomorrow: the bathhouse (which I know I said I'd cover in this entry, but it's already long and I go into a lot of detail about the bathhouse, 'cause it was an experience to remember)