Would you like some WHINE with that?

Here is where I make an excuse for our severe lack of blogness. Um, don't have one....except the weather has been "real purdy" and we have been enjoying it. Oh- and Brett is drunk on soju all of the time. Typical.

I can honestly say we have really improved at this "living in Korea" thing. We really have things down pat. We have favourite stores, we know how much things cost, we know how to say "too expensive" (aka- you are ripping me off) in Korean, and we even have our students convinced we can understand them when they are saying bad things about us in Korean (thanks to our super-teacher-spidey-sense...we really just can tell when a child is being cheeky). Other than a small restaurant mishap last week that left us rather hungry, we have been doing really well and really enjoying life.

There is one thing though that we just can't seem to get past. For our first few months here, we really thought people were upset or angry all of the time. Since we could not understand the language, we were really just relying on tone. Often we would hear women or children talking to each other in a tone similar to the tone i hear everyday when teaching grade one in Canada. It sounds like this "Miiiiiiisssssssss Booooooooyeeesssss, heeeeeeee hiiiit meeeee" (say it in a really whiney voice...I know you have heard it).

One day I was sitting in my favourite restaurant. We call it "Orange" since we don't know the name, and the sign is orange. There are usually 4 lovely women working there. They welcome us with smiles and bow when taking our money. We love it, and we love the food. Anyway, back to the story. I was eating my favourite bibimbap with my back to the ladies. I could hear what I thought was a real war breaking out between them. Seriously! The tone was that of distress, disgust and anger. They were whining at each other. Crabbing. Yelling. Oh oh. I thought I was going to have to duck. I pictured hand fulls of rice being thrown across the restaurant as this war escalated to food-violence. But when I turned to look at the ladies, they were all smiling, and two of them were even holding hands. I had made a "foreigner mistake". What would be a whining tone at home, is not a whining tone here.

Every day we remark on this difference. It doesn't seem to stop surprising us. No matter how much we practice speaking Korean, we know we will never be able to master the "tone".