Knock knock

In Canada, if you live in an apartment, you can go a long time without anyone knocking on your door. Maybe even a life time. Not so in Korea.

In the week and a half we've been here, apart from water cooler guy, movers, and air conditioner installers, we've had three random visitors.

The first was last Wednesday. At around twelve noon our doorbell rang, and at the door was a Korean lady Shayne and I recognised from around the building. She started speaking to us in hurried Korean and pointing downstairs. We, like any normal person would, thought something might be seriously wrong, but since she spoke absolutely no English, we invited her into our apartment and called our boss. Mrs. An, among her other attributes, has become a very handy free translator for us.

After explaining the situation to Mrs. An and handing the phone to our neighbor, we sat back as the woman started explaining whatever it was that she wanted. At first we stood there, expecting to have the phone handed back after about 30 seconds - a sufficient amount of time for an idea to be communicated. After a couple of minutes, however, we took a seat and exchanged "what the H*** is going on here?" looks. After a couple more minutes of animated Korean conversation, punctuated every now and again by a significant "ahhhhh!" by our visitor, Shayne picked up his novel, and I started daydreaming out the window.

Finally the woman handed the phone back to us, and Mrs. An explained that the stranger was our downstairs neighbor, and she wanted us to tutor her son in English. Apparently this took 10 minutes to explain. Mrs. An had taken her number, so we said good-bye in broken Korean and she was on her way.

Then, yesterday morning we were rudely awoken at the obscene hour of 9am to another knock on our door. Shayne braved the trek out of bed, and was greeted with a random Korean and a big plate of kimbap, Korean sushi. He was so out of it that he mumbled out a "comsamneda" (thank you in Korean) and shut the door in their face - having no idea who the hell they were, or why they were giving us this strangley oderous version of Korean Sushi.

(Kimbap...not my favorite, but Shayne thinks it's okay. This batch, though, smells a little bit funny.)

Last, this morning at the more reasonable hour of 11am, two Jehova's Witnesses came to the door. Thankfully they spoke no English so they left and didn't leave what looked like Korean versions of the Watchtower with us. We fear, however, that they may come back with a translator....sigh...even in Korea we can't escape religous canvassers.

Now we have nothing to do but wait for the Korean version of Ed McMahon to show up and tell us we have won the princely treasure of 2 million won.

Cheers

Jo