I-Day Redux!

I am now wired (in the electronic sense, that is.) The KT guy showed up minutes ago and set it all up. Yay! No more treks to the opium-den-like (full of gamers rather than drug addicts but there are many similarities) PC Bang to use the internet.

So this morning I bought trash bags and signed up for a French placement test at the Alliance Francaise; the two events are unrelated.

I stopped into the Alliance Francaise on my way home from school this morning. Having looked at the course schedules I realised that I'd missed the start date by a week (typical for me.) Since I had spoken a little french to the woman at the counter she asked where I was from and said that since I had already studied french I can write a placement test and possibly start in a class at my level. So I meet the director tomorrow for a test, I wonder how much french I can remember?

Buying trash bags was an adventure in gesture and patience. In Busan each district has its own official trash bags that pay for the cost of refuse removal. Each bag costs about a buck. I realised last night that I've been using bags from the wrong 'gu' and they were too small anyway, so I had to figure out how to get trash bags at my neighbourhood store, where the mom and pop don't speak any english. A customer in the store asked me to write it down, whereupon he could pronounce it but still had no idea what it meant. Finally, I saw the bags under a chair behind the counter whereupon the mission turned to getting pop to select the right thing I was pointing to. Then when I gave him enough for two bags he gave me back half until I gave it back to him pointed to the bag and held up two fingers. It took ten minutes to buy two garbage bags but I did finally remember the Korean word for garbage: "srigae" (or close to that)