More Adventures In Clothing

Sadly, my perennial soccer buddies Lon and Lisa are returning to Sin City in the coming weeks, so the time is approaching to give them a proper sendoff. As always, it shall be done with class, in the form of a fancy dress party. I will be wearing my 3-piece suit, but Laura wanted to buy a new dress for the occasion. This proved to be a surprising ordeal.

There were a few problems here. First, the cultural barrier. I'm sure I've mentioned this in the past, but Korean stores are incredibly high-pressure environments. As soon as you set foot in the store a clerk is all over you, throwing out prices and trying to get you to try something on. It's like buying a used car. Also, some of the pricing is dishonest. We saw a cute dress on the "14,900 won" rack that we were later told was nearer 20,000 won. This is still a good deal of course, but it's disappointing when it happens.

Secondly, the language barrier reared its ugly head yet again, and not just because we were shopping at the charmingly-named "Shark Zone." Yesterday, we found a shop there with some cute dresses, but no one was present. There was a phone number on the table, but we were pressed for time and decided to come back later. Today, it was still vacant, so we called the number. My Korean proved inadequate to communicate the situation, so I asked a clerk at a nearby cell-phone store to call the number for me. All I could pick out from the conversation was something about foreigners wanting to buy something, and the price of the desired dress. What was unclear is who exactly Laura would have paid if she liked the dress.

(For future reference, if a Korean speaker could let me know how to say "I'm trying to give you money! Where the hell are you!" that would be great.)

The final problem was biological. How do I put this . . . Laura is possessed of certain physical gifts which would be appreciated by Sir Mix-a-Lot but are virtually unheard of in Korea. In the case of the phantom store, there was nobody to advise of this dilemma. In the case of other shops, this was hard to communicate without resorting to obscene gestures.

In the end (no pun intended), everything worked out as she picked out a lovely gold dress for the party and a few others for good measure.