Party
The other day I came home to find a "PARTY FOR FOREIGNER" sign on my door. It promised "FOOD AND BEER!" and "AMUSING EVENTS!" So I went. I had met a couple of Germans over Chuseok, when all the Koreans were home and nearly everything was closed all the time, with the effect that the only people around were the foreigners and we all had to eat at the same time in the same place. Both their names start with B. Ba and Be I guess will do. I met Ba because he came up and asked me "Bist du den anderen Deutscher?" (mistakes mine) that is "are you the other German?" I replied "Nein. Ich bin Amerikaner," and he immediately switched into his perfect Aenglisch. So anyway, at the party for foreigner I sat with Ba, at a table which consisted of, the two of us, three other Germans, two Taiwanese, an Indian, a Pakistani, and a third fellow of South Asian extraction whose precise national origin I'm not sure of. (I had originally put "and three desis," but then learned that Some South Asians feel that Desi is a derogatory term.)
There were two games. The first was: stand in a circle everyone put their hands in the middle and form two links more or less at random. You will usually have thus produced one twisted up circle, though it's not impossible that there will be two or
more circles when everything is untangled. At any rate, the game is to untangle it,
without releasing hands.
Our table was terrible at that game. We were so bad, they let us go again at the end. With the do-over, we lost respectably.
The second game was a guessing game, a bit like the old gameshow "password." One person is seated in a chair with someone standing behind them holding up a card with a word on it. The other people from that table are trying to get them to say the word. Not all at once. Each other person has a turn.
We had a big advantage at that game and won convincingly. Actually, I felt a bit bad. The point is that since the game was played in English, a lot of the things one was supposed to try to guess were American pop culture. I was doing the guessing for my team and ripped through them all with ease. The only thing we didn't get was the first thing, where I thought they were trying to get me to say the name of the small convenience store on the ground floor of Jigok Community center and, since I didn't know the store's name, I made them pass it. Then it turned out that the answer was "convenience store." I think I was the only native English speaker, and in particular, the only American, in the room. I felt particularly bad for the table of middle-aged South Asian families (it's one thing to ask a 20 year old Indian to guess "Terminator" or "Hip Hop." Quite another to ask the same of a 40 year old Indian)
and the table of Southeast Asians. (Maybe they were all Vietnamese?) Still, what can you do? We decided that I would do the guessing before the implications of that decision became clear.
Anyway, we won POSTECH coffee mugs, beautifully wrapped in burberry wrapping paper.
There were two games. The first was: stand in a circle everyone put their hands in the middle and form two links more or less at random. You will usually have thus produced one twisted up circle, though it's not impossible that there will be two or
more circles when everything is untangled. At any rate, the game is to untangle it,
without releasing hands.
Our table was terrible at that game. We were so bad, they let us go again at the end. With the do-over, we lost respectably.
The second game was a guessing game, a bit like the old gameshow "password." One person is seated in a chair with someone standing behind them holding up a card with a word on it. The other people from that table are trying to get them to say the word. Not all at once. Each other person has a turn.
We had a big advantage at that game and won convincingly. Actually, I felt a bit bad. The point is that since the game was played in English, a lot of the things one was supposed to try to guess were American pop culture. I was doing the guessing for my team and ripped through them all with ease. The only thing we didn't get was the first thing, where I thought they were trying to get me to say the name of the small convenience store on the ground floor of Jigok Community center and, since I didn't know the store's name, I made them pass it. Then it turned out that the answer was "convenience store." I think I was the only native English speaker, and in particular, the only American, in the room. I felt particularly bad for the table of middle-aged South Asian families (it's one thing to ask a 20 year old Indian to guess "Terminator" or "Hip Hop." Quite another to ask the same of a 40 year old Indian)
and the table of Southeast Asians. (Maybe they were all Vietnamese?) Still, what can you do? We decided that I would do the guessing before the implications of that decision became clear.
Anyway, we won POSTECH coffee mugs, beautifully wrapped in burberry wrapping paper.
posted by GB at 12:57 PM
2 Comments:
sounds like a nice surprise! thanks for the fun description. all those pictures above are fabulous, i especially liked the graffitti....
does it not rain there and thats why they can just tape paper to the stairs?
do you know what the proposee said?
no, it rains a pretty often, so if one is unlucky one's tape-and-paper artwork gets ruined in a hurry. but using duct tape it still lasts a little.
no i don't know what the proposee said.
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