Staying with my friend Stu. Today was a very uneventful day: returned the rented car, bought some presents, hung out with friends, edited Stu’s homework paper, ate too much. Tim took me out for some special soup made of chicken and ginseng, reputedly a cure for hangovers, which he had but I didn’t. The soup is a little startling – each bowl has an entire bird in it (a very small chicken or a game hen of some kind). The fowl is stuffed with rice and ginseng and then boiled whole. When it arrives you have to dismantle it with chopsticks before you can eat it. Then, if you’re not exhausted by the entire thing, you can eat. It’s delicious…
Later I tried to take a taxi back to Stu’s. He had cleverly photographed an envelope with his address on it with my phone so I could show it to the taxi driver. All taxis here have GPS so not being able to say the name correctly shouldn’t cause any problems, shouldn’t being the operative word here. I find a taxi and show him the address and set off at a great rate. Then he says to me, “where, where?”, and I point to the address. He says, more loudly, “you phone, I not know”. I didn’t have Stu’s number, so I say (a little loudly), “no phone, GPS”. This time he shouts, “NO GPS. YOU PHONE”, but I couldn’t…so I said, in my best Korean, “GPS please”. By now he is looking over his shoulder at me as though I am an idiot, while driving full speed in heavy city traffic. Finally, with a grunt and a sigh, he pulls over and takes out his phone and uses the GPS. I’m not sure why he didn’t use the one on the dashboard, it seemed to be working. Anyway, we drive up and down several alleys with him getting increasingly frustrated and shouting at me “here?”, “here?”… and then driving me right to Stu’s door and saying in a perfectly normal tone of voice, “here.” And the whole trip only cost $5.
A very long evening with good friends – does life get any better?