Slang

My sister and I decided to get some drinks for the movies we rented last night. We went down to the 7-11 downstairs and picked out a couple things. When we went to the counter, we didn't think anything of the Korean girl working there. All of a sudden she asks us, in the most PERFECT english voice, "Do you wanna buy a bag?" I looked at my sister and she looked up from her wallet with a shocked look on her face and answered, "Oh ummm yes." (In Korea, you have to buy plastic bags if you don't bring your own.) She places our bottles in the bag and then says, "Thank you very much, have a nice day." My sister and I were like "!!!!!" Hearing someone speak English that well in Korea, an hour away from base is like seeing a peso in North Carolina. She even had the whole slang thing down: wanna. The only other straight-up Korean I've ran into that can speak with English slang is my stepmom.

How do people pick up on slang in other languages? I know some Korean, French, Italian, but I don't even know where to begin when it comes to slang. Here, for example, we say, "I'm gonna sing 'till the cows come home." First of all, why would cows come home? Where are the cows coming from? First-time English speakers will have a huge conundrum with this phrase. Gonna? How are they supposed to know that 'gonna' actually means "going to." How do you get 'gonna' from that? It always makes me laugh when I hear my stepmom say things like, "Ew what a dinky dress," or, "This piece of crap notebook is falling apart." I think it's kind of funny how fast some foreigners pick up on English slang.

What I hate the most, however, is when they learn a cuss word. They sound like little 5 year olds who hear it for the first time and decide to add the word to their everyday vocabulary. I was walking down a street one time with shopping stores all over the place. Korea has these hustlers that bring customers into the stores that you can't see from the street. Well, one time I was walking by and one of the hustlers told me, "Hey bitch! Good American size. Bitch clothes." I was like wtf?! I was about to slap him but I remembered I was in Korea haha! Then I passed by a store named "Fucking Lovely." Fucking lovely, huh? It's weird how there's so many languages and so much slang, I always wonder how people figure this stuff out. Sometimes we can get lost in translation or found in miscommunication. I don't get it either.

Mozartkugeln

I never thought that I'd learn to make German cookies in Korea. Since my sister doesn't know how to spend her time studying, she wanted to partake in some extra credit work by making cookies reflecting the time period she's studying in her class. Therefore, we searched the web for "German cookie recipes." Instead of choosing something easy and more closely resembling something that Americans bake everyday, such as German chocolate chip cookies, we decided to go with these marzipan chocolates called Mozartkugeln. You start by making an almond paste for the center, then continue by making your own marzipan out of ground up walnuts for the outer center. The last step was probably the messiest, considering we had to hand dip the balls in a bowl of melted chocolate. Knowing us, we didn't just "dip" them, we pretty much submerged our hands in a spa-treatment. They say cocoa is good for your skin and I'm just starting to believe them.

A lot of people have asked me what I do when I'm in Korea..what do I do here that's different than what I do in America? It's a good question that I can't answer. I mean, here I am baking German cookies. I don't even think I actually do anything differently in whatever country I'm in. Eat, shop, party? The only thing that changes is how I do it. In Korea, I eat Korean food, shop cheaply, and party like a celebrity in top clubs. In America? I eat burgers and party at people's houses. The only factor that really defines a place is not by the obvious things to do there, but how you do them.