TL;DR – Funny Stories from Korea

Welcome to the first edition of Eatyourkimchi’s TL;DR Thursdays, where we answer your top rated questions in video format. The #1 question at the time of our recording was courtesy of dahiladreams, from Georgia,USA, who asked: “Funniest moment ever while you were in S.Korea?”

We’ve had tons of reasons to laugh here in Korea, but much of the time it’s because of a failure in communication. Sure, the language barrier is frustrating when we’re trying to get something from someone (FYI, house hunting sucks if you can’t speak Korean or don’t have a realtor who speaks your language), but sometimes it can provide great laughs.

Anyhow, the pepper spray explanation is by far our favorite mistranslation story, but there’s another one that we cut out of the video: bonus story for our readers yay! So here’s the deal: Simon was teaching a Christmas lesson and his students were doing a puzzle. One of the questions was very difficult and stumped the majority of them. When it was time to go over the answers, he prefaced that question with “time for the easy one!” He thought it was clever. The whole class starts laughing. Even the co-teacher is laughing, slapping her thighs laughing. They all then point to one girl in the class. Now, she isn’t the best student in the class. She’s the only one with makeup on, and she’s got circle lenses and a perm as well. All of the students point to her and say “she is the easy one!” Even the co-teacher called her the easy one. WTF?!?! Now, back when we were in school, we knew that there were some girls that were more floozy than others and got around a lot more, but never would a teacher laugh and call her the easy one. So, when asked for a bit more clarification, the co-teacher said “that is her name. Ee Ji-Wuan.”

Simon burst out into laughter then, a lot louder than everyone else. Oh, poor girl. We don’t know what her name means in Korean, but let’s hope she goes by a different name in English. Hilarious! In a similar vein, we know someone who is a gym teacher, and his name is Chun Ki-Beum. Sounds like Chunky Bum. How inappropriate…for a gym teacher! Anyhow, if you’ve got any funny stories we’d love to hear them. Please do share! We could use a good laugh :D

So that’s it for this week. If there’s a topic you’d like us to talk about, please ask away over on our bonus page, linked here. Also try voting some of the questions up and down, so we can get a better sense of what you all would like us to talk about. Also, this is probably the last video you’ll ever see from our kitchen, since we’re moving into our new place on Wednesday. Huzzah! We’ll be staying in Bucheon, and we’ll for sure make a video of our new place once we’ve got everything in order :D

Tagged As:

confusing, dogs, Korean Language, Korean School, Life in Korea, Teaching English

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