This weekend being Valentines Day as well as Lunar New Year in Korea brought many fun activities. Among them were, ice-skating downtown, watching a movie, eating some delicious Mexican food and , generally just taking advantage of the fact that we live in a large city with a million things to do. On Saturday we headed down to the "electronics district" in search of a coffee pot which was our gift to each other for Valentine's Day (our old one is very small and leaking grounds into our coffee). We spent some time wandering around looking at everything from computers and video games to blenders and home decor. Somewhere in the mass of options that were provided for us, we found a perfect little coffee pot in our price range. Now, if we were to get a little stereotypical here you'd think that Korea was more of a tea-drinking country than a coffee-loving one. We have been surprised to find that Koreans LOVE their coffee. This being said we thought it wouldn't be a problem to find a coffee maker. This is true, it wasn't super difficult to find one. The shocker though is the price. The cheapest coffee pot we've seen in Korea is a small (unknown name-brand)4cup machine for 45,000won(about $38)! So, we pulled a "Dave Ramsey" and dove into negotiations, cash in hand. Success! We were able a get a nice 10 cup machine for about $45.
Now, coffee maker in hand we headed out to meet some friends for ice skating. Since we were going to be busy with skating we didn't want a lot of extra stuff to hold on to, so we safely locked our purchases and whatnot into a locker at the subway station. Then we headed out to find the rink. It was a nice outdoor rink in the middle of downtown where it only costs $1 to skate for an hour! We enjoyed our time but after our hour was up we were pretty tired, after all, we had been running around most of the day and it was already 9:30p. So, we headed back to the subway station to collect our things and go home.
Much to our surprise when we got back to the lockers we couldn't figure out how to get our locker open. It was an electronic system that requires the input of your phone number to lock it instead of a key. Since everything was in Korean and we really couldn't understand it we just started pushing buttons and entering numbers....this did not work. Needless to say, late in the evening the day before Lunar New Year was not a good time for this to happen. There was hardly anybody around and definitely no helpful subway workers. We spent the next 1/2 hour asking just about anyone that came along if they could help us, to no avail. Finally, we spotted a subway worker who was helping another lady. We followed him around until he was finished, because we weren't about to let him escape back into the recesses of the subway. He walked over to the lockers with us and stared at them for a few minutes and then started pushing buttons himself. Keep in mind that he spoke exactly zero English, so we had to play a little game of charades before he could understand our problem. After a time he left and came back with a second subway worker. The two men pushed buttons on the machine and had us enter our phone number a few times and still....nothing. They finally called the company that runs the lockers and told them of our problem. The helpful man on the phone had us enter our phone number(which serves as a code) a few more times to try to unlock the locker. Apparently, all the phone numbers entered into these lockers are saved in a giant database....eventually he told us to type in a different number and Voila! our locker opened and I got my purse back along with our purchases. Turns out, I switched two of the numbers in our phone number.....as my students say "I am genius!" We finally were able to go home....unfortunately it was already almost midnight. ...
I am genius!
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