You Say Tomato, I Say Tomatoe

Confusing stuff like this happens so often over here I've become somewhat desensitized to them, but this made me laugh so hard I thought I would share.

On Friday night, I went to a Brazilian barbecue restaurant. They have a huge spit out front where they cook all different kinds of meats and side items: lamb, an assortment of beef, pork, chicken, sausage, potatoes and pineapple. Servers circulate throughout the restaurant with the skewers and you pretty much eat as much meat and side items as you can. The food was absolutely delicious (as was the Chilean red wine.) I find myself eating a lot of Asian food, being that I live in Asia, but sometimes it's nice to get some cuisine from other parts of the world.

Dinner ended and we were pretty full and a little tipsy. My buddy decided that the perfect ending to our meal would be some hookah smoke. Tons of bars over here have hookahs with a variety of different tobaccos. None of us were too familiar with the area, so I decided to ask the waiter if he could point us in the right direction.

Now, I still have yet to learn Korean, so I still rely mainly on actions, body language and other people's understanding of English in order to communicate with others in this country. Fortunately for me, the majority of the waiters at this restaurant were Brazilian, therefore they also were not Korean-speakers - they spoke Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese, but they were also fluent in Spanish and asked if we could speak it as well because they were more comfortable with it than English. My Spanish doesn't take me much further than being able to engage in simple conversations and, conveniently enough, restaurant Spanish, but it was enough to get by. Even though we were all speaking our second language, I felt like I was communicating with our servers on a level I am unable to in most restaurants I am in in Korea. It made me feel great.

So I felt like we had become kind of chummy with our waiters and I thought he could point me towards a bar that would have hookahs. I asked, in English, "Hey man, do you know where I could get a hookah around here?" To which he responded, without missing a beat, "No. No hookers around here." I lost my shit. I was laughing so hard I didn't even bother to try to continue the conversation and figure out where a hookah bar was. I was just content to walk out of the restaurant with our waiter thinking I was that comfortable loudly asking where a man could find a whore. It's amazing how highly people think of Americans over here.

Love from Seoul