My Own Hungarian Phrase Book

Watching a movie called "The Spanish Apartment" where the main character leaves France to spend a year in Barcelona. He has a few pretty rocky moments at the start which he remembers later as being the worst moments that turned out to be the best stories. Here are a few of mine.


The other day I was walking through my neighborhood and saw a rack of clothes outside a store. People sell clothes from the back of their cars out here, so seeing racks of clothes for sale outside is not a rare thing. There was a skirt that I thought was cute (and might actually fit) so I took it off the rack and held it up for inspection. As soon as I did a red faced Korean man storms out of the door and spits out rapid, very angry, Korean while pointing at the painted sign on the building that says "Dry Cleaning" in very large, obvious English letters.



Last weekend when hiking I was pausing on a rock waiting for others to catch up. I was copying the squatting pose old Korean women perform on every street corner around my neighborhood quite expertly and chatting with a (fully bilingual) Korean woman. A patch of sun hitting my face was bugging me so I put up my hand to block it when a group of Koreans not associated with our hike, and not billingual, went by and thought my hand was a signal to high five. I'm not one to be stingy with the high fives so I thought it was cool. They speak to my companion, saying something that makes her blush and stammer, something I can tell is happenning despite the fact that I can't understand what she is saying. When I ask her what they said, she tells me they said they were impressed that a cute kid had made it this far on the hike.