August 2nd - 3rd

Thursday, August 2nd
I had the AM shift and then I chilled in the apartments with Rachel until dinnertime. For dinner, Rachel and I met up with Boram and a girl from the Swiss Pavilion and then we just talked all together on the playground set outside our rooms. After that I studied Korean with the textbook I'd bought in Seoul. I think what I'm weakest on is vocabulary. I just really need to sit down and memorize words, but it's just rather boring to do without any external motivation, so I haven't been studying much.

Friday, August 3rd
I took over the PM shift for Audrey, so I worked PM instead of AM since she wanted to see the Psy concert that night. In the morning, I woke up to a phone call from the bank, which had called to inform me I had gotten a bank transfer. They were asking me to explain why I had gotten a wire transfer. After I explained it was money from my parents to study abroad, they then requested my bank account number and the amount of money received in the transfer, so at that point I told them I would feel more comfortable talking to someone face to face, not on the phone. So then I got ready and headed straight to the bank to deal with the whole problem. However, when I got to the bank and tried to explain (poorly) about the phone call I had received in the morning, the lady behind the counter just gave me a funny look and then showed me the money had been deposited in my account. I was really confused, but I decided that there was no reason to push the issue since I had the money already deposited with no hold put on it or anything. I grabbed lunch on the way back to the apartments and then caught up on some blogging. The cleaning ladies asked me what I was doing after Expo and when I explained I was studying in Seoul for the year, they gave me free towels and hand soap, which was really nice of them. They told me not to report it to their bosses or they could get in trouble.

Out of my many strange Expo work experiences I had one of the strangest during this workshift. A Korean guy came into retail and after asking my friend and I if we had heard of some place in Alabama (we hadn't), he asked me for my phone number. I lied and said I didn't have a Korean phone, so he asked for my American number, and I told him it didn't work. He then asked me to marry him, telling me he lived in Alabama working at a Hyundai plant, to which I responded I was definitely too young to get married. During this whole conversation my friend and I kept exchanging looks and laughing at the absurdity of the conversation, but the guy was completely serious. He asked how old I was due to my response and I told him my actual age, but he responded that he was twenty (total lie, he had to have been at least thirty five). At that point a huge crowd of people came through the retail area, but he kept asking if I wanted to get his number so we could go on a date. I kept telling him I was busying handling transactions and finally he was like so are you not interested in me? And I told him no and he finally left. It turns out he had asked two other girls at our pavilion earlier for their contact information and then later asked one again for hers and asked her to marry him too. When she said no though, he told her he could make her happy and asked her why she wouldn't agree to it.She just walked away. We theorized he was trying to marry an American out of visa issues or something. Regardless it was weird, but because I never felt personally threatened since I was always with another American at the time, we mainly just found it funny.

Later I went to the Psy concert and actually got a pretty good view despite the fact that the area was absolutely packed. Psy's new song Gangnam Style (강남스타일) is currently an insanely huge hit in Korea (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0) so he's super popular right now. The concert was really good, although I think holding it in the digital gallery was a poor decision because it was too crowded and hot.

Afterwards, I ran into Boram and a friend of hers from Singapore as they were headed to the Colombian Party, so I decided to tag along. It was pretty lame though, so we ended up migrating to the party at the Philippines, which I didn't particularly care for either, but it was done by midnight so it didn't matter that much.