A Linguistic Adventure

My Vietnamese skills are quite horrendous, to be sure. Any Vietnamese speaking friend of mine back home can attest to that and there are also two more examples in Korea that simply add to the testimonials.

Example #1
My homies and I went down to Ansan to get some legit pho and get some balut. In Ansan, there is a kind non Korean Asian Market Place complete with stores and goods catering to Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese, Filipino, and I'm sure much more. We go to this Vietnamese restaurant that I've been to before with my friend Christy and proceed to order. We all get pho and we order some balut for those in our group whom are brave enough to try it. I sure hope I used "whom" correctly there.

So we eat and into our meal I ask our Vietnamese waitress for something. Now, as a background, there are three Vietnamese dialects, Southern, Central, and Northern, I speak the southern one and our waitress spoke northern. So I ask her for this little side dish and she couldn't understand. I then try to articulate a little bit more and add more of an accent. No dice. I tried one more time just to be sure before I gave up and asked my Korean friend in English to ask the nice, patience Vietnamese waitress in Korean for something that I wanted.

Turns out they didn't have it.

Example #2
My homies and I stumbled upon a random Vietnamese restaurant in the middle of Suwon the other day and we decided to head inside because they actually had Vietnamese writing on the menu. I've stumbled upon many pho places in Korea and I always test them out by first asking if they speak Vietnamese in Vietnamese and then trying the iced coffee. I asked the ajumma that greeted us if she spoke Vietnamese and she gave a blank look and I thought it was another epic fail. That was until someone from the back came and spoke Vietnamese! My friends and I were delighted so we sat down for some iced coffee and other things.

So while we drank our coffee we spoke with the waitress - my friends in Korean with her and I spoke Vietnamese with her. Rather funny because we were translating back and forth since there wasn't a common language that we all spoke. The waitress asked if I had been to Vietnam before, now quick background check again - Vietnamese is a tonal language, so making the same phonemes with different pitches result in drastically different meanings, and I told her I haven't. Good good.

Then she asks me why. Of course, I could give her a normal reason like being in college, having no money, or not having time. Which I did, I told her I didn't have time to go because I've been busy since graduating and coming to Korea. Funny thing is, the word "time" sounds a lot like the word for "wife" in Vietnamese. Guess which one I said?

The nice waitress then proceeds to ask how old I am, why I didn't have a wife, and give my friends and I more free food. She also tells us to come back. True story.