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Another Invitation

Last night, I went to the local market to buy some bread and other groceries.

As I got to the checkout counter, the clerk—whom I’ve mentioned here before as having invited herself over to my house for dinner, as a way of hinting she would like to do so—invited me to cook dinner for her. She asked why I was buying 떡 (ddeok, which is a kind of rice cake), and when I explained it was because I was making 떡만두국 (ddeok mandu guk, which is rice-cake and dumpling soup), she asked if I am good at making that soup. I said I was, and she stressed to me the fact that she would like to try my cooking, at my house.

I said, “아… 그런데 내 집에 오면… 아마 내 여자 친구가 나를 축이얼거예요!” (“Ah… but if you come to my house, my girlfriend might kill me.”)

This sent the clerk into peals of laughter, laughing so hard she had to squat for a few moments behind the counter to keep her balance. I think it was a relatively nice way of turning her down, as she seemed to get a very good laugh about it. She’s a nice woman, and I appreciate her interest, even though it ain’t gonna happen.

It was funny, though, because it happened only a few minutes after I chatted with Lime on the phone. She’d asked me whether any woman had asked me out on Tuesday (a follow-up joke to Monday) and I told her no, of course not. And then a short fifteen minutes later, this happened. When I told Lime, we joked about it for a few minutes but she seemed just a tiny bit bothered by it, until I reminded her that my telling her about these silly little occurrences is a good thing; I told her, the problem would be if I were not willing to tell her about them, actually. But this way we can laugh together about something that doesn’t really matter.

It’s funny though, I found it amusing that Lime thought an age difference between me and the woman, who is a couple of years my elder, was a sign of craziness on the part of the woman, while our age difference (I am some six years her senior, though in the Korean counting system I think it’s counted as five years) is negligible. Funny, that. Ah well, not a big effect on us since I am older, so we’ve never talked about that before… and I may be assuming it was a bigger deal to her than it was.

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