The Perils of Singledom

Last Thursday night I annoyed a cab driver.

It was my friend Sheila's last night in Korea and I was grabbing some of her stuff, including a clothes rack, a mattress (of sorts), a giant pillow, a small bedside table and a rice cooker. So, naturally, I hailed a cab. He happily took me over to Kyungidung (spelling undoubtably wrong there), but he was mighty unpleased upon mention of the trunk being opened and watched the packing of the backseat with stuff (he refused the trunk request outright) with louder and louder grumbling.

There are more than a few cabbies here who don't much like having to deal with a foreigner in their cabs, much less one with furniture. Perhaps this would also not go down well at home - I don't know, as I've never tried it. Though I did once help someone move 5 blocks by piling all sorts of stuff on top of beds and couches and walking them down the center of the street. No doubt the motorists would have symphathized with my cabbie.

At this point in the story, it is perhaps important to point out that our grumbly cabbie did not speak English. Nor do I particularly speak Korean - my accent is atrocious, and I know only words rather than the sentences to string them together in. However, I am incredibly fluent in context-and-gesture Korean, thus the rest of this story.

After grumbling at me that I didn't need a cab but a mover (I hadn't the slightest the idea of the word for a mover in Korean, this is where context comes in handy - obviously that was what he was grumbling about), the cabbie asks if I am married. The word sounded familiar to me, but I wasn't sure what he was inquiring about so insistently until he grabbed my hand to examine my ring finger. "Ahhh, anyo!" I said, light finally dawning.

He made it very clear that if I only had a husband, I would not need a cabbie or a mover, as the Mr. would obviously deal with all of this for me. And then he jokingly suggested that I go to Geckos.

Obviously for a single gal, an evening is much more productively spent picking up GIs in a bar than moving free stuff that she needs.