Oh God, It's her!

Today I went to the bank to transfer a healthy sum of money to my English account. Normally my trip to the bank is never easy...I speak only basic level Korean, and their English level is even lower. A simple desposit of my monthly wages (paid to me in a combination of cash and cheques) can cause quite a cafuffle, and attending to me takes twice as long as serving everyone else. To the bank workers, I am a headache.

This time when I walked through the rotating door into the main waiting area, I was greeted with the obligitory smile and bow, but the smile was strained and the eyes wide with slight panic "Oh God, it's HER again". I dived into my bag and pulled out my Han-Yeong/Yoeng-Han dictionary. After riffling swiftly through the pages I found the word I needed. I then took my Korean bank book in one hand, my HSBC cheque book in the other, and with the appropriate motion said "Jeonhwan"/transfer slowly and deliberately (to avoid bad pronunciation).

The attendant twigged what I wanted and rushed me over to another desk. Here I filled out form, half in Roman letters and half in Hangul, but when I got to 'bank number' I ran into problems. Of course, the Koreans use American terminology and not English. I wondered if this is the same as 'sort-code' but the attendant tried to tell me that I did not need to write the sort code. With the help of my dictionary I argued that the sort-code is very important. Another attendant scurried over to try and help, and pointed to a table on the back of the form. Here it had all the different terminologies from the different English-speaking countries. 'Bank number' was indeed 'sort-code'.

So after all that hassle, I finally completed the form and for a small fee began the process of transferring the money. It's no wonder the look of disappointment everytime I walk through the door.