Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

...I need some English conversation, stat!

Please don't pour flavord syrup on my menu.

"We'll do our best" ...but don't get your expectations too high.

"If wanner you don't hot is pretend to be around to"

...I read it on a t-shirt, so it must be true.

Hope on and off freely

Okay, we have three contenders for this week's Eanglish Trophy:

On my new scales- "The glass and your feet do not be wetted with water in order to a void you slide down!"

(I don't want to slide down the void!)

and

On "Cat Food Premium & Pet Snack Hairball Snack include fresh fish meat": "Excellent effect of restrict the cat's feces and pee. Including dietary fiber, protecting Obesity and Hairball".

(My cats are Tug and Tiki, though I admit Obesity and Hairball would be pretty cool names.)

But my favorite, I think, is on the brochure for the Daegu City Tour Bus: "Hope on and off freely."

I do.

Antic furniture and instant noodies

A couple of months ago, I posted about the mangled and nonsensical English that abounds in Korea, which I call Eanglish. Oftentimes it's on store signs and such, but more often you find it on t-shirts. Everybody wears clothing with English (more or less) on it. (I'm literally the only person I've ever seen here with a t-shirt in Korean writing: letters spelling "Ee-tay-ka"- Ithaca- which was a present from a good friend from Eetayka. What's funny is that the Americans can't read it and the Koreans don't know what it means.)

Anyway, submitted for your approval:

Online, I found a t-shirt that (in Korean) says "Do you know what your t-shirt says?"

A little shop near the school advertises vintage clothing and "antic furniture". That's false advertising; the furniture doesn't even move.

The luxurious Dong-A department store's grocery section has an aisle marked CANNES GOODS, but there's no film festival memorabilia. And, sadly, the INSTANT NOODIES turn out to just be ramen.

No soup for me!

As I've said before, many Korean letters have sounds in between different English sounds, such as B and P, D and T, L and R, and so on. Their character that looks like a doodle of Space Mountain and is supposed to sound like "S" actually, in their pronunciation, sounds more like "Sh", which makes it fun when the littluns have to read "Sit down" in their books. (There are three or four channels on cable that carry nothing but English lessons, and I actually saw that very point discussed on one program-- the Korean people on the show, when it was explained to them, thought it was hilarious.) I've seen the same Korean place name in English with a B on one sign and a P on another across the street.

What I didn't expect, though, was that somehow that can lead to mixing up letters even when they're writing a word that's already in English. Who knew? For example, I've seen a street sign directing people to the "Seoseung Brdg." and another for "Samduk Hosbital".

The champ, though, is a menu item in a little restaurant near the US Army's Camp Walker:

CRAP CREAM SOUP.

Spotted on the street...

...a teenager in a t-shirt bearing the Dallas Cowboys' logo from the early sixties: a goofy-looking cowboy, wearing a Dallas helmet, galloping on a goofier-looking horse.

Under the picture, one word: NEWYORK.

In some secluded rendezvous...

There’s a little café just down the block from the school... further comment would be not only superfluous but inevitably, knowing me, indecent.

Eanglish

In exactly a week here, I’ve never seen anyone wearing clothing with Korean characters on it. T-shirts with English writing, however, are wildly popular. As they are on storefront signs, the slogans may be perfectly correct, not quite there, or completely wacko. A lot of the time, it doesn’t seem to matter what the English words mean, although they often attempt to say something positive and happy. I guess the wearer may not know what the shirt is trying to say. I’m calling the botched attempts KorEanglish, or Eanglish.

Here are the first-week Eanglish t-shirt medals:

Bronze: “WISN IS CHARMINGLY DISORDERED” (Hard to argue with that.)

Silver: A picture of a cute teddy bear wearing round-rimmed glasses, a shirt with the name “Radar” on it, and a khaki watch cap that says “4077th MASK”. (Extra points for a Korean kid wearing a M*A*S*H shirt.)

Gold: “LEAVE OUT YOUR DEAD. BE HAPPY” (Okay.)

Oh, and I don’t have a good ending for this post, so I’ll just throw this in, because I keep forgetting to mention it: Pizza Bingo, the storefront I mentioned several days ago, makes really good pizza. Here are three things I didn’t expect: the pizza comes in a box tied with a white ribbon; the veggie pizza has corn on it; and the pizza comes with a little plastic tub like Papa John’s buttery sauce: you open it up and what do you find? Sweet pickle chips.

…and just to tie it into the Eanglish theme, the box has a picture of a sunflower and says “LIKE A FLOWER! Well-being Pizza Bingo”.

F-style and fresh

I bought some bread yesterday at a little shop incongruously called Paris Baguette. The wrapper has a label that says, “This soft goods the good material in the body and a possibility of eating with the families together and fiber of these fibers. Uses the fresh one materials in family brand where it is f-style and fresh. I it uses fine, edo. It is good and the mouth to be joyful to Paris newly the fortune well of the baguette’s round it is a life style brand with fine”
The bread’s really good, though.