English, kinda

Hello! K, here. It's been a pretty uneventful first week back since the Chuseok holiday. So instead of tell you stories of our adventures, I'd like to share a little collection I've been putting together for the last year or so. This is my collection of "English" signs and labels I've seen around that have totally cracked me up. Now this is in now way to say that Korean's can't do English well. Most signs are pretty clear and grammatically correct. But then there are these. These gems that tickle me to my core as a native English speaker. Enjoy!



 





Perhaps the best example, because it marks J's classroom at one of his travel schools. Obviously this sign was not designed by a native English teacher.



A menu for a "New York" style pizza shop in Gwangju we found last winter.

I love this, because it's an intentional play on words. But who
designed this I will never understand. The small print specifically
rings of Korean high school student speaking "cool" English.

This beauty, or some version of it, can be found in most big city public restrooms such as the airport, shopping malls, etc. My favorites are "no scribbling" and "don not climb on toilet." Believe it or not, climbing on the toilets is actually a problem in a country that has just recently graduated to sitting toilets rather than squatting toilets. Some people are still more comfortable doing their business in a squatted position.

I think I used this photo in a previous post, but it still gets me. It's a pizza place called "I love Jesus" that opened in 1992 and I honestly don't know if the owners made this sign on purpose or if it's just the cutest coincidence.

And then there are prints like this T-shirt. I'm not even sure what to say about it, except that
English is "cool" here and so often you'll see clusters of words like this that almost....
almost make sense.

This beauty was printed on a re-usable grocery bag at my favorite little dollar-type store.

And this motivational speech printed on my coffee cup just makes
me feel better about life in general.

I may have posted this before, but if I haven't, shame on me. This is the motto of our beloved Goheung. It says "High Goheung, Happy Goheung" which is supposed to be a shout out to the aerospace industry here and the kindness of the people in the countryside. But then, without knowing that it can be interpreted many ways...

And last but not least, another T-shirt print. Again, it almost makes
sense. You kind of want to respond with "totally!" even though it's
hard to say exactly what they were going for.

And there you have it. I hope a few of those made you laugh as hard as they make us laugh when we come across them in our daily life. It's a nice little reminder that English is valued here, and also, that we have some amount of job security as English teachers.
Cheers!
-K