Korean phone booths are very well made.
This was one of the major trains of thought running through my tired mind as I sat on the floor of a phone booth just outside my dorm at Ewha University, wondering how I'd found myself in such a cliched situation. There was no handle on the inside of the door and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to escape, since the door was one of those folding/sliding ones that opened inward into the booth. I went into the phone booth intending to call some of my relatives in Seoul and tell them I'm here and only discovered I couldn't leave after I discovered that the pay phone didn't take coins. Asian pay phones tend to take special cards that you load money onto, and of course I don't have one of those yet. I don't have a cell phone yet, either, and as my Korean vocabulary is very limited, I couldn't figure out how to call collect or what the emergency number was. Also my dorm is at the edge of campus and it was 9pm, so cars and passerby were few and far between. Thank god I had a lighter and some tissues. I ended up lighting a tissue on fire as a car approached and they stopped and let me out after I almost burned myself, dropped the flaming tissue, and stomped on it a few times. I hadn't been panicking, but after half an hour I was starting to resign myself to spending part or all of the night in a mint-green 4'x4' cubicle with a stupid useless pay phone for company.
It was definitely a "... And you go to Harvard?!" moment, but in my defense, I've only been in this country for 4 days and I can barely communicate in the language. It's been about half an hour since I was freed from my little cage, and I am definitely not attempting pay phone calling again. It's been at least a year since I've used a pay phone, and probably at least 5 years since I've used one in the States (last summer I went to Australia with my choir).
Moral of the story: always carry a lighter, or a cell phone, or both. Actually, just steer clear of phone booths, period.
No more philosophical thoughts tonight.
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2 comments:
Were you in one of these? Because that's about the size of my room in Cabot.
http://re-directed.blogspot.com/2007/04/phone-booth.html
Yeah, that was basically it, but with more windows. The quad sux0rz.
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