I noticed that I was running a little low on shirts that didn't have either bolognese sauce stains on the front or frayed collars. So off I went on a shopping trip. The department stores here are very efficient. None of this business of walking up to a shelf selecting the thing you want with a clear description of the size, material on the front of the package. Oh no. Here there are Shopping Assistants.
A successful tactic is to creep along the edge of a department store section where you think it might be possible to get what you want, so that you can safely check it out without too much human interaction. Peer too much, any neck craning and you're done for - you'll be pounced on by the Shopping Assistant. Who can't speak a word of English but fully believes that you're just being shy about your Korean as she chatters away about something clearly not important enough to be communicated in a useful way.
With this chatter going on in my ear and random shirt styles being thrust in front of me, I tried to focus on making her understand the essentials of my needs. Shirt must have a breast pocket. A man would be an fool not to take advantage of his natural ability to have a pocket just covering the heart. A good place for leaky pens, metro passes and if anyone ever wanted to shoot you, in a fatal kind of way, while travelling, the bullet would first have to go through your passport. All this was very easily communicated to the Shop Assistant using the example pocket on my current shirt, although I'm not sure she understood the bullet thing.
Next, colour. White or blue. These were business shirts. I reserve other colours for non-business in order to help me to recognise when it is a weekend or a holiday. Material, cotton. Strangely this took a long time to communicate. Must have been my mime impression of a cotton gin. Lastly size. (Here Korea has excelled itself in being truly unique. There is a numbering system that is neither inches or centimetres and I think, not actually related to any known mathematical classification system. Small starts at 90 and large ends at 110. Brilliant - I wonder when the rest of the world will catch up.)
But I didn't need to communicate my size - Shop Assistant was all over me with a measuring tape doing shoulders, waist, length from top of neck to belt line (both front and back), length of arm (she actually raised her eyebrows when she got that, she must have thought I was part Simian). I started getting worried that she had misunderstood and was making me a shirt from scratch. But after sizing me up from all angles and a few moments with a calculator, she pronounced '105'. (By the way, the shirts still come in the same 4 sizes - S, M, L, XL: 105 is an 'L'. The actual shirt size with that name is always different and as usual varies from country to country and brand to brand.)
Unfortunately, they didn't have the 105 with a breast pocket. I say 'unfortunate' because by this time I had also reached my 'shopping saturation' threshold. Like a diver at 18 meters with his air gauge locked at red zero needing to surface, once shopping saturation is reached I rather like being on the outside of the shop with it receding in the distance. So, principles abandonned, I took the 105's, paid the piper, and headed home.
First thing I did was put them in the wash, due to the allergy to the bug killer they spray the material with. Next day - dried, pressed. I try them on. And of course they don't fit. Next time I'll remember 110.
