To be a tailor

My wife is regaling me with the story of her day. Usually I wouldn't be listening, but I'm hoping to get lucky this weekend, and listening is my seduction.

She tells me how she took a jacket to the dry cleaners to be altered. "He said it would be 12,000 won!' I said, '12,000? I bought it at the used clothes store for 3,000.' Then he said, `If that's all it costs, why don't you buy clothes that fit?' "

I'm not sure who is supposed to be the hero in the story, and who the villain, but that doesn't really matter. A seduction only requires listening, responding just fouls up the works.

"So I took it to the old tailor lady near the park and asked her how much it would cost to alter it." she continues, "She's cheaper because she spilled Kim-chi on the shirt I took her last time."

I wonder if that is really why she is cheaper, or symptomatic of her being cheaper. I wonder if I really heard this right, a tailor is not going to work while they are eating. But this is all in Korean, so I can't really tell the difference between causative transitions and temporal ones. I'm listening the story though the fog of half understanding that is my lot here in Korea.

In the end, the old woman agrees to do it for 8,000 won. I don't know how this is acceptable against the argument that the clothes only cost 3,000 won, but it is less than 12,000 won, and by a calculus that is indecipherable to me, this is all that matters.

It doesn't matter though, it is a seduction.

Later that day, or maybe the next, we are out walking, and my wife says that as we are near the park, we might as well go pick up the altered pants.

We actually go into the park, which I wasn't expecting, cutting across the park takes us away from the road with the stores. We go to he benches where the old women are gathered playing yut nori. My wife taps one of the women on the shoulder and asks about her pants. The woman pulls them out from a shopping bag and explains something to my wife, pointing at them with a pair of scissors.

They have the prerequisite final argument over price, and then we leave with the pants.

"How did you know she wouldn't be in her shop?" I ask my wife.

"She doesn't have one, I just saw her out here sewing one day and asked if she could patch a hole for me."