The Wallet Incident

"A drunk man stole your wallet. Give the phone back to him and he'll call the police." That's what the free translation service told me when the man eating bugs gave my phone back to me. Well, crap. This isn't good. Our first trip to Seoul was turning into a real bummer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last Saturday, Haley and I decided to explore Seoul, an hour train ride north from our local hub, Pyeongtaek. We left around 10 and arrived in Seoul just in time to start looking for a place for lunch. After wandering down Itaewan, home to Outback Steakhouse and Quiznos, we found a place much more suited to us. Someplace where we could order only by pointing at other people's tables and nodding. A place where the two ladies working there who didn't speak English could bring us uncooked bacon and random spicy, pickled vegetables and leaves to wrap it in. A place where Haley could get shoo'ed away for trying to get her own rice when it wasn't self serve and where I could get walked in on while peeing by a Korean lady at their co-ed bathroom without a working lock. We'll call this place McAwkward because the only sign out front was in Korean and, as you can probably guess, WE DON'T KNOW KOREAN.

After lunch, we took the subway to an indoor/outdoor/underground market. After exploring the market for a few hours, we stopped at a little convenience store. We bought a couple beers and sat at their outdoor tables and people watched. Energy restored, we took off for a mall down the street. The mall was packed, so we just rode the escalator to the 8th floor, found a table in their food court and looked at our map to plan our next move. We were getting tired by this point, so we planned one more pass thorough the market before we'd head home. We went down through the mall again, back out onto the street and continued marketing.

Mid-market I did the wallet check. Patted the back pockets. Nothing. Front pockets. Nothing. I even patted where cargo pockets would be but alas, I wasn't wearing cargo shorts. Nothing. In 13 or so years of legitimately carrying a wallet, I've never done a wallet check and turned up empty. Awesome that the first time I do, I'm in the 8th largest city in the world, in one of the busiest markets. Even better that in my wallet is:

-my military ID (deeply, deeply frowned upon to lose these)

-my Alaska driver's licence (good luck renewing that one)

-my Korea driver's licence (just got it that week)

-my Status of Forces card for Korea (another sensitive piece of paper)

-ohh, and the parking ticket to get us out of the garage at the Pyeongtaek train station

Least of my concerns were my credit card, ATM and 100 or so bucks in Korean won. Easily replaceable.

So we retraced our steps. Up we went to the 8th floor of the mall to look at the table we were sitting in. Not there. The three Koreans that cleared the tables just stared at me blankly when I charaded how I used to be sitting at the table but left and now I was back and I had lost my wallet and maybe they had picked it up and maybe put it in their lost and found and how exactly do you charade lost and found? I didn't give up with the hand motions and frowns until I was pretty sure it wasn't sitting on the counter next to their cash register. So back down through the mall we went and headed out on a quest to find the store where we had a beer earlier that afternoon. No small feat considering the maze of corners and corridors that these Asian markets are like.

Somehow we found it and I began the whole lost wallet charade again with the old lady shopkeeper. There were some men sitting at the table we had sat at earlier, drinking tea and eating boiled cockroaches with toothpicks. When I started looking over and around them for my wallet, they started jabbering in Korean and this time I just didn't have the energy or patience to act out my saga, silent film-like. I knew of a volunteer translation service through our guidebook. You call a number on your cell phone and it dials someone who's volunteered to translate English to Korean. Apparently these volunteers carry around cell phones and just stop whatever they're doing and help you. It seemed too good to be true and I was desperate. A guy answered immediately and I explained the situation. He told me to hand the phone to one of the bug-eaters. So I did and they talked for a few minutes before the phone got handed back to me.

"A drunk man stole your wallet. Give the phone back to him and he'll call the police." That was the free advice I got. Whatever. I handed the phone back to the guy and slumped down in a chair to pout while he called the police. I need a beer. But didn't have any money. I had more questions than answers. What drunk man? How do you know he was drunk? Why are we calling the police, don't they have better things to do than find some randoms wallet? Why are you eating cockroaches?

So Haley and I sat at the next table for about a half hour waiting for the police to arrive. I just keep shaking my head, half angry at myself, half annoyed with the pain in my ass it was going to be to replace all that crap. One thing should be noted. I was about 95% sure I hadn't been pick-pocketed. The two Asian countries I've spent extended time in, Thailand and Korea, are overwhelmingly safe. And I've heard similar things about China and Japan. No, no. I couldn't blame this one on some drunk guy, just my small pockets and carelessness. And usually when a drunk guy is to blame, that drunk guy is me.

So as we're sitting there, some commotion starts coming from an adjacent booth with a tarp covering it. The bug-eaters get my attention and wave me over. They had peeled back the tarp and laying on the ground was, of all things, some drunk guy. Holy crap. He was completely passed out. One guy just walks right up and starts rifling through his pockets. Holy Crap! He checks the shirt pockets and the back pockets and then, as the dude starts to stir, pulls out of his front pocket my freaking wallet! HOLY CRAP!! They hand me the wallet and not a single thing is missing. Kids, write this down. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, and that day, I was just plain lucky.

So here's what I put together: My wallet fell out while we're sitting down for a beer. We leave. This local homeless man who the shopkeeper and bug-eaters know as a regular wanderer comes by, takes the wallet. Shopkeeper lady sees him take something from the table we were sitting at. He makes it 8, maybe 9 feet away and face plants, tanked, into this abandoned market stand at about 2 in the afternoon. Shopkeeper finds him while we're waiting for the police, gets bug-eaters to go through his pockets, and now I've got a story worth starting a blog for.

A couple takeaways:

-Had drunk guy been able to make it another block or so, he'd have made off with 100 dollars in won. We'd never haver found him. Imagine his blog post after Saturday: So I was really wasted last Saturday and found some wallet on the street, but I could only make it few feet away before I passed out and they found me later and .....

-After we got the wallet back, we did have that next beer.

And drunk guy, now fully roused, comes up to me and says, "I love you!" What do you say to that? He eventually took a seat a few tables away and would just nod slowly every time I looked over at him.