Conor Meagher Fan Club

The film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan opened in theaters January 25th in Korea for some odd reason. I wasn’t going to question it, because it’s a movie I’ve wanted to see ever since it was in production. Plus, everybody I know had seen it except me. So after a busy weekend of flag football and dinner dates, I tried to catch it last night with my friend Kevin. Though it was only a week since it last opened, theaters were pulling it left and right, so it was now or never. I told my co-worker at work that there was only one time left I could see it and where it was. He didn’t believe that it was the only time, so he did a quick search and checked the theater he saw it at just a couple days ago. “Borat, 9:10pm at Artreon”, he said. So I sighed in relief and told my friend to meet me there instead of the other show at 11:45pm which was 30 minutes away. That night after work I met Kevin at the theater with excitement, but he said in disbelieve that there was no showing of Borat that day and only Blood Diamond which is written similar to Borat in Korean writing. Apparently, my co-worker had read the show times in Korean incorrectly and mistaken Blood Diamond for Borat. So after the disappointing news, we had to go to plan B, which was to see the 11:45pm showing in Gangbyeon 30 minutes away by subway. Since we had a couple hours to kill, we decided to eat something and check out the local arcades. After a couple hours of Pop-A-Shot, we let time slip and it was already 11pm. We then headed for the subway, but had to wait 10+ minutes because it was the last train. So the total ride took more then the average 30 minute ride. We finally made it to Gangbyeon Station and ran to the theater next door. Since it was almost midnight all the surrounding stores were closes and locked off. It was like a maze trying to find which door would let us in. We finally got a door open and headed for the elevator even though we no idea which floor the theaters were on. 9th Floor, it was a lucky guess. Out of breath, we went to the ticket counter and asked for 2 tickets to Borat. The manager, I’m guessing since she wasn’t in high school, told us in Korean that we could not buy tickets. We demanded for an answer. Her reason was because they weren’t allowed to sell tickets after a certain period and the computers wouldn’t print the tickets either. It was like midnight which was 15 minutes after it started! After standing in shock for about a minute, I huddled with Kevin and drew up a new plan because I now knew that this would be the last showing of it in the Seoul area, so we could not give up. The new plan was to buy tickets to another movie, Blood Diamond ironically enough, and sneak into Borat. It’s the old switch-a-roo, we all did it as kids. After buying the tickets we went to the ticketman to try to work our magic. He stopped us from entering and told us we had to wait 15 minutes because the movie wasn’t cleaned yet. Denied again! After contemplating bribing him or making a break for it, we decided not to mess with the ticketman who was using his walkie talkie. We thought he might be a snitch. So we waited out the 15 minutes and I made a fool of myself trying to order a Fanta in Korean. Ordering something is nothing difficult for me, it’s just saying the Korean version (Konglish) of Fanta is hard. Quick Korean lesson: the Korean language doesn’t have a “f” sound, so when English words are spoke in Korean, the “f” sound becomes a “p” sound. For example, the English word “fan” (as in fans of a music group) is pronounced in Korean as “paen”. Pretty easy, but from some reason I have yet to find, the soft drink in Konglish is pronounced “hwan-ta”. Back to the story. After the time has passed, we got our tickets torn and preceded to the theaters. Another thing that is hard to explain in Korean is that the theaters don’t have the movie titles on top of the doors. Maybe it’s because every Korean I know likes to movie hop and I guess that’s what we were doing too. After looking back a couple times at ticketman to make sure the coast was clear, we made our move and snuck into another theater. Thankfully, it was the 11:45pm showing of Borat. We had a couple laughs and didn’t get kicked out, but we only saw the last 30 minutes of it. That was end of the adventure. Was it worth it? Probably not, because I can download it now, but it makes for a good story.