The Movies.

A few weeks ago my boyfriend and I decided to catch a movie at the local cinema (Korean pronunciation: chin-e-muh). It was a Sunday afternoon and the movie was on its last leg (all English movies are played with Korean subtitles). So, in Korea you are assigned seats when you pay for your ticket. In fact, you choose by pointing to your desired seat on a computer screen. We picked our seats, grabbed some popcorn (it's only 2 dollars for a large size) and went to find our seats. Well, being foreigners we are automatically slightly inept- we couldn't find our seat number on the tickets so we decided to just down. Being that it was an empty theater, besides the family of 3 sitting in the front, we didn't think this would be a problem. Oh, we were so wrong.

5 minutes after we sat down, two women came in and we immediately realized we were in their seats. But since the theater was empty they didn't mind too much and just sat in front of us.
Then 10 minutes into the movie, as the theater is pitch-black, three more women came into the theater.

They started talking to the women in front of us, and I was able to pick up enough to understand the following:
women who walked in late: "You are in our seats."
women already sitting: "No, the foreigners are in our seats, so we just sat here."
women who walked in late: stare at foreigners. realize it would be pointless to tell us to move since we most likely don't speak their language.
all women: "korean korean korean, foreigners, korean korean korean, where are we going to sit? korean korean korean, they are messing with the social order of our culture, korean korean korean, stupid foreigners".

Now I understand there is a system. And that we completely disregarded it. But at the same time, the theater was COMPLETELY EMPTY! Couldn't the women just sit in front of us, beside us, behind us, at the other end of the theater?

No. They decided to sit near their assigned seats. So, two sat next to the other two women and one sat next to us.

If you were to take a picture of this theater it would look something like this....
3 Koreans sitting in the front of the theater.
4 Korean women squeezed next to each other at the middle of the theater.
2 foreigners and 1 Korean directly behind.
And 200 empty seats.