DPRK: Korean Lessons

After dinner, and a quick shower, I went in search of the bar and found a couple of our group in a room that didn't look much like a bar at all. There was a bar and a fridge tucked away in a corner and there was a pool table on which two of them were playing a very long and remarkably strange game, apparently inventing new rules as they went along. The rest of us were playing a different game - charades.
This started because we were trying to communicate with the young Korean woman at the bar and after a few false starts we developed the game as follows.
I had bought a phrase book in the Pyongyang Hotel. This is a quite startling publication called "Let Us Learn Korean". In addition to the usual "Hello", "Goodbye", "How are you" stuff, and the slightly more unusual "It is very Juche-oriented" and "Here is really a people's paradise" it includes such useful phrases as "Four seasons in Korea are relatively distinct from each other", "I don't eat pork, give me pheasant", "With the death of Comrade Kim Il Sung mankind has lost a legendary hero" and "It is of high artistic and ideological quality."
There are also no fewer than ten different variations on the theme of "Reunify Korea now!"

The way our game worked was that the barmaid would read through the Korean phrase and pick one and show it to one of us. That person would then mime the English phrase for the others to guess. Once it was guessed we tried to say the Korean and she tried to say the English. After a few false starts it went very well and we had a pleasant hour or so playing. Then the rest of the group decided to go off and do Karaoke. I would rather eat my own liver than do Karaoke so I stayed where I was and bought another beer. With just me and the barmaid left charades clearly wasn't going to work so we tried other English lessons of pointing at and naming things. I learned the Korean for hand, arm, face, hair, leg, eye, nose, mouth, ear, finger, chair, beer, glass, bottle and a few other words and remarkably I can actually remember them now. (son, pal, ulgul, mori karak, taree, dun, ko, ib, kwee, son-kara, kol-sang, maekju, cupu*, byong since you ask).
Then she got out her vocabulary book and I helped her with her pronunciation of various words in English.
Finally I noticed that it was almost one O'clock and went off to bed. It had been an odd day and a very mixed one starting with that bizarre visit to the Memorial Palace and finishing with an English lesson. Tomorrow also had a mixed itinerary planned, and one of similar extremes.

*This might be a local or slang version. I can find no independent verification of it.