My wife and I went to Taco Bell in Seoul, which apparently is the only Taco Bell in Asia right now. Anyway, we brought home a hot sauce pack, mostly because they were a lot bigger and we thought it’d be neat.
If you are familiar with the US ones, the Korean ones were the same. They had a little message that(we assume) is some kind of joke or something.
Yeah, you posted after my edit. I’ll run it by the girls at the Korean school, and see if they can get it. I think you’re right, in that it’s probably some kind play on the phonetics of either Korean or English.
I’m surprised it’s still called “Border Sauce.” Does the phrase “South of the border” have any meaning outside the US? I mean, do they understand what it means to us (WRT food anyways)?
Okay, we figured out that this is just a play on the Korean-Chinese pronunciations of the numbers (to the left of the equals sign), put together with another word or sound (to the right of the equals sign) to make up new, arbitrary words.
The first line, when using the Chinese-Korean pronunciation system, (“yok” – 6, plus “sam” – 3) together with the “product,” which here is the Korean word for “building,” is how they call a famous building in Seoul–the so-called 63 Builidng (육삼 빌딩).
The second line: 2 (이) pronounced “ee” with 9 (구) pronounced (“gu”) followed by the product (=) “ana” … Put the three sounds together and it makes the Korean word for “iguana.”
So: Tall buildings and iguanas makes for wacky times at the Taco Bell in Seoul.
However, we can’t figure out the third line. Some word that begins as “isa-“ Maybe Cecil can crack it.
This is not very amusing, IMO, and really, and it’s not even clever. It’s kind of like those Lucky Beer bottle caps, with the rebuses on the inside.
Could be anything. I-sa in Korean means to move (as in, to move to another house). Apparently it’s a thing that the Korean Taco Bell does - print silly stuff on their hot sauce packets.