First Night Drinking in South Korea

I must apologize to my family members who are reading this and still, for God only knows what reason, might have some faith in my maturity, but I got extremely drunk.  

It was my first experience with Soju, which is a Korean rice liquor, and which has replaced vodka as my drink of choice.  It comes in beer bottle sized bottles for about $1.50.  If you mix it with anything there is no trace of it in smell or taste at all.  I drank the whole bottle.  And then a few mugs of beer at Now Bar, which is an international bar close to the school where I teach.

At first everyone went together; it was Allison, Jeremy, Holly, Chris (Holly's husband), Tanya, Shannon, and I.  At around 1 am everyone decided to go home except for Shannon and I.  That's when things got sort of crazy.  We met these American guys who were teachers also, one from California, one from Colorado, and one from New Jersey.  They were all pretty cool, but then this Korean guy, whose name was Simon, and he introduced me to his friend Diego, who was from Mexico.  Shannon and I then left with her friend Raj, who she already knows and who is from Canada.  The other guys tried to follow us, but I walked away from them midsentence and got into a cab and we took off.  We went to another bar called Crazy Duck, which was a dance place.  There were a lot of Korean guys there, and one of them started speaking to me.  I expected him to have accented English like most Koreans do, but his English was perfect.  It turned out he was from Seattle.  It was the first time since getting here that I’d met someone who was Korean but not from Korea.

After we left Crazy Duck we went down the street to this open air restaurant where I got a hamburger, which was really pork in some sort of sweet sauce formed into something resembling a hamburger patty and put on a sesame seed bun with lettuce.  It was surprisingly good.  Raj ordered some Korean finger food, which was meat and vegetables inside a fried dough package, like a crunchy fried dumpling.  It’s called Mandoo.  We poured some dark sauce all over it.  It was really good.  It also prompted Shannon's brilliant and unbelievably emphatic, "Look at that sauce.  Look at it!  GET SOME OF THAT!"  She was cracking me up all night, and I am honestly glad I stayed because, for one thing, it was fun, but mostly I'm glad because I got to know Shannon much better and we get along really well.

After that we headed home and I Skyped a friend in New York for almost an hour and then fell asleep at around 6 am.  Thankfully I don’t have work tomorrow.

The interesting thing about going out was that even though we went to places that cater mostly to expats, there were a lot of Koreans at the bars as well, and a lot of people who were out drinking.  Just from this first observation it seems like Korea has a pretty pervasive drinking culture.  The teachers I was with and the other foreigners we saw were definitely not the ones being the loudest, most obnoxious, or drunkest.  I was a little worried that partying or going out in Korea would always be very tame and demure, mostly because I thought that Koreans wouldn’t approve much, and I would never want to be the obnoxious drunk American.  Somehow I don’t think that will happen here, mostly because Koreans seem to enjoy drinking to excess as much as, if not more than, the Westerners.