Korean nightlife

Last night (Friday night over here), I was treated to a marvelous night out on the town, Korean-style.

Brown Eyed Girls, a K-pop group. Not my photo.

First, our boss treated the entire staff to dinner. It's customary for the director to pay for everybody's meals, but he isn't required to take us out to eat. Our boss is a nice one; he takes us out a lot. We went to Chaban, a Korean "fusion restaurant" combining elements of Western and Eastern dining, as I suppose the name to mean. Ergo, you sit on a cushion on the floor and eat Korean food that you cook up at the table like any other Korean restaurant, but there's also a salad and ice-cream bar. Hmm.

Anyway, the meal was delicious. It was hangjeongsal, similar to what I ate with Charles (see a Korean folktale). I think the optimum mix of ingredients out of the myriad to choose from is as follows. A large leaf of lettuce, crisp and fresh; a bite-sized piece or three of meat, piping hot and dipped in salted sesame oil and/or ssamjang, spicy meat sauce; blackened garlic and fried kimchi, also fresh from the grill; and some greens and onions steeped in soy sauce. Wrap the whole affair up into as elegant a bundle as your clumsy, untested foreigner fingers will permit, and chomp on it. I'm drooling as I write this, and I just polished off a boxful of Korean fried chicken. (There's this one particular fried chicken place I've been wanting to try since I got here, just down the street from me on the main drag. NeNe Chicken, it's called. I had the chicken with bulgogi sauce, the non-spicy variety. In my opinion, it's not as good as BBQ Chicken, a similar place in the other direction towards Adam and Elaine's, past Ganiyeok. You get more side dishes, true: in addition to the standard pickled radish cubes, you also get sweet pickles and pasta salad. But the quality of the chicken, especially the sauce, is substandard in my book.)

I had some beer (maekju) and soju, and when that ran out I drank a little cider. I should clarify here and state that Korean cider is not what Americans or British folk are used to. As an American, I define cider as a slightly tangier version of apple juice, something you drink around Thanksgiving time. Say "cider" to Adam or Elaine, my Geordie coworkers, and they think hard cider. In Korea, cider is lemon-lime soda. The taste of the main brand, Chilsung, is similar to Sierra Mist (although some have compared it to Sprite, or even 7-Up), but sweeter. It's pleasant if you're in the mood for it or if you're mixing up a Rum Cooler, but not much use for anything else.

After the meal was over, Jacob and Lily (the boss and his wife) went home, but not before giving us teachers a wad of cash and telling us to spend it how we would. (Like I said, he is very generous, Jacob is. And I will not tarnish that fact by suggesting that its cause is the current bout of thunderous prosperity that Reading Town is enjoying, to the extent that Jacob plans to open a new hagwon in the neighboring and only slightly smaller town of Okpo.)

On Adam's recommendation, Charles, Gaia, Erica, Julia (all Korean teachers), Adam, Elaine, and I (the foreign ones) headed for a bar that we foreigners had frequented before. Jazz Bar it was (and still is) named. It's a Western-themed bar, with portraits of American movie stars on the walls, 1950s kitsch, California license plates and the like. It's also got a pretty good dartboard and an unusually up-to-date music selection, albeit mostly insufferable pop tunes. All the same, it's always a good time there. We bumped into some other expat friends of ours, South Africans working for a rival hagwon. I had a Long Island Iced Tea and a
--> Piña Colada and shot some darts with the gang.

After this we went to another bar we were acquainted with, Geogi (pronounced guh-GI, literally meaning "that place" in Korean). We had more beer, and Adam had somaek, the Korean term for a soju bomb (dropping a shot of soju into the beer). Somek is the Korean words soju and maekju run together. And we had snacks. This is another thing I love about Korea: whenever you go to drink somewhere you don't just drink. You eat and drink. I'm used to just getting peanuts or pretzels in bars back in the States. At Geogi that night we were first served a soup of sprouts, rich in acids I can't pronounce which would work subtle magic on our stomachs and lessen hangovers in the morning; salad with Thousand Island, and corn salad; then an eggy soup (protein, also helpful for the morning after); and finally a heaping plate of different kinds of French fries with ketchup. At some bars, particularly the German-themed ones, you get heaping plates of seafood (insanely cheap here) and meat. When I say "meat," I mean good meat. Barbecued chicken with mustard and sauce. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Nothing beats sucking down a frothy beer and nibbling on chicken strips and fries. Fancy stuff like that costs extra, but not what we ate at Geogi that night; that all came with the beer. Nobody better try to tell me Korea is not a great country.

After Geogi we headed back out into the night. Julia and Charles headed home; the rest of us singles (well, Adam and Elaine are engaged, but they still know how to party) stayed out and headed for Arabian Nights, literally the only nightclub in Gohyeon, and possibly all of Geoje. The joint was still hopping at three in the morning. It took a while for me to get worked up into the mood, but after a couple more beers the rhythm finally got into my legs and I was out on the floor. I must've been in fine form, too: a couple of homosexual Koreans, one in a suit and the other in a Samsung dock worker's uniform, prepositioned me on the dance floor. I turned them down as politely as I could, drunk as I was and still attempting to dance. I suppose I ought to feel flattered. Back at the table to rest, I drank more beer and nibbled on an enormous plate of nuts and sliced fruit provided courtesy of the kitchens. Yep, you eat well at the clubs, too. At five in the morning we bugged out and I fell into bed back home, drenched in sweat and feeling that I'd done a very thorough job taking advantage of a Friday night (and Saturday morning).

These are the cardinal aspects of Korean nightlife: the dining (which in itself frequently involves drinking), the drinking (in the bars) and the clubbing (which is infrequent out here in the boondocks, but more common in the big cities like Busan and Seoul). And I had experienced all of them in a single night. It really gave one a feel for the celebratory atmosphere of a Friday evening. The Korean people really put their heart and soul into having fun, once they've set their mind to it. The Samsung workers in particular march on the bars every Friday night, indeed, even most weekday nights. I've seen gaggles of 'em, hard men with weathered faces, sitting around tables in restaurants with as many as six or eight empty soju bottles on the table between them. I don't know how they do it, having to be at work at seven the next day and all.

The only thing I didn't experience that night (though I have tried it before), itself innately Korean, was the noraebang. It literally means, "singing room." It's the Korean take on karaoke. You go to a singing room, pay a fee, and you get a private room to yourself with as much booze and snacks as you want, TV screens, surround sound, even tambourines for accompaniment. You can belt out as many tunes as lustily as you like and the soundproofed walls will protect you from embarrassment. I've done this before, both sober and drunk, and it's a lot of fun. It's rough on the vocal chords and even rougher on the ears (depending on your companions) but it's a heckuva goofy good time. Even in this small town they have a decent selection of Western tunes in English that a weguk (WAY-gook, the Korean word for "foreigner") can comprehend and sing. I'd like to suggest that you try something similar if you ever come here. If you run the entire Korean-nightlife cultural gamut all in one night (dining, drinking, singing and clubbing, in no particular order) you won't soon forget it.