THE GOOD:
-Honestly, the #1 Coolest Thing I'm going to miss most about Korea? Convenience store drinking. Basically, since there are no public drinking laws, we can just park outside a convenience store (weather-permitting) and drink until everything's blurry. You need more booze? You go inside the store and buy another tall boy. Almost every convenience store has plastic chairs and tables out front, because this is so awesome.
The end of the night may look something like this.
-Non-puritanical values! Now, the Confucianism that Korea is founded on instead may not be a much better alternative, but at least you get this:
Nipples! On a random ad poster! Sometimes it's the simple things that make you happiest.
-The day a dude bought a round for the entire bar. I had never seen it happen. One night at the Holy Grill, a military guy comes in with what must have been a fresh paycheck, and he does it. So the bartender makes roughly a hundred billion Bazooka Joe shots:
And they are hastily consumed by our intrepid team of professionals.
-Korean taxis. Love how fast and loose these guys play with traffic laws, literally so. But I'd like to mention one specific cab ride: I had just been talking with a friend about a Tom Jones show he had gone to, and how the man was a terrific entertainer and blah blah blah. Going home, me and a different couple of guys are chatting up our cab driver, some laughs are had, and he starts rummaging around his dashboard. He pulls out a jewel case, tells me to open it, and put it in. I do. And on comes "She's A Lady", full blast, which we all sing along to, including our driver. It was magical. And I don't say that lightly.
-Also magical was the amount of soft-core porn on TV. Staggering.
-Many day trips were made, some forgotten, but almost always relished when all was said and done. The rest, the blackouts take care of. Here's one where we went Seoul and visited the 63 building, famous because it's tall (guess how many floors?) and, I don't know, has an aquarium and god-knows-what-else. It also had an art exhibit, where I got to capture the fleeting moment where curious children become extra-curious children:
And being 63 or whatever stories tall, it had a bit of a view:
Alright, that's enough of Seoul, hive of scum and ineffectual public transportation that it is.
-We also made a very tourist-y trip to Gyeongju, very old and historical city famed for its ancient burial mounds:
Of course, such natural beauty and peace takes its toll on a polluted, booze-wracked body like mine. I would need help keeping my wits about me on that afternoon.
Luckily I had the last of my Thai Red Bull. The stuff's so scary, the bull is fucking dead.
So we walked around, took in the sights, even walked into one of the tombs:
And we knew it was okay to appreciate these sights, because we had helpful signs pointing out where movies were filmed:
But sometimes it gets a bit much, almost too refreshing and life-affirming, like children playing on the burial mounds all metaphorical-like:
And that's when you just need to fire a goddamn gun.
Well, we were in luck.
We bought some sort of package deal where we got to try out their gimmick guns (the gun from Dirty Harry, the gun from James Bond, etc), and me being the man (with the least shooting experience, namely: none) they of course gave me the biggest gun.
Which turned out to actually be a .357 Ruger, but who cares look at how badass this is:
And this is the damage I done did with it:
-Weird unintentional quasi-racism!
I will stay white, so long as you stay delicious.
-Another great thing about teaching in Korea?
The students:
Awww.
-Also, the drinking again:
Adorable.
-And, of course, my going-away party.
About 60% less blackout-heavy than you'd expect, but touching nonetheless.
-Equally great is how I started playing darts in Korea, and got a hat trick:
How do you like me now, LADIES.
-And another day trip to fireworks in Busan!
The Bad:
-Dealing with the goddamn crowds while watching fireworks in Busan:
That photo of the fireworks? Taken from a goddamn roof above all this nonsense.
-Getting arrested. Not recommended, especially for the novice traveler.
-And this shit:
Just because the thought of educational reading materials in a subway vending machine being a viable product market in Korea depresses the shit out of me when I think of America.
-Oh, and this crap:
Tastes like hate. If you drink it, congratulations, you're a despot.
It may not be Korean, but they're still culpable for having it available.
-Look at this:
Seems fucking rad, right? Ninja star Cheetos. Well, they're not rad, and I'm an idiot for even showing you them. Korea sucks chip-wise, but they like to gussy it up, making more and more new Cheetos and Pringles flavors of meals that haven't even been conceived yet, and the whole time you can't even find a bag of regular motherfucking cheese-flavored Cheetos in the whole place.
-The insane celebrity-worship culture:
She's going to be reduced to making Christmas albums and hooking by the end of the year, but for now let's all crowd around her and take photos while she pretends to be shocked! I'm going to take one ironically for my blog, it'll be so funny. Wait, no one writes blogs anymore? For like 10 years? Well, that's why it's ironic, and you, just, don't get irony. It's REALLY funny, don't worry about it.
-Rampant, brazen piracy!
This is literally a legit game shop (on the right) next door to a store that sells burned copies of games (on the left). With goddamn trophy stacks of empty bulk CD-R packages in the front window. Now I'm no stranger to "trying out a game to see if I like it or not" but come on guys. You're making the rest of us thieves look bad.
-Remember that 63 Building in Seoul, with the art exhibit? Well, this was the exhibit:
And I hate this piece, this series, and this exhibit. Kill it with fire.
-Speaking of mass arson, let's bring up Seoul again:
Seoul sucks. It might have a little more culture and stuff to do than Daegu, but it is also 10 times harder to navigate and travel around in. Fuck Seoul.
-And fuck North Korea as well! I was supposed to go to the DMZ, and the first time I tried to go I had forgotten my passport, so I basically had to go back home and be really embarrassed. My bad. Next time I go, North Korea fires a goddamn missile the day before, and our tour group gets halfway to the freaking 38th parallel before we get the call that it's all canceled. They refund our money, but we're still out the cost of bus tickets, food, and KTX tickets back. So my companion and I make the most of our time in Seoul:
By visiting the biggest Protestant congregation in the world, the Yoido Full Gospel Church.
Here's the main sanctuary:
Which might not look big compared to some of the megachurches in America, but consider that this is the entire church complex:
An entire city block. Which looks a little like this:
Now, when we entered we were descended upon by what seemed like thousands of greeters and helpers and volunteers, circling us like hungry, helpful vultures. We were referred to the "foreigner section":
Back of the Church bus. Righteous indignations were a-brewing, until we saw this:
They were up here translating in 8 different (and seemingly random) languages, in a section that looked like this:
So, still pretty ritzy.
-Oh, something else that blows? The students:
Reading wikipedia for 6 hours a day would be so much easier if you guys weren't constantly interrupting.
Oh, and one more Bad:
-Korean washing machines. Terrible, all of them. But I guess you guys make up for it with super-cheap dry cleaning. Alright, moving on:
The Ugly:
-The amount of bathroom sex that goes on in this club that necessitates putting up a sign:
-These mannequin heads:
This was one store on what must have been a whole street filled with wig shops. Hideously eerie.
-Seeing King Kahn break up on stage. Actually, it was kind of great, so this also gets an honorary "Good".
-You know what else was ugly? That hooker who made fun of me. Oh, you didn't hear about that? Well, I was walking along wig street from one photo ago, and it turns out my friend and I have stumbled onto Daegu's red light district. Every cross-street all of a sudden becomes a gauntlet of pushy middle-aged hookers and madames who have all the English vocabulary of your average Jersey Shore star. While pushing past all the offers of "Seksu" and "You wan' fuck?", I'm trying to be polite, and decline. Well, one hooker doesn't take it so well. She starts spitting back "No thank you! No thank you! No thank you!" in a higher and higher pitched parody of me as I trek on, crumbling inside.
I've faced a lot in my life. It's the cruelty you don't expect that hits you the hardest. Which she probably learned from her next john who enjoys a good stomach-punching when buying sex.
-Public spitting. There's a lot of it, and it's gross. Like, avoiding puddles of it on Seoul sidewalks gross.
-This guy:
Why is he so ugly? Probably because he just got off a 4-hour bus ride to Seoul-Incheon airport to leave the country, and he's been drinking nothing but Hennessy Beautiful out of a Powerade bottle.
(Artist's Rendition of what such an atrocity might look like)
And there you have it. A disorganized mess of anecdotes that can't even begin to describe a country, but I'm going to say they do and you'll have to come to Korea to prove me wrong. Also the food is great, and so are bag drinks. And GIs are terrible people, except for the guy who bought the round of shots for the bar. And I could keep going on like this ad infinitum, but if you've read this far you get the idea.
Honestly, I thought I would feel an immense relief when I came to the end of this post, and thus the blog, but I don't. Maybe next time I travel I'll start up another blog, and forget to update, and then do it months after the fact. Maybe I won't. It's a funny feeling, carrying a camera for more than myself, afraid of not sharing and oversharing and staying up stupid hours writing things that I hope are not best kept to myself. It was an experience, and went about as alright as it could have, I suppose.
So to keep this fire going for just a little longer as I finish my last blog-related whiskey, here are the drawings from some Critical Thinking Projects various students of mine did, that I felt worth singling out with no context whatsoever:
That's it.
