A stranger in a strange land. One of the most common literary themes used by writers is that an individual who is isolated from those around him tries foolishly to bridge the gap and build relationships. Another common theme is that through such alienation, comes self-knowledge. I hope to experience the struggle in building relationships as well as self-knowledge and write about it. These are literary themes that I plan to explore in the artwork of my life here in Seoul. This is my first time living in another country, so far away from home. To be quite honest, I wasn’t very well traveled either.
When I first landed in Incheon Airport and was sent to training and orientation, I was very disoriented, and culture shocked, I actually needed the orienation, the decompression period to help me re-adjust. I could write all about how the different cars and street signs freaked me out. How the brightly painted parking garage at Incheon Airport amazed me at first, and how even simple things like vending machines had me gazing in wonder…
“Wow, what’s a Ghana chocolate like?” And now that I’ve been here a few months, I know that Atlas is my favorite candy bar here.
But at first, I was truly culture shocked. At the orientation and training, I frantically tried to make friends. It reminded me of being back in college. I was very clingy. Very very clingy. It wasn’t cool. Looking back on myself, I hated myself that week because I was so desperate for friends, for some inkling of something to remind me of home. Not surprisingly, I clung to a fellow New Yorker.
We didn’t really date, so much as we just got to vaguely know each other and occassionally we would sneak from the group to go make-out.
She was cute, but nothing too special. I quickly lost interest in her when I started going out with my friends and meeting more women. But at first, it was frustrating. I had heard all of these things to watch out for from posts I had read on internet forums where guys wrote about the craziness and quirkiness of Korean women, and also things I heard from friends of mine who had been in Korea during their service in the army. They warned me of bar girls and women who end up being prostitutes. Of course, I think they hung out at different kinds of bars, but nevertheless, I was weary of women when I first came here. I also heard that women can be extremely difficult to understand and figure out because of the cultural differences. I heard that a lot of times they’d send out mixed signals and guys would think “yeah I got this, this girl is going home with me” only to be duped and left to go home by themselves. That sometimes women just wanted put out to a guy.
Contrary to that, I also heard that being a white guy here came with privilege. I read and heard about guys coming over here, ESL teachers coming and teaching and sleeping with hundreds of women. I read about how Asian women look towards white people as the ideal of beauty, and that even ugly guys, even the fat, bald, early 30’s slob of a loser can find a hot woman and get laid. There’s countless threads on websites like www.eslcafe.com about this subject, and dear reader I am sure that (if you haven’t already) you can read even more threads and posts and news articles and editorials about the reputation of Western ESL teachers in Korea, as well as the general attitude taken towards them. I feel that I need not get into that too much here.
So anyway, I guess when I first came here I thought that it would be so easy, that I would walk down the streets and bitches would be in heat in for my cock. Haha! boy was I wrong!
My first night out in Seoul I hung out with some other expats in Itaewon. We went to Gecko’s and Wolfhound, and I was really very unimpressed with the talent. Gecko’s reminded me of a white trash bar back home, complete with military tough guys, and bad music. Wolfhound was more like a Euro trash boys club—I was just sorry that I didn’t bring my rugby jersey and alcoholism with me. So looking for a place more “Korean” (in Itaewon its actually kinda hard). Not to knock those places too much, but they really weren’t what I was looking for in a pub. If I wanted to hang out with all guys, I’d join a soccer team. If I wanted to not get laid, I’d go to church. Another night in Itaewon my friend and I went to M1, some ritzy basement wine bar that made me reminiscent of New York. It was complete with the white leather couches, lounge pillows, over priced drinks, and its too hip to be cool dj ‘spinning’ the best dance music his gyopo friend could burn him on a mix CD. If I sound bitter or jaded, or pissed off, or mad, its because I associate M1 with the experience I am about to recall.
So as I sat at the bar in M1 talking to my friend, enjoying a 7,000won Filipino beer, I noticed that there was two pretty Korean girls sitting next to me. They were hard not to notice, they were so hot. One of them, the one sitting closest to me, had legs long as a mile and was proudly displaying them in a short short skirt. She was sitting on her barstool, shaking her head to the music and swaying the long wave of her brown hair. She was dancing in her seat like she could hardly contain herself, just grooving to the music in her own little world. It was a weeknight and there was hardly anyone in the place. So it wasn’t like anyone was really dancing or anything and it wasn’t like there was a real dance floor anyway. So I said, “It’s a shame there’s not a dance floor here, or you’d be able to dance”. I was just being nice, trying to talk to her…but what she said really shocked me.
She looked at her friend, then looked at me with this arrogant, snobbish look, with her nose just slightly up in air she asked, “Umm, do you know us?”
I couldn’t believe the attitude on this little trick. The fuckin’ nerve of her! Thinking she’s so hot that she could blow me off like that. I told my friend and we both cracked up laughing at her and her attitude. It’s something that my friend and I still joke about now. Every so often we’ll just say “Umm, do you know us?” and die laughing. It really was funny that she’d say something like that. I mean really, I was just trying to be nice and strike up a conversation with someone that I’m sharing some space with, but some girls here won’t have that.
I had heard about this element of Korean culture–this insular thinking of Koreans that prohibits them from speaking with strangers. Like in a bar or a club, they have to be introduced by someone that they know, otherwise they won’t talk to you. So yeah, my first attempt at talking to a girl in Korea and I got horribly shot down. Since then, I have managed to successfully chat up women that I just met, but it came with time and patience.
Another time I struck out was in Shinchon (not Shinchon…yeah, that’s what I said Shinchon, not Shinchon–if you live in Seoul you know what I’m talking about, the constant confusion between 신촌 and 신천 which to the Western ear sound very similar). So anyway, I was in Shinchon (the one on the north side of the Han River, the one near Hongdae, and I was in this bar/club that moreso resembles a Canadian’s dream home. I was at this place called Mike’s Cabin. That atmosphere of Mike’s Cabin is more like a truck stop Canadian gay bar. Surprisingly, it’s a good place to meet Korean girls who might be interested in Western guys, that is of course if you can stomach the campy decor and the hordes of other lame ass white guys there sitting at tables drooling over the women. The DJ knows how to DJ and knows how to play a good variety of music from her mp3 collection, which says a lot more than what others in Seoul can do.
So anyway, shortly after the M1 “Umm do you know us?” shoot down, I bucked up and got back on the horse trying not to get knocked down. My friend Andre introduced me to the place. Andre’s a solid dude, he’s been in Korea for something like 5 years and he pretty much knows how the game is done here. Andre started talking to this girl, she was playing foosball with some Pakistani guy. Right after their game finished he grabbed me and said “We’re playing foosball!”
I love foosball, so it was no pain on my end. I was quickly introduced to the girl that Andre was talking to and her friend Monica. At first I thought Monica was tall for a Korean girl, but really it was just her high as fuck high heels. She was pretty good looking, long straight hair and bangs cut straight across her forehead as if her hair stylist cut along the straight edge of a bowl. She had tiny lips and produced an equally tiny smile as she spoke. Occasionally she’d look into her cell phone at her Korean/English dictionary to help her find the right word to say.
At foosball, Monica and I were one team, and we were playing against Andre and his girl. This was a good way in, it got us talking and working together. It was sorta like a cute couple thing, and I quickly realized that Korean girls go gaga for that kind of cutesy couples shit. It makes sense, what with them loving couple t-shirts and all that lame crap. So I figured that if I could get a girl to do ‘cute couple’ shit with me just after meeting her, I could easily get her to do raunchy kinky couple sex shit with me later in bed– boy was I wrong again.
So I bought her a couple drinks and things were going well. Andre had said something that offended Monica’s friend and she wasn’t digging him anymore. Andre felt kinda ashamed or embarrassed or something, and he cut out and left. I was sticking with Monica for the long haul and hoping I could take her home with me that night. I don’t really live close Shinchon, so a cab was definitely in my future plans as Seoul believes in this retarded idea of closing subways at certain times (while public transportation in Seoul is pretty good, there’s a lot of things that Seoul could definitely learn from NYC).
So we were talking and dancing and drinking and everything was going well. I was just happy to actually be talking with a girl and not getting snubbed and to feel like I was back in the game. It’d been a while. She was a smart girl, and her English was pretty good, although her pronunciation was hard to understand. The fact that the speakers were loud and blaring music didn’t help things either. I was thinking things were going pretty well. Her friend was occupied with some other guy not that Andre was gone. They were dancing, we were dancing, and the DJ was playing some pretty good music.
Then out of nowhere, up walks some blonde-haired blue-eyed Adonis. He doesn’t look like he’s fluent in Korean, but he just starts belting it out. Monica’s friend was quite impressed. He had a thing for her alright. She seemed to forget the guy she was dancing with and we was all over this blondie who was actually from Sweden. Monica explained his situation to me, he’s a student studying here. Part of his studies meant that he had to study Korean full time, so this bastard’s fluent and picking up girls like its nothing, while I’m over here struggling, typing on some little ass keyboard looking up words in my cell phone!
This guy knew the Korean game and he knew it well. He had Monica’s friend crawling all over him, and I was just fudding around with Monica trying to think of how I could get her back to my place. I had nothing. I was like a fighter pilot trying to shake the Red Baron on my tail. I pivoted left, I pivoted right, I dove down and spun in a spiral, I pulled every maneuver I had in my book but nothing seemed to work against the enemy that I did not know.
I think that nothing would have gotten her to come home with me that night. But that didn’t stop me from blaming the Swedish guy. The Swede fucking prick bastard (who I have actually run into in Seoul quite a few times–I can never forget his arrogant macho face) didn’t really help things. He was being really super aggressive with Monica’s friend. At one he just grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards him and just started making out with her.
Then Swede-boy starts saying they need to go to Hongdae, that he has friends there to meet up with. So Monica says “I have to go” to me, and I’m confused–like what the fuck does Swede-boy have that I don’t have? Why not invite me along? Why? Cuz Swede-boy’s a pushy aggressive dickhead?
(Note: I would later discover that Swede-boy’s pushy aggressive attitude was something that was not only accepted and tolerated by Korean women, but also something they enjoyed and looked for in the opposite sex, but more on that later).
Yes, so that’s exactly what happened. Swede-boy pulled her by the hand right outta the club and Monica followed her friend. Off they went to Hongdae, and I was just glad that I got her phone number in time… I remember calling it just to make sure that it was real. I left there feeling like such a fucking loser. I look back on that night as being a night of desperation and loneliness, but also one where I learned a great deal about Korean women and how to pick them up.
I left Mike’s Cabin alone, with nothing to show for myself but horrible buzz and a raging hard-on hungry to get laid. This led me to my first experience in a Korean brothel/whorehouse/massage parlor (whatever the fuck you want to call them)…but as this post is already close to 2,500 words, and I love a cliffhanger, I think I’ll leave this post just how it is. Besides, the brothel story deserves its own separate post, so I’ll leave that for your anticipation.
Sex With Seoul 