Institutionalised Alcoholism

I saw in the English expat magazine recently an advert for a teacher recruitment website. It listed the features and benefits they offered, and showed a picture of a large group of westerners who may or may not have been recruited through the site, in a bar, downing shots.

Now, in my opinion that's a bit wrong. You wouldn't advertise any other job with a picture of your current employees getting trashed. It's not professional. It's certainly true, though, that a lot of teachers view their year in Korea as a paid jolly, seeing nothing wrong in spending unconscionable amounts of time and money on hedonistic pursuits.

Now, like most people, I enjoy a few drinks - but not during the week, at least not excessively. I know of teachers who've rolled in in the morning, unshowered, wearing clothes from the night before, having had little or no sleep, smelling of soju. I can't fathom how this can be done: teaching dozens of screaming under sixes with a hangover? No thanks. I've done it before, in previous jobs, jobs where I can sit behind a checkout or answer phones for eight hours, jobs where I don't have to use my brain, but not when I'm working with kids - it's not fair to them, or to their parents who've paid hundreds of thousands of won to send their kids to our hagwon.

And it reflects badly on other teachers. And I had to get that off my chest.

Taxi

The cat got out. A man came to get it. Hmm.

This weekend has involved lots of drinking. Today I woke up at 5pm. On Friday I stripped. A bit. There were 159 photos on my camera from Saturday night. 159. About 130 of them were shit. There are photos on facebook - I don't have to post them here.

I said I got up at 5pm today. Well I went to bed at around 7.30 am. Itaewon does that to you. Would have been home earlier, only our cowboy taxi driver decided to take us on scenic tour of Seoul. Check the map. Considering that we live in north-east Nowon-gu, imagine our confusion to see a sign for somewhere in southern Yeongdeungpo-gu. Or rather imagine the confusion of the girl who's been here six months. Imagine my obliviousness. We had been out in Yongsan-gu.
So, we got a different taxi home. Here are some photos of the journey.

Drink

Listen: Koreans like to drink. The first night I was here I went for a walk down the road and back, and stepped over several guys in suits passed out on steps. This was a Sunday. After a 80 hour week at the office though you'd want to pour as much as you could down your neck. That was in Suyu, and while Junggye has less of that, there's still a very tangible culture here. Despite this the bars, in this area at least are pretty thin on the ground and never packed, which in my books is a good thing.

But this is the thing: you can buy alcohol 24 hours a day from any convenience store, and to give you an idea of their prevalence, there are at least 10 of them within a five minute walk of my apartment, open all day every day. The majority of these stores have tables and chairs outside, inviting you to buy a few bottles and enjoy them bathed in the neon lights of the store. The selling point is that you can get a 1.6 litre bottle of Cass or Hite for about £2.50. And soju is even cheaper. I've resisted going down the soju route so far, though. I've seen the consequences. Plus it tastes like toilet duck. I just read this on wikipedia:

More than 3 billion bottles were consumed in South Korea in 2004.[3] In 2006, it was estimated that the average adult Korean (older than 20) had consumed 90 bottles of soju during that year, with each bottle equivalent to seven shots.

And this sounds like suicide:

Despite tradition, soju is not always consumed in unmixed form. A poktanju (lit: "bomb drink,") consists of a shot glass of soju dropped into a pint of draft beer (like a boilermaker) and is drunk quickly. The reverse equivalent, a shot glass of draft beer dropped into a pint of soju, is called suso poktanju (lit: "hydrogen bomb drink").

Nowon is a short bus/taxi ride away and has a lot more going on. Though when I went last night with my coworker Sean with the intention of finding a club, we wandered haphazardly and fruitlessly around for a while before getting turned away from a place because we weren't Korean. Rather than making the point that that's a bit racist, we just went home. It would seem that the GI-saturated meatfest that is Itaewon is the top choice for a proper night out. Not that I'm much of a clubber anyway, as you probably know, but you crave the bright lights once in a while.

So, OK, wrap this up now. Conclusion: I drink more here than I'm used to. Had a couple of stinking hangovers at first, lost whole days after getting in at 6am and it really can't be beneficial to my health or my skin, but, interestingly, I think I've lost weight. Work that one out.