Hap Working The World

Korean is known as the land of the morning calm, but to me there is nothing calm about Korea. The lack of calm is what I love about it. Korea is not a destination that comes to mine as a holiday destination as it lacks natural beauty and space. There are over 50 million people squeezed into a country you can drive across in 5 hours. But what it lacks in beauty and space it makes up for in its colourful, friendly, vibrant, wacky pulse that satisfys a cultural junkys addiction.

The reason I love Korea so much is because it is such a polar opposite to New Zealand where I grew up, it’s just such a contrast. When I lived here it made me appreciate what I had taken for granted growing up in New Zealand.

Those querky little things I will remember about Korea are

• The street food stalls with the friendly little ladies serving you up all kinds of adventurous food, some great and some that not even fear factor would dish up. 

• The highest denomination of money is $10! You can imagine the stack of money I received when paid 2 million won($2000) a month in cash when I worked here teaching English!
• There is a shortage of rubbish bins, or maybe there are just none when you are looking for them.
• Smells, I think Korea is the land of smells, some pleasent like the smell of korean ladies hair as they brush past you in the subway, and some not so pleasent like the smell of piled up rubbish.

•  It’s rude to blow your nose, but it’s fine for the old men to cough up a greeny and spit it on the side walk. (when you think about it,  it is quite disgusting that we store our boggies in our pockets).
• There is row after row of numbered apartment buildings where people live,  “human filing cabinets”.

•  A crowed beach takes on a whole new meaning, (I will let the photo do the talking)
• When swimming at the beach you are not allowd to go out past a rope that is placed in shoulder deep water. When there are waves -what we call ripples, about a foot high- everybody is called out of the water. The reason for this is because a large majority (around 70%) of the population can not swim. I put this down to there being no widely accessible swimming pools, rivers, lakes etc.

• Dogs are treated like dolls, they even have dog clothing stores

• If it’s not dressed up, it’s eaten(I realise this is now becoming more frowned upon by more Koreans). The photo below is me out the back of a dog restaurant in the hills (obviously photo is taken 5 years ago as I look as though I’m 10 years old). It was kind of a weird feeling chowing down on dog stew inside and hearing all the barking outside, probably because your eating mother dog. Some may think this is weird, but if you think it about it, it’s not that weird, as the Hindu don’t eat cow as it is a sacred animal, Muslims don’t eat pork etc.

• The pollution and smog I will remember, it seems that there is never a clear sky day.

•  The 3 litre jugs of beer and the complimentary bacteria snack bowls.

•  The signs and advertising, it seems that every available space on a building is covered in advertising – who needs windows!

• The neon lights, Korea beats Las Vegas hands down in this department. This photo is taken outside where I use to live in Bucheon, but it is common place all over Korea, even the churches have neon crosses.

•  The people. Every country has there share of dickheads, and Korea is no exception. There are some people that resent you as being a foreigner, and the behaviour of some foreigners justifies this. But the vast majority are inquisitive, friendly people that want to show you a great time in their country.

Last night Mandy and I stayed with kiwi friends Tom and Lauren who are teaching English in Korea.  We visited Lauren at her English school that brought back a lot of memories for me, being surrounded by cute smiling little kiddies, but I was also glad that I didn’t have to teach them.

After work we went to possibly the most weirdest bar I have been too.  Well it had the weirdest concept for a bar, as I think the club I went to in Colombia would take the cake for weirdest, ieit had naked dancing people, dogs walking around, a naked room in which you could only enter if your naked, geese quakcing around, yeah that was crazy.  OK, I’m rambling.

The bar we went to last night was called Danka Bar. In the bar there is a  fish pond with seats around the perimeter of it. You sit with your feet dangling in the water and fish come up and feast on your dead skin!  It’s quite a funny sensation at first having fish nibbling away at your feet, especially when your a little ticklish and jumpy like myself.  Yes all rather “fishy”, but a unique experience, sitting having a beers with your mates and getting a fish pedicure.

After that we battled it out in a mini street game olympics involving baseball (your in a cage and a baseball machine launches balls at you that you hit and score points from), shooting  and  soccer which involves you kicking a soccer ball as hard as possible and see what score you get, great fun!  Ok, enough blogging, off to the airport, Thailand, here we come.

 After my previous post entitled wet naked men, I thought it best I add to this before you think I’m weirdier than I already am.  So I snuck my camera into the bath house where Mandy and I slept the night, wait for it, I was an undercover “Haparazzi” hehe.

So he goes my photo tour of the korean bath house.

The bath house plays a big role in Korean life, they are located everywhere and are usually open 24 hours.  It is a place where you go to relax after work, to get away from the troubles of the day, or an outing for the family or a place for friends to meet, or a place to sleep the night. All for the great price of $8.

The photo below is of the males bath house which contains numerous pools and saunas of varying temperatures and healing properties. Usually it is full of naked men, but I took this photo on a Monday night at 11pm when it was quiet.

After showering and bathing, you then don your styly pyjamas they give you, and can go into the unisex meeting area where you can sleep, talk, read a book, play a video game. In this area there are different types of hot rooms, an internet cafe, TV rooms, singing rooms, smoking rooms, a gym, an indoor pool and a restaurant.

If all this relaxing is too much, then you can go sit down for a beer! (You can see my old apartment building where I use to live in the background).

You can also get stoned. They have various hot rooms with differing kinds of flooring, this particular one had perfect circular heated round stones.

Mandy and some old Korean dude enjoying the massage chairs. NO boys, the chairs do not give happy endings.

If you want to catch up on the latest Korean soap, there are plenty of TV rooms, just pull up some floor space.

When your finished doing all this, you can find your own piece of real estate on the floor and set up camp for the night. Just make sure you don’t set up beside a snorer, as last night I had to unleash a few pillows at the vacuum cleaning whale beside us.

What an occasion, 56 friends of Ben and Mia traveled from 12 different countries to attend the wedding in Sang Dong, Bucheon, Korea.

It was a special moment for me personally, as it was through me that Ben and Mia met.  Ben who I met playing soccer at university, after that teaching in Korea and Mia was a fellow co-worker at my Korean English academy. The seed of Ben and Mia was planted when I invited Mia to my apartment for drinks with my mates, and the seed was sowed.

So it was pretty crazy that 5 years later, we were back in Sang Dong across the road from my old apartment where they had first met and now they were getting married. It was great to be back in my old stomping ground, but I will write another blog post about that soon (if I have time).

It was classic getting ready before the wedding, disorganised was definitely a word to describe it.  trying to organise 20 guys with no cell phones to meet in one place.  This sums it up, 5 of us turned up to the reception area of the wedding hotel wearing no shirts (a late rush to get our shirts ironed saw us getting the hotel linen cleaners to iron our shirts) and one member no shoes (apparently lost in the week long festivities). But we made it bang on time, 5pm sharp, looking darn right handsome.

First of all they had the western wedding which was predominantly spoken in Korean, luckily for Ben he is now completely fluent in Korean so he knew what he was getting himself into.

Following the western ceremony there was a tedious photo ceremony where a very authoritative photographer barked orders like a drill Sargent. It was quite funny when he was shouting at us in Korean and someone shouted out “just do what he’s saying”, haha, the photographer hadn’t quite grasped the concept that foreign looking people don’t speak Korean. Poor Ben and Mia won’t care if they don’t have another photo again.

Following the photo drill, a great spread of food and booze was put on for all.  Then it was time for the Korean ceremony which is usually conducted in a small room and only open to family. But they kindly had it in a large open room so all the foreign visitors could experience it. 

The Korean ceremony was quite entertaining, it involved Ben and Mia sitting on the floor around a table, bowing to family members, drinking some shots, throwing some stones onto a blanket to tell them how many children they were going to have, Ben piggy backing Mia around the table, then his mum, and some more drinking of shots.  Now that’s a wedding ceremony, sounds more like a university drinking game, but I’m sure there is a lot of meaning behind it all.

Then it was onto the after party at the Jazz and Bones club (some of the Korean bar names are rather hilarious, my favorite is bar free beer) that had been hired. A few speeches, and as a tribute to Ben and a cultural experience for the Koreans we performed the haka, much to the delight of the Koreans. The rest of the night was spent making the most of the open microphone and bar. 

 Cheers to Ben and Mia for a great time, and what a great couple!

In New Zealand we call it a ”stag do” but in other countries it is known as a bucks party, bachelor party etc, it’s the big party the groom has before he gets married. 

This was my first stag do, and it has been great.  There were about 15 of us kiwi’s here, all of Ben’s (groom to be) mates from high school, and a few of us from university, a lot of us whom had all lived here in Korea 5 years ago teaching english.

From what I have heard about stag do’s it is a time where grown men no matter how old go back to having the maturity of a high-school kid,  all whilst drinking copious amounts of alcohol.

On Saturday night after the family dinner with Ben’s family from NZ and Europe and Mia’s from Korea we got Ben dressed for the stag night in a pretty pink dress, pink tights, and pink hat. 

Then it was onto the bars/clubs  of the funky university area of Hongdae.  Without going into too much detail, there was a lot of soju(Korea’s version of Sake which is drunk in shots), maekchu(beer), norae bangs (private karaoke rooms), dancing on tables, nakedness (there was no stripper, the nudity came from members of the stag party and the old Korean men in the bath house where we slept) and general antics which are probably better off “left on tour”.

After partying in Hongdae, we ventured to the nearest Jimshilbang (24 hour bath house) for a bath and a sleep on the floor with the other guests. 

After waking (Sunday morning), it was off to a galbi jib (restaurant where you sit on the heated floor and meat is cooked on a communal hot plate in front of you) for breakfast/lunch before our stag soccer game. Well about 4 hours later, and half of Korea’s soju consumed, we bought a soccer ball, and headed to the closest soccer field. By field I mean flat hard dirt/sand area with soccer posts as they don’t really have grass in Korea, and if there is grass your generally not allowed to walk on it.

We found some university students who were keen for a game against the unruly mob of 11 foreigners.  After the worlds most pathetic haka (a famous maori war dance done by the New Zealand rugby team before every game) it was action.  We started shakily, but as we found our Northern soccer (the Dunedin university soccer team a lot of us played for back in NZ) combinations and sweated out the soju, it was great.  Long story short, the foreigners took the game 3-2 with the stag Ben scoring the winner.

It was in our celebration of our glorious victory I had my near death experience. As you have seen on the TV, when the professionals in the European league celebrate they jump on top of each, forming a human pile on the ground, usually a couple of players high. 

So, it seemed like a great idea to celebrate in this way. Unfortunately for me, I was the first on the ground. After about the 3rd 80 kg team member to jump on the accumulating pile, I was finding it hard to breathe, then add to this a full team, I could not expand my rib cage, I could not breathe. I was thinking “wicked, I’m going to die on freezing cold rock solid ground under a human pile of my mates in Korea”. That was my last thought, life went black!

The next thing I remember is slowly coming around, not being able to see, just seeing black, then my vision came back, and noises too, I could see a couple of faces really close, then I remember thinking that I should know who they were, they looked real concerned, it was my mates, I was alive!  I was still dazed, the boys were hugging me, obviously quite ecstatic themselves, as 30 seconds ago they were checking my vital signs and thinking how they were going to explain my death to my family “Ummm yeah Mr and Mrs Cameron, you see, we played this great game of soccer, and we celebrated the victory by all jumping on top of Hap until he couldn’t breathe, sorry about that”.

To celebrate my new lease of life, our soccer victory, and it being Ben’s last Sunday night as a free man, its was off to the after match function, and then another Jimshilbang.

More people arrived today to join the stag bunch, including Mandy from Perth, so don’t worry mum, she will look after me and make sure I’m on top of the human pile when we celebrate our next soccer victory!

Best be going, having great times, loving being back in Korea, so weird and wacky.