Cherry blossoms and cool people

Man, I didn't realize just how badly I needed a day out of Seoul. My friend Tom, who is escaping soon to Taiwan, invited me down to Changwon - South Korea's alternative capital in case Seoul gets bombed to bits by Kim Jong-Il - where he lives and works for some fun and a cherry blossom festival. The weather reports forecasted rain for this weekend (no surprise there), but I wanted to get out and see my buddy before he left, as well as see a bit of Korea, so on Saturday (would've gone Friday night but he works Saturdays) I took the "express" bus (five hours) to Changwon from the express terminal, which is an hour's subway ride away from where I live. It was a long trip, but no matter.

After a minor debacle with a cab driver taking as long as he could get away with to bring me to Tom's apartment, I saw my friend outside the Family Mart, drinking, like ya do, with two other foreigners - an Irish lass, and, I believe, a South African. This sort of thing is standard foreigner procedure in Korea, you see.

From there, we proceeded to a party with his coworkers and friends on the roof of their apartment building - but first, of course, we needed booze. Which brought us to our first adventure:


Creepy Construction Worker Guy

We wandered on down to a small grocery store in a basement. On our way down we passed a tall, strange ajosshi in coveralls and a yellow construction worker's helmet, who started rambling in Korean upon seeing Tom. We believe he thought Tom was Russian.

Anyway, we proceeded on to the beer aisle, while we looked at our (very sadly limited) options. But the creepy fellow had followed us and began gesturing at the dried fish foodstuffs on the racks while making what I believe had to be suggestive comments. We did our best to talk with him, but we didn't know a scrap of his language, and nor did he ours.

When we picked up our beer (maekju), he perked up, as if genuinely impressed that we were buying (so much?) beer. He started rambling on about alcohol, and the various benefits that could be derived from it, in the most physical manner possible: he snatched at Tom's crotch, and pulled his hand back up to his face with a vigorous sniffing. He then did the same to me, making, much to my dismay, contact with the bits he was apparently talking about. As far as I could tell, he was trying to tell us that a) beer makes you manly, or b) it makes your urine stink.

After the crotch-grabbing incident, we hurried away from the crazy fellow, who was happily distracted by one of the store employees as he elaborated on the benefits of maekju.


We went on to the roof, where I met some of his quite fun and lovely coworkers and friends, chatted a while, till it got cold and we retired to someone's apartment for more drinking and chatting and suchlike with more people showing up.

At that point we (or somebody, anyway) decided it was time to go to a nightclub, which was apparently all you can drink for 15,000 won, a pretty nice deal when they throw in platters of fruit for free. I tore up the dancefloor all night with Mina, one of the Korean girls who work at their school... good times.

It was about 4:30 AM when, in a slow, random trickle, we somewhat disorientatedly left the club - and we unfortunately missed the creepy short fellow stalking one of the girls. Probably (hopefully) harmless, but would've been fun to see.

I need more nights like that. Tales (and maybe pictures, if you're not on Facebook) of the next day to follow.