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I'm a firm believer that you can get sick, both physically and mentally, if you don't take a break every once in a while to chill, alone, and do nothing of value. And so, this fine Sunday afternoon I am sitting in my apartment and slowing down, catching up on life. I am certainly not going to Yongsan with Mike and Nik and Jak to pick up cheap pirated DVDs and inexpensive USB hard drives. Oh my, no. And the fact that Sanbon is a good hour's subway ride away from anything good in Seoul certainly has nothing to do with it. I am a paragon of self-discipline and regimented solitude.

I'm also moderately hung over (surprise!). Last night it was back to Itaewon, back to the troops of American soldiers in camouflage and full killing regalia. Back to the seeping masses of Western nostalgia.

Jay Bar hit me like a ton of a bricks. It was a basement joint with a sacred Egyptian logo, seedy and full of hipper-than-hipsters. It was Phils' older, slutty sister. On the tiny corner stage, kids jammed and bounced and sang and the bass levels were totally fucked but I didn't care because for an instant I believed that I was home. There was one bathroom for both sexes and I had to pee in front of the American and Irish girls who had kicked my ass at pool earlier. "Fuck all this Korean pop!" one singer shouted. "Whatever happened to rock and roll?" And then he tried to rock. And then we left.

Next we went to some underground club where neon liner was plentiful and Korean pool sharks eyed Western girls dancing to last year's Top40. Mike and Jak swore to me that hot Brazillian models would show up at 1 AM. In the early morning prime-time, the bar flooded with whitey cracker hooches from all nationalities and a wide variety of ESL geeks and wannabe thugs looking to pick them up... but no Brazillian models. After some fruitless altercations with tall, wire-thin Russian girls, we hit the road and I peed on a police station while Sam threw up in their bushes.

Itaewon is a bubble, a growing stronghold of ironclad cultural stoicism. If other, rural parts of Korea refuse to let go of tradition, Itaeon embraces change and globalized American trends like a filthy hooker with a half-hour minimum.

Belinda, our new Australian teacher, loves using her Korean in randomo conversations but the Jay Bar(tender) brusquely told her "No Korean!" when she tried. No Korean in Korea. No Korean in Itaewon. The two are not synonymous.

Earlier we had talked about how people come to "multi-cultural" nu-nations like Canada and American and Australia and just stay in their Chinatowns and Little Havanas. Immigrants learn enough English to survive but hide behind their cultural walls, unwilling to push themselves into the wilds of mass society. They hold on. They build themselves a sanctuary in a strange and foreign land and defend it rabidly. And it was last night, in Itaewon, that I realized that this phenomenon occurs elsewhere too. Welcome to Little USA, where streets are nicknamed Homo Hill and American soldiers stride the strip, marching by unconscious drunks lying in gutters lined with garbage.

SIDEBAR NOTES, TOP TA BOTTOM:

(1) Apparently, the only thing Canada has to offer is the great, snowy wilderness.

(2) I don't know what was in this building, but the hardcore gateway featured one of the deadliest fencing of all time.

(3) This is a public washroom. Girls.

(4) I found this rad umbrella in E-Mart. It features anime characters from some weirdo kids cartoon or video game or something. People look at me strangely when I hold it - I'm a little concerned that maybe I bought merchandise for "Yokimo-Kim's Homosexual Turtle Parade Paradise".

(5) Jen and Chad feeding the corporate agenda at Starbucks. Jen is proudly holding a Prize. Her coffee came with a scratch card and after she scratched it, we realized that the unintelligible line of Hangul symbols could mean anything from "FREE SUV WITH PIMP RIMS" to "YOU SUCK YANGO, TRY AGAIN". So we thrust the card at an employee and she brought Jen a free pen! The pen had advertising on it.

This world isn't perfect.

Posted by Chris at 01:39 AM >> Commentations (1)