Hitting On Korean Girls

Man, it's been awhile since I've posted. I've done a bit of travelling. Went to Japan for a week and had a pretty good time, but that can really mostly be explained in a series of outrageous photos so I may just update this with a Flickr photo album from that trip at some point if you're curious. 

What I thought would be more amusing for you guys back home is to learn about how I've discovered Korea operates on a social level (from my personal experience). It's different for everyone and of course a lot of it has to do with how you approach people, but a lot has happened to me in the past few weeks that, for better or for worse, Korea has played a big part in.

I'm kind of weird because I don't really hang out with the foreigner crowd. Not to say I don't have Western friends that I love to death, but generally big mobs of Westerners just kind of piss me off. I loathe this "Let's hang out with English-speakers doing English-speaker type things in Korea" mentality. I just can't fit into it. It drives me absolutely mad. I know plenty of guys who speak great Korea, have Korean girlfriends, and still go to those Western events so like I said...it's just me. I'm weird. I came to Korea get uncomfortable and to see what life was like in another country...not to replicate some poor facsimile of my life back home.

So recently I've been trying to make an effort to hang out with more Koreans. A few weeks ago, I was drinking at a foreigner bar and it was just...boring. Other than the cute bartender (I'll get to that humorous anecdote in a minute), there was really nothing keeping me there. So I message a Korean girl I'm friends with because I remember her mentioning something about a good club called 247. Turns out she's already there, so I head out and walk from the "foreigner" side of downtown to the "Korean" side of downtown basically just by crossing a big road (I'm sure Foucault would have something to say about the social asymmetry of this symmetrical city planning...but anyway...).

I get to the club and guess what? No foreigners allowed. The fuck. It's already 3am and I promised my friend I'd go inside and I was already incredibly inebriated (Sidenote: Thank you random Russian girl, wherever you are, for showing me your outrageous flaming Sambuca tricks. You will never be forgotten). I dug up some superhuman Korean abilities I don't possess when I'm sober and tried explaining to this guy I already had a friend inside. He finally breaks and says "Okay, tonight you are Korean" and lets me in. Apparently, from what other foreigners have told me, is an atypical result. Which sucks, because this club was INSANE! Koreans just going hard left and right in a way I always believed asian biology would not allow.

Korean Club Life (Part 1):
In America, clubs are usually a hunting ground. As a result, it's very territorial when it comes to dancing and possessive when it comes to...let's call it "attracting a mate". Korea is none of those things. Guys were pretty much pushing their girls to dance with me, I was dancing with a bunch of random bros cheering on girls and shit. None of these people spoke more than 6 words of English or had a goddamn idea who I was. They just want to have a good time and dance and party. It can be a little weird because Koreans are generally very physically expressive of their emotions with close friends and when alcohol becomes involved that expression reaches beyond close friends and I had guys kind of putting their hand around my waist or some shit at times, but it's not a "being gay" thing like we have the tendency to freak out about in America. It's just friendliness.

After the club died down around 8am, I go out to breakfast with my Korean friend and like 9 random people I assumed to also be her friends (come to find out she had no fucking idea who those people were either). The whole time we're just eating and they're calling me best friend and trying to speak English with me and shit. My drunken Korean was still active so I could keep up with bits of the conversation, but slowly people started passing out at the table and I eventually took a cab home around 9:30 to get some sleep.

That is what I wanted out of Korea: To go hard like a Korean. That was one of the greatest times I've had in Korea.

But the next day, I go back to the foreigner bar with the cute Korean bartender and try to keep working on that again. Like this girl was not only pretty but just super fun to dance with and really awesome, so I figured "why not?" Plus her boyfriend broke up with her around the same time my girlfriend broke up with me...so it was like...kindred spirits shit. This is where things get into the "I Don't Understand Korean Girls And The Might Be Crazy" portion of the blog. This isn't solely me saying this...this is my Korean guy friends saying "Korean girls are crazy" and then me choosing not to believe them and going for it anyway..only for them to be proven right.

I Don't Understand Korean Girls And The Might Be Crazy (Part 1):

So basically I had a great weekend with this girl. Did a lot of drinking and dancing, got her number, talked a bit, but always drunk, right? Once daytime came, like a fuckin mythological creature, this girl was non-existent. Would not return my texts or any shit. I invited her to dinner twice and got turned down.

Talked to Korean friends about it again (girls and guys alike) and both sexes said "A Korean girl will [always] turn you down the first time you ask them out. It's expected that this will happen because Korean girls don't want to seem easy"....the fuck? Okay, that's utterly ridiculous...especially when the guys are aware of this as well...it's just unnecessarily complicated, but whatever.

So I keep going to he bar, keep trying at it. Some other dude comes out with one of my military buddies and starts gaming on her and I'm "you much be fucking joking me"...but she was still talking to me and I thought stuff was really good. Invited her out to dinner again the next day, not turned down again because she had to work...so I did some cute ass shit and brought her dinner at work against the advice of my Korean friends who said "Don't act like you're too into her. Talk to many girls and make her think you don't really care." Again I'm like "the fuck is this nonsense?" I hate lying and I hate bullshit games so no guys....I'm just gunna do my thing. Drop off dinner. Head to Busan. [spoiler alert: I fuckin crash and burn].

Korean Club Life (Part 2):

So Naz brings me out to Busan for some real solid club life and to get me out of my head and away from Changwon. We head out to the KSU area where the clubs are supposed to be bumping. It was pretty solid. First two bars were foreigner style bars and they were mad boring (because they were full or foreigners sitting around drinking and trying not to look too awkward) but at the second bar, I run into this outrageously cute Korean girl who was dressed extremely well with a bored "I don't give a fuck "attitude on her face blowing smoke ring soff her hookah pipe. I'm like...well shit.."challenge accepted". 

Go talk to this girl, hit it off pretty well, start talking and shit teachers me how to blow smoke rings. Buy each other a few drinks, but this place is still fucking boring. So I ask her if she likes clubbing. She said no, but she would go if her friend went. So somehow that involved me dragging her friend, a Belgian guy, an American guy, and the cute Korean girl all to the Blue Monkey. It was kind of small, but the DJ was sick...flipping tracks and blending them every 30 seconds.

Soon I realize "shit...this girl can't really dance". Like she was trying to have fun, but it's like she had no idea what to do with herself and was just pantomining what she'd seen dancing look like in American movies (you know...the girl raising her arms in the air and just flipping her hair around thing?) So I somehow go start dancing up on stage and get people pumping, when this ridiculously slutty Korean girl starts dancing on me like we're in a fuckin' rap video. She was really cute but we were dancing like mom and dad would never want to see and I'm like "oooh girl, you fuckin' crazy if you think I'm going anywhere with you" but dancing with her was fun, so I kept dancing on stage with her for a bit until I went back to go find the cute awkward Korean girl, but she was on her way out...I think she was pissed...I probably blew it. Oh well, that was only round three. I think we hit pal cha (round 8) that night. 

Everywhere we went afterwards were just straight Koreans clubbing. girls on stripper poles, guys cheering em on. Felt like the states. Raging with Koreans in Korean clubs is just a hell of a good time. Notice this is filed under Korean Clubbing and not Korean Girls Are Crazy, because they're fairly fucking Western in how they act inebriated. That shit is standard. I can handle it. It's once their cognitive processes reboot again the next day that shit goes crazy. The whole time I'm having a blast in Busan, I'm still messaging this bartender because (of course) she's drunk, so (of course) she wants to talk to me. And I thought I was getting somewhere. I thought fucking wrong.

Naz gets pretty messed up at some point, so I grab a cab back to the bus terminal. But when I told the cab driver to slow down, he thought it would be funnier to speed up instead. So Naz ended up vomiting  in the dude's cab and I had to fight with the cab driver in drunken Korean about him trying to overcharge us for that shit.

We pass out in Lotteria for an hour and then bus home to the light of morning. I drunkenly asked the bartender to the Flower Festival the next day.

I Don't Understand Korean Girls And The Might Be Crazy (Part 2):

Wake up around 4 the next day and, big fucking surprise, totally got ignored by that girl again. So I lost my cool and messaged her that getting stood up that much is fucking embarrassing so not to even bother messaging me again. But I was a little depressed after that, so I met up with Naz and his girl Gina for some coffee.

Gina is the exception to this "Korean Girls Are Crazy" subheading. She might be her own kind of crazy, but it's a super awesome kind of crazy I can definitely get behind. She is unbelievably cool. Naz is English so he hates how I'm teaching her American phrases like "fuck that shit, man". I think it's the most hilariously adorable thing ever.

We go to grab some samgyuepsal and Gina starts coaching me on how to talk to Korean girls. I'm like "Gina, what do I say?" and our conversation goes a little something like this:
G: "Just say hello!" 

Me: "Obviously! I know that part! Where do I go from there?"

G: "Just ask them 'Do you like coffee?'"

Me: "Okay, okay...then what?"

G: "They will say yes. Then you ask 'Do you want to get coffee now?'"

Me: "Wait...what? Gina...I can't just walk up to a random girl on the street and ask her if she would like to stop whatever she is doing and get coffee with me!"

G: "You can! I think she will say yes!"

I'm blown away by the utter and impossible simplicity of this tactic, but I've got nothing to lose, so we bump into two girls on the street and throw out some Korean:
"coffee juhwayo?"

And they say yes so I'm okay...next step...
"coffee han jeun hashileyo?"

And they just start nodding really eagerly and I'm like "what the fuck is happening? This is the craziest thing!"

So they speak like zero words of English, so coffee is a bit awkward with Gina translating, but one of the girls says she likes to drink so I'm like "Fuck yeah! Me too! Let's go do that shit!" ("Do that shit" is also another phrase I've taught Gina).

So we go drink makgeolli and play some drinking games and get a little rowdy when, three hours later, one of the girls tells us they both have boyfriend. And I am like "you must be fucking joking me..."

Do you see why Korean girls are crazy now? In what world can you stop a person on the street, convince them to stop whatever they are doing, get coffee with you, then drink with you for three hours....only to find out they both have boyfriends?! t's utter madness! If my girlfriend did that shit, I'd be like "....what?"

So ending on a somewhat serious note, I was a little depressed after those back to back failures and somehow ended up back at the bar where the bartender works that night. Luckily it was closed and I didn't make an ass of myself. So I started wandering home and I bumped into Coby on the streets. He invited me to go for a drink and I sort of cathartically unravelled to him. He gave me some of the best advice ever. 

I realized, even though I'm in Korea. I'm still kind of afraid of being alone, of travelling alone. I don't really know myself that well and always want to have other people with me or around me. I also have ridiculously high expectations of myself and others.

So that really got me thinking about "okay...what do I really love?" I love making people happy. I love big crowds of strangers and unusual situations, and above all else I fucking love music. Some of the clubs we rolled into in Busan were dead and I just started dancing anyway. Or at foreigner bars I'll always jump on the PC and throw down tracks to bring up the mood. Even in college I loved doing that shit all the time. So I realized I really want to start getting into the DJ scene here in Korea and bring over some more Western club music.

Luckily I have a friend who is a DJ here, and a couple DJ friends back home, who are helping me out. It's a good personal goal to work for just to do something with myself other than learning Korean. So I just take time every day and practice. It gets my mind of things. I get to bury myself in the music. It's really exciting. Gina's a really good friend and is pushing me to go all out for it too.

At the end of the day, after all the emotional ups and downs, Korea is still providing me with a ton of opportunities for personal growth that are just stifled in America. I think I'm discovering a lot about myself here and it's really strange to imagine I'm coming home in 8 months.

I wonder who I will be...