the only soulful white boy in jinhae-gu

koreaposting


for nearly as long as the "big japan trip" had been in the works, one of my friends had also been pushing hard for a side trip to korea, making sure to bring it up almost every single time the japan trip was mentioned. his motivation was fairly transparent, his girlfriend is korean-american and going there with her he was certain to receive a grand welcome and free accommodations from her extended family. everyone else, on the other hand, remained understandably lukewarm about the idea, we didn't really have any deep connection or interest in the country besides, say, being a dedicated player of its most popular arcade game. prospects improved a bit when the family in korea was finally contacted and said they could lodge a couple extra guests, though only for a day, and of course you'd still have to pay extra for flights to get there in the first place. when the family agreed to host some of my friends began to express some measured interest, but i remained fairly non-committal, when questioned about it deploying my usual annoying stalling expressions like "my people are looking into it".

of course, what ended up happening is that nobody joined my friend and his girlfriend on their korea trip except for me, after a booking a cheap ticket at the last minute while drinking some jinro soju. besides the booze, what made me take the leap was recalling the last time i had the opportunity to stay with a friend's local family during a trip, it was several years ago on the big island of hawai'i and is still easily one of the best trips i've ever been on (i should write about it sometime... there are already some handwritten manuscripts i could transcribe from). well, after my experience in korea, i think i may be instituting a new policy of NEVER turning down such offers...

what did i think korea was going to be like? i kinda expected it to be like japan's canada, everything basically the same except for minor cosmetic differences like the popular chain restaurants all having different branding, as if it's an alternate timeline where the only difference is that one coin flip decades ago had the opposite outcome (there was a futurama episode with this premise). the signs would be written in different moonrunes, there would be pump it cabs instead of dance dance revolution, kbbq instead of yakiniku, green soju bottles instead of strong zero cans. on the other hand, i did expect things to be way more grim in korea from a social/political perspective, even though they've been having a bit of a moment in global pop culture lately all the news and stats coming out of there paint a barely pre-apocalyptic picture: lowest birth rate in the world and still dropping strong, insanely competitive academic culture where kids are in classes and cram school from 7am to 2am, i recall seeing a survey where 80% of korean young adults said they were "living in hell", they seem to be on the cusp of an all-out gender war with korean guys spreading qanon-level conspiracy theory about korean women subtly making fun of their penis size in ads and stuff, the political situation is unstable after the prime minister tried to do a self-coup out of nowhere a couple months ago, and so on. now that i think about it, the most acclaimed recent works of korean film and tv internationally are parasite and squid game, neither of which i would say have a positive view of the current state of the country...

looking down from above on approach to gimhae international airport (which seems much too small for a city of busan's size), i already spotted one extra cosmetic different between japan and korea: korean roofs are much more colorful, maybe the most colorful in the world. maybe colorful isn't quite the right word, they just use a different color palette heavy on blue, dashes of orange, and some bright beige, but it's enough to make a dramatic visual difference. it's a distinctive look, i'm remembering now that i should've been aware of this in advance from time spent looking at korea on google maps over the years, i always wondered if there was some weird filter over their footage in korea, but no, their roofs really just look like that... i wonder why...

when we landed, i didn't have the greatest first impression of korea on the ground. although their passport control area looked much slicker than narita's "japanese janky" version, the line was disastrously long and took nearly an hour to get through (i was at the back of course), during which my caffeine high and korea hype subsided substantially. luckily, our ride was already there when we got out, my friend's girlfriend's aunt was waiting there to pick us up right away. we had a bit of a drive ahead of us, my friend had warned me beforehand that his gf's relatives lived in a "quiet seaside town in the middle of nowhere 1.5 hours away from busan". during the drive, my friend's gf revealed a level of korean conversational ability that had been unknown even to him, chattering incomprehensibly with her aunt up in the passenger seat. her aunt know no english whatsoever so my friend and i were completely shut out, left with nothing to do except stare mutely out the windows. the gibberish floating back from the front seat plus all the unreadable signs i was seeing outside made me acutely aware for the first time that for the next couple days i was going to be back to square zero language-wise, just like during my first trips to japan.

once we left the flat river valley home to the airport, we travelled into the hills along an inscrutable series of winding boulevards through tunnels and over passes, normally i have a good sense of direction but it felt like we were going in circles around the hills. japan is well-known for being mountainous but it's actually NOTHING compared to korea, in terms of easily-developable flat land korea makes japan look like texas or the midwest. it's truly unbelievable how many people they've managed to cram into such inhospitable terrain, maybe the falling birth rate isn't so bad, they could stand to shave a few millions off the population. the lack of flat land means that korea is forced to make much better use of it, they don't have the space to do the kind of greeble sprawl of lowrise buildings japan does across its luxuriously expansive flat river plains, instead korea builds on average much, much taller than japan, including huge highrise housing developments of dozens of identical towers on a scale never seen in japan. every bit of space between the hillsides felt like it was crammed with something, whether it be an industrial park, warehouses, or a massive housing development.

the "quiet seaside town in the middle of nowhere 1.5 hours from busan" did not turn out at all to be the sleepy rural village i had been imagining, instead it was a lively coastal city clinging to a mountainside that seemed to fit the population of the average american mid-sized city (say, peoria illinois) into a tenth of the area, necessitating the construction of highrise housing of the sort you only see in miami. from what i saw later i guess by korean standards it does fit the description, and it certainly was 1.5 hours from busan. despite all my talk of highrises, friend's gf's relatives actually lived in a detached house at the edge of a neighborhood. as far as i saw, korean neighborhoods of detached homes were pretty similar in size and composition to their japanese counterparts, except with more ornamentation: bright blue glazed tile roofs, ornate masonry details, and lots of metal fences and front doors (possibly part of some national metal obsession, korean chopsticks and tableware are usually made of metal too).

the interior of the house (the supposed shabbiness of which we received many apologies from our hosts for) was completely bedecked in wood, a stark contrast to the exterior. as the enthusiastic greetings began my friend and i felt the language barrier again, we could only communicate through gesture, useless unless friend's gf acted as a full-time interpreter. we sat awkwardly on the couch as she conversed with her relatives, sort of acting like we were listening politely to the conversation, but the whole time i was bored out of my mind like the little kid brought along to a family visit and forced to sit there while the adults talk about boring adult stuff like the weather and taxes. eventually it occurred to me that continuing to sit there quietly pretending to "pay attention" was totally pointless because everyone already knew i didn't understand a word, so i pulled out a book and began reading, which served as a catalyst for introducing us to our room so we could "rest" a bit.

shortly thereafter, the living room meeting adjourned and my friend's gf offered to give me a little tour of the place, though she had not been there in like a decade (at some point though, the domiciles of older relatives basically become encased in amber and rarely change, similar to vacation houses). we started in the kitchen, where she pointed out one of the dedicated kimchi fridges i've heard so much about. indeed, they had a whole additional full-size fridge intended specifically for kimchi, specialized models built for the domestic market by korean appliance manufacturers. i peeked inside and there was certainly plenty of kimchi, though contrary to what i'd expected there was a lot of other stuff too, other pickles and a few fruits like those korean melons or pears or whatever that come swaddled in protective netting. upon laying eyes on the fridge kimchi i blurted out "can i try some", and when the aunt came down a few minutes later my request was relayed to her. a little bemused, she took a out a tray of kimchi and began cutting some onto a little dish using scissors (staple korean tableware, i learned over the course of my trip). i declined rice or anything to go with it, just rawdogged it from a tiny dish using metal chopsticks. i thought this might be pretty common in kimchi-obsessed korea and that i might earn some street cred for eating my kimchi bare, but APPARENTLY eating kimchi on its own is completely unheard of there and the aunt was greatly amused by it. as if summoned by her to "get a load of this guy eating kimchi ON ITS OWN", the uncle appeared in the kitchen doorway and also had a chuckle at the sight, then asked if i wanted a beer or something, i said yes and he disappeared for a bit. i assumed he had some ready to go in the fridge, but no, he actually went to the convenience store to buy some for me, the first hint of the outrageously generous hospitality we were about to be spoiled by (to be fair, the convenience store was only like a 2 minutes walk away).

what ensued was perhaps THE most over-the-top night of drinking and gluttony of my life, it was like the classic "visiting grandma and she constantly stuffs your face with food" situation except with restaurants and booze. we started with kbbq around 7pm, which i naively expected would be dinner for the night. after all, never in my life have i still felt hungry or managed to eat anything else after a fat kbbq session. what's more, they had a full buffet of banchan and were serving up kalbi in sizes i never even knew existed, continuing a common pattern i've noticed that america, supposed land of gluttony, has nothing on some of the portion sizes you can find in asia (the only domain in which we remain undefeated is in soda cup size). there was of course plenty of beer and soju and both combined (somaek) to go around, and i got a crash course in korea's strict drinking etiquette. i didn't catch all of it but broad strokes you're apparently supposed to always have your drinks poured by others, received in a cup held with both hands. the pourer is also supposed to pour with both hands, i noticed the uncle had developed a very lazy way to do this by just crossing his other hand over his chest and lightly touching his other arm that i guess technically counts (he would be the expert here). we were not drinking that light fruity soju that's been getting popular overseas lately, this was the Big Boy Korean 18% unflavored "JINRO IS BACK" (was it ever gone?) in the light blue bottle. the first shot or two suck, but once you've built up a baseline buzz you can drink it like water and it gets a bit dangerous. a bottle of it is 1800 wonnies ($1.25) at the convenience store and it can't be much more expensive at the restaurant, at those prices it's easy to see why the uncle didn't hesitate to order a new bottle as soon as the last one was emptied.

it feels like every korean meal requires covering the entire surface of the table in bowls of various sizes

believe me i've learned my lesson MANY times over when it comes to overeating at these sorts of places, so i ate a generous portion while still making sure to hold back a little breathing room. my friend on the other hand has never been a big eater and was struggling to keep up, he felt obliged to keep eating way beyond his limits so as not to humiliate himself in front of his gf's relatives (certainly it didn't help that i was also ribbing him about his "lack of appetite" the whole time). then, when we were finished with kbbq, the uncle made a surprise announcement that it was time to go for some "chicken and beer" (chimaek) next, eliciting groans of pain from my friend. through his gf he managed to buy a 2-hour stay of execution before any additional food, which we killed by going on a digestive stroll along the waterfront with the aunt. on the way, we encountered a park filled with a bunch of wonderful korean public exercise equipment quite fun to play around on while a little drunk, it was like an adult playground. there was a giant captain's wheel you could turn, some kind of elliptical, a little spinning platform you could stand on and a different one you could sway side to side on. i thought at the time that was just a particularly exceptional park, turns out that many korean parks have similar setups, the devices seem to be pretty standardized.

at the waterfront park it was lively, almost hard to imagine we were in a country facing a dire demographic crisis and imminent gender war seeing all the children frolicking and couples strolling hand-in-hand (but i guess misfits do tend to stay indoors). besides the crowds and occasional fireworks going off, there was no shortage of stimulation at the waterfront, every inch seemed to be covered in some kind of elaborate light display or other décor. what also stood out to me was how much we stood out, there were absolutely no other foreigners to be found there (or in the rest of the city), a big difference compared to japan... these days in japan you have to try quite hard to find some place so obscure that there isn’t already another white guy there, the minimum requirement now is to start in some outlying city, take one of those one-car rural trains out at least thirty minutes, hike a mile from the station, and then ideally go 30ft underground. we walked all the way to the end of the coastal park and then turned around, and as we made our way back the aunt reported she was starting to get impatient texts from the uncle asking what the hold up was, he'd already gotten back from wherever he'd gone for drinks and snacks while we walked and wanted to head out for chicken and beer already. when we joined up with him at the house we decided to keep walking because the chicken and beer joint was pretty close by, and on our way there i was surprised to see that only a few blocks away this "small city in the middle of nowhere" had a vibrant nightlife district bigger and more popping than i've seen in american cities several times the size.

at the chicken and beer place we got some chicken and some beer, a few other dishes, and this novelty mixed drink i saw on a poster on the wall that you blend yourself at the table. at some point the uncle excused himself to go out and have a little smoke, my friend and i joined him because we were curious about the strange long thin cigarettes that seemed to be popular in korea. it was a little awkward because of the language barrier but somehow we managed, the uncle just kept speaking in korean like normal even though he was basically speaking only to himself, we followed along based purely on gestures and body language. he offered us each a cigarette and then showed us that before smoking you have to crack a flavor pellet in the filter with your teeth first, following his demonstration i confidently chowed down on the completely wrong end of the cigarette and he had to give me another. though i appreciate the meditative ritual and physical act of smoking, i've always been put off from doing it very often by the bad taste it leaves in your mouth (i did notice during my biggest smoking binge ever in biloxi that you do get used to it after a bit in the same way that you can get used to strong odors, which explains how habitual smokers are able to stand it). the thing is, the thin korean cigaretts were completely different, they didn't leave a harsh taste at all, they were smooth and left a pleasant taste (tea-flavored, i believe). in fact, my mouth felt almost refreshed afterwards like i'd just brushed my teeth or popped a breath mint, rather than icky the way it usually feels after a cigarette. smoking them felt practically healthy, in that moment i could totally see nine out of ten doctors saying they smoke only korean cigarettes. if i recall correctly, one of the biggest initiatives pushed by Big Anti-Tobacco in the US has been to ban anything that makes cigarettes taste TOO good...

at the chicken and beer place even i struggled to continue eating, it was beginning to feel like some kind of strange torture like that scene in matilda where the evil headmistress forces a kid to eat an entire cake (i will admit a lot of it is a self-imposed, i have a strong aversion to wasting food which leads to me always trying to finish everything put in front of me no matter what). in the end i decided it wasn't worth the suffering and we left behind a decent spread of leftovers, though i finished all my drinks and the uncle said approvingly "you drink like a korean!", much to my friend's consternation. then, he further humiliated himself when we stopped at a literal hole-in-the-wall arcade on the off chance it had pump it up, it only had a small collection of well-worn classic crowd-pleasers, the uncle put in some money anyway and i soundly defeated my friend in hoops and the punching bag game, which i laid down with a flashy spinjutsu move in spite of (or perhaps thanks to) my drunkenness.

after the arcade, everyone followed the uncle as he ambled back in the general direction of the house... but he had other designs, suddenly turning into the doorway of ANOTHER restaurant! this one was a seafood joint, after having a brief word with the uncle the waitress immediately brought out some little sashimi slices (not sure what they call it in korea), another bottle of soju of course, and a surprise bowl of SILKWORM PUPA! the silkworm pupa had long been a bit of an in-joke in our friend group, my friend's gf's dad used to eat it over rice for breakfast and she pointed it out a can of it one day on the shelf at h-mart, we bought some and ever since then we occasionally bust it out at parties to gross people out or troll them doing bits like "oh, you like korean food? then you shouldn't mind a side of some authentic korean silkworm pupa...". i won't boogs in the bottom left bowlsay i particularly like them but they're at least edible while drunk, just watching me eat some was enough to make a guy throw up once. the thing is, we still weren't sure if koreans actually eat them regularly, and having it served to us completely unprompted at a random restaurant on our first night in korea seemed to clear that up definitively. my friend, who was always a little more enthusiastic about eating pupa than me, was grateful to finally have an opportunity to aura farm, not only would it seem impressive for him to eat them because they were kinda gross, but he could also eat a lot of them without getting very full because they're so small. everyone was impressed when he polished off the bowl (with some of my help) and asked for seconds, saying that the "fresh" pupa at the restaurant were much better than the canned ones. i thought the small bites like the pupa would be it at this restaurant, then suddenly the waiter came out with a giant platter of the ocean's bounty over ice and set it in the middle of the table. i almost groaned aloud seeing such a huge portion of even more food, mercifully it was all tiny thin slices, easily manageable despite how full everyone was. i should also mention that the soju was flowing continuously the whole time, the bottles didn't have a chance to stay empty for long before being replaced...

it was getting late and the restaurant seemed to be winding down for the night just as we finished our seafood platter, but the uncle didn't seem to be quite done yet because when we left he led us in the opposite direction from the house. luckily, he just stopped by a window and got a coffee to go, and then we headed back home around 2am. it goes without saying that we hadn't paid for a single thing all night. back home, we got settled in our room for the night, which was still blisteringly hot despite the AC (turned on specially for us, we'd been told) supposedly running all day. the hospitality continued unabated, the uncle came in with a couple extra fans, then as he left propped the door open with a little garbage can (presumably to prevent fan death). but that wasn't all, several minutes later my friend's gf was sent down from her room upstairs with the rest of the family to ask how we were doing, we insisted we were fine though admittedly it was still sweltering in there. she remarked that our room was noticeably hotter than the living room she'd just passed through, i confirmed it myself and then accepted an offer to decamp to the living room couch. then, a couple minutes later our hosts came down and insisted we come upstairs and switch places with them and sleep in their room with the beefy modern AC, they didn't believe our claims that we were just fine downstairs, the uncle having been convinced of this after seeing me in bed with my shirt off (even though this is normally how i sleep...). the hospitality was reaching guilt-inducing levels, now we were even taking their own beds, they wouldn't take no for an answer so we had no choice but take their place upstairs.

despite collectively polishing off somewhere in the vicinity of 12 bottles of soju the night before, in the morning i somehow didn't feel the least bit hungover, a lot of it had probably been absorbed by the even larger quantity of food. after getting up, we sat on their upstairs couch (which felt like a rock, the stiffest couch i've ever been on) and sampled some korean tv, mostly pro wrestling and then a long infomercial mail-order kbbq meats ("if you order within the next minutes, we'll throw in one more kalbi ABSOLUTELY FREE!")yeah kbbq is kind of a big deal in korea... while walking around i peered into a lot of restaurants and i swear fully half of them had the distinctive tabletop vents that indicate a kbbq-type establishments. we left the house promptly at noon for lunch, though i groaned a little internally at the prospect because it still felt like i could go a week without getting hungry again... after lunch we bid farewell to the uncle who drove off to whatever mysterious work he does in his little kei truck, then picked up my friend's gf's cousin to go visit busan.

i'm not really sure how to describe the cousin besides "generic fashionable korean girl", like everyone else we met she didn't speak any appreciable amount of english so it's not like we had any meaningful interactions. i just remember that she had this tic where she refused to have one side of her face photographed, she always turned it away or covered it up with her hand or something. she was very amused by my (and to a lesser extent my friend's) dumb golden retriever american tourist antics like going completely upside-down on some vintage piece of korean park exercise equipment or standing up and jumping in the middle of the glass-bottom gondola car, she was constantly filming and taking pictures of it all on her phone. it's possible that thanks to her posts i'm now a minor celebrity on korean social media... perhaps if i had a full-time cameraman filming me all the time like she was i could make a career out of going random places with a spirit of curiosity and adventure, like one of those twitch "irl" streamers. instead, i write about it weeks (or months later), for a "purer" experience of things "in the moment".

all the photography started getting annoying when we got to busan tower, an attraction that i was of course heavily in favor of visiting. i had a little fun outside with a photo op with big letters saying "BUSAN TOWER", i laid on top of them facing the wrong way so the letters were backwards and tried to get them to take a picture, it was tough because at first they didn't get the joke, they were like "but that's the wrong way! go on the other side!". why take the same boring photo everyone else does? then, i realized that if my friend and i stood on either sides of the sign and covered up the outermost letters, it would look like it says "USA OWE", so we took that picture too. after that i'd had about enough of photos and was ready to go up the tower, but the base of the tower was filled with all these themed rooms set up for photo ops that you had to get through in order to reach the elevator and of course they wanted to stop for photos in every single one. i wasn't having any of it and refused to pose, but my friend is a bit of a people-pleaser and obliged them so it took a bit.

this is where i post from btwafter the tower we drove across an impressive combination of highway bridges to get to the hotel the aunt had booked us for the night, in a "fashionable district for young people" she said. the elevated highway viaducts and bridges gave a good overview of the busan cityscape, you could call it the "hong kong of korea", dense clusters of highrises and other buildings crammed between steep hills and extensive waterways. the traffic felt surprisingly light for the size of the city, at a couple points we were just one of a handful of cars on big wide roads, it didn't seem possible that the roads could be this empty among so many buildings of such size. the hotel was on prime real estate facing gwangan beach and the magnificent suspension bridge spanning the cove, which we'd accidentally taken a wrong turn and driven across and then back on our way there. it was fancier than i'd book for myself... though i noticed that the bathroom still didn't have any sort of bidet, they don't really seem to be a thing in korea the way they are in japan (where they even have them on planes), i didn't see a single one the whole time in korea. on a related note: it felt like there were far fewer vending machines in korea too, whereas in japan they're so ubiquitous that it seems almost unlikely that it’s profitable to keep them all stocked and refrigerated.

before the aunt and cousin left, we went to dinner with them at a nearby restaurant that was basically korean bbq except with seafood. it was one of those meals that a sensitive american might consider borderline animal cruelty, then again shellfish and other sea creatures generally seem to attract less sympathy so who knows, i've encountered so-called "bivalvegans" who won't eat any animal products whatsoever but will eat shellfish because they don't have brain and aren't that cute. anyways, it was the first meal i've ever had where one of the dishes tried to escape... we got this variety set that came on a multi-tier platter, one of which had a live abalone... we left it for last and before we managed to eat it, it had crawled to the rim of the platter and the aunt had to intervene before it got any further. but the real star of the show was the dish of still-wriggling chopped octopus tentacles, they had an element of danger because they're easy to choke on, and a unique mouth-feel when the suckers still have enough juice left in them to clamp on to your tongue... my friend was a big fan, but i dunno, i'm just not a big fan of seafood in the first place...

after digesting for a few hours in the hotel room, my friend and i went down to take a walk along the beach and the main strip adjoining it. takedown was underway for some kind of street festival that had closed the street to cars for a couple hours, the asphalt was covered in chalk drawings and people were packing up folding tables and stuff, but out on the water there were still some boats letting off fireworks. we stayed mostly outside, only going in to check out the little arcades along the street, mostly looking for pump it up. in fact, when we'd arrived i'd spotted one from the car right next to our hotel and insisted we look for pump it up there before going to dinner, everyone was skeptical but they decided to indulge me, and what do you know they had not one but TWO cabs shoved in the back corner. actually, every "real" arcade that wasn't just crane games had at least one pump it up cab, and they were always accompanied by a little shoe rack of loaner "korean crocs" for people to play in (they're light and good for playing, but none of the pairs i found ever fit me well). besides that, i was a little surprised to see almost no other rhythm games besides a couple taiko cabs... though for whatever reason ever single arcade seemed to have at least two "THE Bishibashi" cabs.

the "real" arcades were easily outnumbered by the "fake" arcades that were just wall-to-wall crane machines, they seemed to fill the niche in korean nightlife districts that pachinko usually occupies in japan. the people yearn to (fake) gamble, i guess. along the road i also noticed a kind of establishment i've never seen before, "self-serve photo studios", they were EVERYWHERE. it wasn't like photobooths/purikura, they were actually whole unmanned storefronts with props, backdrops and a bunch of little rooms to take photos in, they seemed to be getting a decent amount of use too. what they say about korea being a vain culture is true... random korean guys on the street or serving you in the store look like they're in boy bands, they've clearly had work done and their skin is shiny from applying makeup, looksmaxxing has already been the norm for korean guys for years. korean girls of course almost universally looked like models, cuter than the japanese girls... i'm told this is because they're better at applying more "natural"-looking makeup, meanwhile in japan you frequently see girls doing ghastly things with makeup, ESPECIALLY right beneath the eye. on the other hand, japanese girls are more fashionable, or at the very least more adventurous with their outfits... the koreans were always slick but inoffensive, i don't recall ever seeing anything as flashy as some of japan's more out-there subcultural styles...

the next day, we took the KTX high-speed rail (tickets paid for by the cousin) from busan to seoul, in the opposite corner of the country. i don't have a whole lot to report about the ride, i spent most of the ride on my laptop writing, like half the route is in tunnels and the other half is briefly whooshing through the narrow valleys between tunnels. the one nice thing is that they still had a drinks vending machine inside the train carriage, in japan they've been pretty much eliminated (as i discovered during one unpleasant and very thirsty ride). in seoul we were back to paying our own way so we stayed in this miserable myeongdong guesthouse, three of us in a single room where the two beds in it took up approximately 95% of the square footage. at least it was close to seoul station and the "action" in myeongdong, one of the biggest tourist districts in the city.

as you might expect myeongdong is a bit meme-tier, mostly just a bunch of shopping, in the evening they also run a larp night market for the tourists. back in the busan area there had been almost no other westerner tourists but here we started encountering them again, compared to what you see in japan there was a way higher proportion of women, both alone and in groups. japan's for the boys, korea's for the girls... the reasons for this are left as an exercise to the reader. i noticed that there were a lot of cosmetics stores, and also for whatever reason a bunch of suitcase stores that were specifically targeting japanese shoppers, huge signs saying "スーツケース" and named things like "スーツケースの世界". i did buy one thing in myeongdong, i got some new glasses using money the aunt and uncle gifted us (oh yeah that's right, they also just straight-up GAVE us some money). optometry is a real racket in the US, why do you need a prescription for glasses and why are they only valid for 1-2 years? surely there cannot be an epidemic of people harming themselves with slightly-incorrect glasses prescriptions...one of the flashiest and most unusual stores close to where we were staying was called "HBAF", very colorful in-your-face design plastered with this smiling ovoid mascot in a variety of guises everywhere, including as statues and giant plushies inside the store. some kind of character goods shop like "line friends"? no, they don't sell anything except for a million different flavors of ALMOND, "HBAF" stands for "Healthy But Awesome Flavor", according to their website "HBAF is the largest nut brand in Korea, where there is not a single almond produced".

this is what the trail up the hill i took was called... my friend and i found it particularly funny because one of the running jokes in japan was that we were constantly committing faux pas landing us in ever-lengthening eras of humiliation... "the decade of humiliation", "the century...", "the millenia...", "the eon..." our first full day in seoul nobody really knew what we should do, so i suggested we go visit seoul tower. it came to mind readily because it was visible from where we were staying in myeongdong, in fact it appeared to be within comfortable walking distance. we set off walking to the tower with me navigating by dead reckoning ("look guys, you can see it right there, let's just head that direction"), but after only one wrong turn leading to a dead end my friend's gf, exasperated, called it off and pulled out her phone to figure out where to go (she works in teaching so she's probably used to stamping out whimsy and deviancy). there's a cable car that goes up most of the hill to the tower on top, but i was determined to make my way all the way up on foot. my friend really wanted to walk up too, however his gf was sending strong signals that she preferred to take the cable car instead by walking up the base of the hill so slowly that she had to be exaggerating and then doing over-the-top laborious breathing when she reached us waiting, so we parted ways at the cable car station and i walked up solo.

to be fair, the hike up was pretty rough, it was mostly stairs and on top of already being quite humid it was also the hottest part of the day. nobody else except for me was walking up at that time, the only people i encountered on the trail were all coming down. at the very least it wasn't very long, only a mile or so, and at the top i spent 5-10 minutes strolling around looking for the cable car crew, hoping to impress them with my speed. eventually i gave up and sent a text asking where they were... to my surprise i had managed to beat them in making it up the hill, they were still waiting to get on a cable car down at the station, there was a long line for it and they thought it could be another fifteen minutes or more. to kill the time, i wandered around the shops and restaurants at the base of the tower, there was even an arcade up there that i went into thinking there was no way they'd haul a pump cab to it all the way up the hill.

to my surprise the arcade had TWO pump cabs, but i didn't hop on them because something else they had caught my attention even more... they had a HAND PUMP cab too. it's exactly what it sounds like, pump it up except for your hands, the same 10-panel pad layout recreated with little circular buttons, although the cab is technically called "BeatOn" it runs on the exact same pump it up software, just a locked-down version without networking capabilities so that hand players don't mess up the global high scores. the cabs are almost impossible to find outside of korea, usually people just build their own setups for hand pump, and it seems they're pretty rare in korea now too since it's no longer being updated. i sat down and immediately put a thousand wonnies into the cab... i got the hang of it fast, pretending like my hands were my feet and alternating them to hit notes like i would normally while reading a pump chart, the one issue is that the cab had this bizarre visual glitch that made the notes flicker constantly. still, i was good enough that i could play through it, and i texted the cable car crew to meet me in the arcade when they made it up.

up in the tower, i grabbed a beer and surveyed the urban landscape out the windows, looking at all the green bulges interrupting the flow of the buildings and once again thinking about the difference in geography between japan and korea.

for comparison, here's a photo of osaka from abeno harukas (former tallest skyscraper in japan) i took a week later... so flat!

on our way down from the hill, we split up again because the cable car tickets had been round-trip. i noticed as i headed down that there were actually a fair number of people passing by on their way up now that it had cooled down outside. once again i managed to beat the cable car crew and had to wait for them down at the station, then we road this funky little inclinator the rest of the way down to street level. to get across the main road and back into myeongdong, we went down some stairs to an underground passageway and unexpectedly discovered that under our noses this whole time there was actually a whole retro underground mall down there with a ton of hole-in-the-wall shops, including a bunch of record stores. i wish i'd known about it before, it was more my speed than myeongdong's aboveground shopping and not even that far from where we were staying... unfortunately i didn't have long to browse because it was already nearly 5pm, closing time for almost every little shop down there, all i managed to grab was a single Turbo CD.

after dinner, we went back to our tiny guesthouse room and chilled for a while. lacking anywhere better to be that evening and craving some more handpump, i researched arcades in seoul until i identified one guaranteed to have it based on recent google maps photos. then, i declared to the room that i'd be going out to play more handpump that night and they were welcome to join... there wasn't much interest at first, as usual my friend was insistent on trying to get plenty of sleep before our early flight that morning (he also seemed oddly fatigued despite not even walking up the hill). his gf was more into going out and we worked to convince him, i gave a rousing speech about how i learned my lesson regarding this long ago, on one japan trip during the last night my friends went out to party while i stayed in to try and sleep, they ended up having a memorable night at karaoke they still talk about whereas i didn't end up sleeping a wink anyways (and if you've read my post about my last night in japan this time around, you'll see i put my money where my mouth is). it's kinda funny that i can actually do way better on this chart with my feet instead in the end he caved to the pressure and we all set out for the arcade that night, riding the subway a couple stops and then walking towards a destination known only to me. when we got there, my friend's gf was like "wait, the arcade is in HONGDAE?!", i guess it's a hot nightlife district that i of course knew nothing about beforehand. i cut right through the crowds of reveling youths, walked past the nightlife establishments, and went directly into the arcade. indeed, they were there on the third floor at the top of the stairs, two BeatOn handpump cabs (and three normal pump it up cabs). these ones didn't have that weird visual glitch the other one had, instead they were just super finnicky about which thousand wonnie bills they'd accept. i sat down and played until we ran out of paper money the machines would accept, and until we absolutely had to leave in order to make the last train.

overall, the korea trip was a good time, short and sweet, but i'm not really clamoring to go back any time soon. in fact, when my friend asked me the other day i said i would much rather go back to china than to korea, and of course japan above all. the language barrier in korea especially made me realize for the first time that by learning so much japanese i've basically "locked-in" on japan when it comes to east asia... in china/japan/korea it is still uncommon to find anyone who can speak an appreciable amount of english so the language barriers are still particularly strong there, which also means that speaking the language can "unlock" a lot more than it does in other places. i guess this is all based off the assumption that i can't or won't learn another language... and honestly, at this point i really don't think i have the mental capacity or the motivation to try learning another difficult east asian language in my lifetime. there's also the fact that korea's national interests/obsessions don't align as well with my own as japan's do, i'm not really into anything korean besides the game pump it up, i'm not that interested in k-popis there any korean music besides k-pop? you never hear about it... meanwhile there seem to be well-known japanese artists across many genres. also, isn't it strange how korea produced almost no literature of note up until han kang's the vegetarian (2007)? or cosmetics... now trains, which they LOVE in japan, on the other hand... and of course, there's just a lot more of japan to explore in the first place, filled with all sorts of delightful bubble-era boondoggles to stumble across. i will say, though, that the food in korea may be what could lure me back...

misc. notes