I'm drinking for sure

friday was tims birthday. saturday was brandons birthday. sunday was my birthday. sunday night was the adventure.

we all met up outside the chicken hof near work at 7pm. the crew numbered six. we wandered down the street towards the river and found a nice place to have some samgipsal. samgipsal(im totally spelling it wrong) is a delicious thing for meat lovers. in the middle of the table is a hole where they put a nice red bowl of hot coals. ontop of which sits a steel grill. on the grill you throw on some rectangular cuts of pig, mushroom caps, and garlic. when the meat is done, you put it on a leaf of lettuce and add a bit of been paste, some julienne cut greens in a marinade and wrap it all up. yum yum.

the only korean with us on that night was brian. a korean national who speaks english really well. he was educated in canada and plans on going to the states in a few months to take his masters. he's a good guy. because he was the only one who spoke english he became our tour guide. where he was taking us i will never forget.

when i think of hookers in korea, the only images that came to mind before sunday were the dodgy looking skanks who chill out on hooker hill in the various "drinking rooms" where they get men to order them drinks before leading them into dimly lit rooms in the back, down/up stairs. the women are all dressed in latest skank wear, as their clients are almost always westerners. where we were heading was a korean hooker section...far far away form hooker hill.

we got out of the taxi underneath a highway connection, the pollution biting at my lungs as i drew on my marlboro light. i really do need to get a surgical mask. nevertheless along the road are many little entrences to alleys, hidden away with what looked like those strips of plastic they have in the meat department in a grocery store. once past these smelly, dirty barriers my eyes were soon met by the shrill voices of women saying "sexy sex sex.

in alleys maybe four or five feet wide were a myriad of stalls selling meat, spicy things, worms, beetles, squid, octipus, cola, beer, soju, you name it. on one side of the alley was the wall; the other side being a roadway. the opposite wall from a distance resembles a shiny glowing line of glass. However as you move closer you see that each window is a different brothel, with the ladies sitting on the floor in formation.

what set this place apart from hookerhill in etaywon was that all the women had these sullen looks on their faces. passing as many as a hundred of these places i noticed they were all for the most part watching the same tv show while they waited for their next client. they made sure their hair was in place, and put on large ammounts of makeup.

what amazed me the most about this area of town was that all the women wore the same thing. they all had on wedding dresses. for the most part all the dresses were white, but some places had them in lime green, red, and blue. it was spooky in a way. no words can describe how i felt. i became so nervous...looking at all the women sitting there either watching tv, doing their makeup, smoking cigarettes, or just staring out the window looking for their next trick.

at the entrances of all the places stood an older female, not dressed up in a gown, but rather in shabby clothes. apparently they were the ladies of the houses. they were the ones who did the bargaining, took the money, and organized who got who and all that. i wouldnt go as far as to say they were the pimps, because im sure the real power figures were men, keeping themselves shacked up in the back counting money. im also sure most of the places we past were gang owned.

apparently these places are popular with young men heading off for their two years mandatory military training. what i saw were business men drunk as skunks swaying this way and that down the alleys. every so often youd see a man stroll out of a brothel sweat coming down his dead, and all the girls inside saying goodbye in really cheery chipper voices.

for the most part these women were good looking. they were clean, and looked very proper, no matter how improper their surroundings seemed or were. ive heard that a lot of these women are sold into the proffesion by parents not needing or wanting a daughter. its sad. i was sad walking the alleys. the only solution other than leaving my friends to forage on their own was to get shit faced drunk. and i did.

me and tim, both feeling a bit out of place decided to get some soju and cola. forgetting about the cola i decided to just start drinking sojo. it did the trick, for a while.

because me and a few others didnt want to have sex, we decided to get a "show" and sex for the ones who did. we ended up in a back room of one of these brothels, my korean counterpart haggeling the price down to 200,000won for the six of us.

the room was smaller than my bedroom, which itself isnt the biggest room. six of us, six of them crammed into a 7x7 room with a large coffee table in the centre. "when are they bringing the beer i thought" as a very pretty korean woman sat down beside me in her wedding dress and put her arm around mine. thats when the chain smoking began. god i was nervous. it was like a bad dream in some ways.

a few minutes later, a broad in a lime green wedding dress came in, obviously borrowed from another establishment. she was the one doing the "show" for us.

as soon as she got in the room the gown was on the floor. standing their naked as can be she put a knife in her punany handle first and began cutting an apple; slicing peices up for us to eat.

when the apple was cut the knife came out and in went a canle. she had us say "ONE TWO THREE" and on three she snapped the candle in half. wow!

candle comes out, turkey baster with yogurt drink and beer goes in. she stands up and then squats over a glass half filling it with liquid. she passed the drink to shane to drink and as soon as she passed it to him, he passed it to tim, and tim then passed it to the next person and then to me. im drunk. what the fuck. i drank it. it tasted like yogurt drink and beer. nothing more cigarettes cant cure. "man when the fuck are we gotting out of here".

after the whole "holy shit you drank it" blurbs finished a hard boiled egg, shell and all, ejected from the hookers nether region. offering the egg to shane, he lay it on the table...knowing not to even bother passing it around. "WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!". "is that what i think it is?", the answer from all five was a unanomous "yes!".

the show ended....not five minutes after it started. the guys having sex went to do their thing leaving me, time, and shane in the room alone with one of the ladies. we explained that we werent having sex because we were married. it seemed like a good enough reason. i figured that acting religious in a country saturated to the brim with christianity was better then trying to tell that i didnt feel like sleeping with a possibly disease ridden female.

ten minutes later the other blokes returned and i gulped my beer and we got the hell outta there.

id have to say that for me, that night was perhaps the strangest, most nerve racking night ive ever had to deal with. the women sitting with us were nice enough. you could see the girlyness in them and knew that when not at work they tried to live normal lives doing the things everyday people did. i thought long and hard about what had happened that night. trying to get to sleep was difficult. i kept thinking of what these women had to do for a living....and asked myself if any of them went to school, had friends outside of work, knew their parents, and so on. we had asked one of the girls with us if she lived at the brothel and she answered yes.

alleys of sorrow.