Makgeolli Wednesdays...

It is just past 2 a.m. on a late Wednesday night. Typically, on every Wednesday night, I go out for dinner with some friends, and this Wednesday is no exception. What makes tonight slightly different is that we went for makgeolli afterwards. This is also not all that different, because roughly 33% of the time, we will go for a few drinks after dinner on Wednesdays. But what makes tonight truly different is that I successfully came home at 1:30 or so rather than 4 or 5 or 6 a.m. Korea is a very bad place to try to abstain from alcohol.

Makgeolli, in a few words, is a Korean rice wine drink that tastes harmless going down but sneaks up on you pretty easily. I am currently in a state somewhere between soberness and intoxication, and I am comfortable in this state because it means that if I have a few glasses of water before bed, I will wake up fully functioning and able to be productive in the morn, and this is really all I want. A new makgeolli restaurant/bar just opened up exactly 44 steps (my friend Michelle counted) from my apartment. Having been open for a whopping two days now, we obviously had to check out the scene immediately. The makgeolli was among the best I've had in Korea, and this obviously horrifies me since, as previously mentioned, the place exists 44 steps from my residence.

I don't think that I actually have a point in writing this blog post. I think that I just have about 45 minutes to kill until the time that I naturally fall asleep in this country, so I need to fill the void by doing something, and since I don't trust myself reading Anna Karenina while semi-intoxicated, I decided that writing a semi-coherent blog post was a viable second option.

Tonight while four of my friends and I were engrossed in conversation, an intoxicated Korean gentleman decided to inject himself in our company. I wasn't bothered by this at all, but on the contrary was rather quite amused. He spoke slightly more English than I speak Korean. This made communication an obvious barrier, but as we were all merrily drinking, nobody felt especially frustrated with the challenge of not having a common language with which to communicate. Frankly, I was surprised that he lasted 30 or 40 minutes, and probably would have lasted longer had we not decided to skidattle...around the third or fourth time that he asked us all what our names were and where we came from, he apparently decided to give up trying to remember that my name was Jessica and I am from America, and instead decided to point at me excitedly and say, "Image-ee Amazon! Image-ee Amazon!" Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have been all that surprised by this, as I am quite used to people presuming that I am from South of the border, but there was interestingly something very strange about a Korean speculating about my ethnicity...I frankly thought that I just looked like any other foreigner in the eyes of a Korean; I find it very insightful to know that I evidently look like an indigenous jungle woman across multiple cultures...

And that's really all I have to say about that...