Being hungry, we decided to enjoy a meal at a Korean Barbeque place. Then, finding that the restaurant did little to sate the burning appetite generated by all the intensity of our game of Starcraft, we took our hunger to the streets. Not unlike New York, Seoul has a plentiful supply of street vendors that sell everything from walnut cakes to boiled silkworm cocoons. We chose a cart run by two pleasant old women that sold quite nearly every pig part imaginable (lung, ear, even rectum), all soaked in a fiery red sauce.
Above: Not the cart we ate at
Our group, now outfitted with four well-fed, strapping young men, left the domesticity of the food cart behind and took to the mean streets of Seoul.
The “mean streets” were swiftly abandoned for the first Karaoke place we found
Fueled by nothing but a variety of pig parts and a couple drinks of 소주 (soju, Korean Starch Liquor), our voices tore down the halls of the noraebang with a kind of passionate but delicate elegance that would make angels cry. We sang and we sang our hearts out. After all, a pig had given its life so we could make such beautiful music. With every breath we took in the glory of the night, and with every lyric we captured the fury of our times.
Now that I’ve had a chance to fan my ego with a little historical revisionism, let me come clean with a better representation of what I looked like:
Is it still even OKAY to make William Hung jokes?
The wonderful part about Karaoke etiquette in Asia is that it’s actually considered LESS impolite to force your companions to suffer through five minutes of your worst rendition of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On than to not participate at all. This fact made my life much, much easier.
