Sturdy...

I went to Hongdae Saturday night. I've been up there a couple of times but not on the weekend. That is the place you go to party in Seoul. It's near a University and the clubs don't close until there's no one buying drinks.

I went to a bar called Tinpan 1. Tinpan 2 is right across the street. The place was small and it was packed but it wasn't hard to get a drink. Service is great over here, whether you're at a restaurant or getting one of your co-workers to call your cell phones provider for you. In Canada, it takes 30 minutes to talk to a real life Roger's representative. Here, you call the number and within 30 seconds there's a real person on the other end of the line.

Anyway, this Tinpan place was pretty crazy. The place was full of foreigners and Koreans and everyone was getting along. The place seemed a little more inviting than Itaewon which is crawling with American soldiers, many of whom are out to simply kick some ass from what I've been told. I have to admit that all of the US soldiers I've came across thus far have been right on, and I met a few on the subway last weekend and we got each others phone numbers. I've heard they have a store on base which sells many Western goods so hopefully they'll eventually hook me up.

But back to Tinpan.

I've never really seen anything like the place to be honest. The bar is one room and it is divided in two by really long table that is maybe 15 feet long. This table had people dancing on it all night long, and the few side tables also had people up there dancing. Those things must be sturdy.

It's also cool because there was no cover so you can leave, go walk around, do some bar hopping, grab some food, then pop back in for a few more drinks. It wasn't really my type of scene but I still had a great time and there were a few English teachers I knew from orientation there so it's always a bonus when you go somewhere knowing more people than you expected to.

The drinks were also really cheap compared to Itaewon and Gangnom. Just a little over two bucks for a beer. Hard to beat that. It's just too bad the beer was Korean and tastes like water.

One of my fellow SMOEzers who was there lives on my side of the city so I was able to split a cab home with him and his Korean wife. She was a hard partier but I'm not gonna get into that now. The cab home was only 20,000 Won and we split that so it was much cheaper than I thought it would be.

I planned on waiting 'til 5:30-6:00AM for the subway to start running but by the time 5AM came I was ready to head home so I gave in and got the cab.

I think I made the right decision for once.