Welcome Back Charlie!

On Saturday, we welcomed back a familiar face, Charlie.

Charlie was editor of the magazine Liz and I worked at, SpeakEasy. Charlie, like the rest of us, cast out his line far away from Korea but found himself pulled back in. We had a big reunion last night in Hongdae. It was Vivian, Anton, Andrew, Liz, Charlie, and myself. First order of business- food.

Once we arrived at the galbi restaurant, we were ushered upstairs at the galbi restaurant..like red headed stepchildren and were tucked away in a corner by ourselves. The reason why we were denied dining al fresco? Personally I think they just wanted to save their street cred and hide the foreigners from street view. But THEIR excuse was that apparently, you can't cook pork outside.

Now can someone tell me the difference between cooking beef and cooking pork outside? There was absolutely no tell tale difference when we were cooking beef and pork upstairs on the "terrace". I'll just chalk it up to another Korean idiosynchratic pile of silly... like not flushing toilet paper down the toilet but instead throwing it into a wastebasket atop a bunch of other wads of used toilet paper... mmm toilets and galbi!

After a very enteraining dinner (conversation = A+, Food= D -) we headed to Diggins for a brief taste of Funk Music and then to Nomad for some Jenga, Captain Cocks (that's their insane version of Jack and Coke), darts and Liz dragging an unsuspecting Korean man to the dancefloor for a quick K-Pop dance lesson. After hearing numerous songs from Mariah and Janet, I simply was not content to just singing along at a table... I wanted a mic.

Next stop was the Candy Shop Noraebang. You would think with (what Westerners would deem) an excess of noraebangs in Hongdae, it wouldn't be a problem to get a room. Wrong. Even for it being rather early (around 12?) we had to stoop into several establishments before even getting someone to tell us we'd have to wait 10 minutes for the next available room. Well we certainly weren't going to let that room go after all that trouble so we rocked out for a good 3 solid hours. Songs ranged in styles and tempos. There was some Boyz II Men, Hall & Oates, Kim Carnes, Ricky Martin, Jamiraquai, Beyonce, Meatloaf, Stevie Wonder, Queen, Mr. Big..

However I am going to get on my soapbox and say that my Fleetwood Mac AND Kelly Clarkson selections were prematurely aborted! Noraebang etiquette states that should someone hit the cancel button on someone else's song, said offender should either let victim choose another song or at least fill up the victim's Buy the Way dixie paper cup with an acceptable liquid apology.

Now I don't REALLY know if there is any sort of Noraebang etiquette but there should be... maybe that will be a future blog post.