An Asian Tradition, Beer Pong

My buddy Dee and I decided we should black out last night; and black out I did.

Yesterday, Dee hit up the local sports store and bought some ping-pong balls. My favorite thing about the sports store is a large box they have in the window labeled "6 Second Abs." I feel that the name is either incorrectly translated or the Asians have come up with an unbelievably efficient way to tone your abs.

After work we got some Korean barbecue and had a few pregame drinks. We went to a local grocer and bought plastic cups and headed back to our neighborhood to play the inaguaral beer pong match of the 2007 season.

We lined up the cups and let it fly. The first game was definitely a game for the ages. It was back and forth the whole time until the end when Dee managed to pull away, and eventually made a shot into my last beer, almost ending the game. However, beer pong enthusiasts will remember that one is given a rebuttal opportunity to save their own ass and stay in the game. Dee still had two cups on the table which meant that I would have to make two perfect throws to send the game into overtime.

I set my feet, lined up the shots and made two shots under pressure. Local sports journalists have compared it to the Christian Laetner shot against Duke. Others have called me the Asian-American Tiger Woods (not to be confused with the actual Asian-African-American Tiger Woods.) I'm cool under pressure and have ice flowing through my veins (or beer) when the game is on the line.

I ended up winning the game, which is even more impressive when you learn that the game took place in Dee's apartment. It was an away game for me and I still managed to pull out a victory.

The beautiful part about beer pong is: although one player may be defined as the "winner" and the other as the "loser," there are no losers in beer pong. Everyone is afforded an equal opportunity to black out, thus we are all winners.

The beer we were using for the game was Cass Red. Cass is a beer I've been drinking ever since I arrived in this cooky land. It is basically a shitty Natural Light, but don't allow those words to convince you it is decent - it is a horrible beer. Recently, Cass has come out with Cass Red which is basically the same beer with twice the alcohol content. I'll be honest, it did the trick.

Somewhere around 1:00am we ended up at the convenience store buying more beer. The convenience store is about 100 yards from our apartment building and somehow I managed to lose Dee on the way home. I honestly have no clue how we got separated, but we managed to part ways and I woke up with two gigantic beers in my fridge and a minor pain in my head.

I don't remember coming home or how my night ended - a textbook case of blacking out. I set a goal for myself at the beginning of the day and I accomplished it. Let this be a lesson to all of you, if you set a goal and really put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. Reach for the stars!

Love from Seoul

2am Ramblings - Inspired by Bukowski

Home
is where I want to be
but I think I'm already there
I walk this Earth being me
and seeing what I want to see
the people glance my way
as I saunter through the day-to-day
business of living life
The memo says: "Production levels are
down for this quarter, so try to do your best to
go the extra mile."
No camplaints come from me
as I walk the city streets
Doing what I can and trying to understand
All I can do is
Smile

Away
from what I understand
as normal
the people fill the streets
and walk amongst the fleets
of money-making schemes and
loudspeaker dreams screaming sales and
tales of the Korean unknown
treasures waiting in the bed of trucks
along the alley

If only the
mute button
on my remote control
worked on trucks

A Little Taste of Home

I finally saw one. I've been looking for one ever since I arrived in Seoul and I finally saw one today. I was walking down into the subway station by my apartment and a Korean girl was walking the other way wearing a Royals shirt. One of those powder blue t-shirts with the front graphic resembling an authentic Royals jersey. I knew it would happen at some point, but I got incredibly excited when I saw it. However, I'm not 100% sure she is a loyal KC fan.

I would equate people wearing English shirts over here to Americans getting those Chinese character tattoos - they might not necessarily know what they mean, but they think they look cool. I saw a guy walking the streets the other day wearing a nice blazer and a shirt that was a fake Skittles shirt that said "Shittles" and had a toilet paper roll instead of a cloud at the end of the rainbow. One of the kids I teach who happens to be about 10, wears a shirt on a regular basis that has a huge marijuana leaf and the number 420 on it. There is even a legend around our school of a kindergartener who used to wear a pair of jeans with a patch that said "Too drunk to fuck." Looking back on it, I wonder if some of the Chinese character encounters I have had in my past were more vulgar than I ever imagined.

People wear American sports teams' gear all over this city so I've been keeping a lookout for somebody wearing Royals, Chiefs or Jayhawks garb. I did see one guy wearing a Chief's getup when I was Christmas shopping, but I don't count that encounter as an official siting. Picture this: I saw a guy that was a few inches taller than me and weighed about a small child more than me. He had a Chief's visor circling his head just below his crew cut. He was wearing shorts even though it was freezing out and had an official Chief's Starter windbreaker from 1994 keeping his upper-half warm. He looked like the kind of guy that would be walking the streets of Raytown getting ridiculed by the locals. All he was missing was the Zoobaz pants.

I digress. Back to the whole "taste of home" part of this blogging. This past weekend was the kickoff of one of my favorite international events - March Madness. Nothing makes me feel more at home than watching the Jayhawks run some ball. The first game took place live on my computer at 8:00 am on Saturday morning. In order to make Seoul a little more Lawrence-y, I trekked across Seoul earlier in the week to buy all the fixins for Louise's West bloody marys: V8, A1, worcestershire and tobasco with fellow Jayhawker, Mr. Atwood, providing the pickles and vodka. We were pretty well shit-canned by 11:00 am. Nothing says home like being close to blacked out in the a.m. while the Jayhawks beat a team by 40 points. We topped the weekend off with some Sunday beer-can chickens coated in Gates hot and spicy rub and covered in Gates sauce.

I haven't really been homesick very much. Sure I miss friends and restauants, but my quality of life is so great over here, that most of the homesickness thoughts just come in passing. Either way, it is still nice to get a little taste of home every now and then. Between my Royals fan neighbors, Louise's West bloody marys and drunk kids cawing out windows, I feel like this place is becoming more and more like Kansas every day. I'm guessing by this time next week Seoul will have decided that evolution never really happened and their main export will shift from electronics to wheat.

Love from Seoul

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomatoe

Confusing stuff like this happens so often over here I've become somewhat desensitized to them, but this made me laugh so hard I thought I would share.

On Friday night, I went to a Brazilian barbecue restaurant. They have a huge spit out front where they cook all different kinds of meats and side items: lamb, an assortment of beef, pork, chicken, sausage, potatoes and pineapple. Servers circulate throughout the restaurant with the skewers and you pretty much eat as much meat and side items as you can. The food was absolutely delicious (as was the Chilean red wine.) I find myself eating a lot of Asian food, being that I live in Asia, but sometimes it's nice to get some cuisine from other parts of the world.

Dinner ended and we were pretty full and a little tipsy. My buddy decided that the perfect ending to our meal would be some hookah smoke. Tons of bars over here have hookahs with a variety of different tobaccos. None of us were too familiar with the area, so I decided to ask the waiter if he could point us in the right direction.

Now, I still have yet to learn Korean, so I still rely mainly on actions, body language and other people's understanding of English in order to communicate with others in this country. Fortunately for me, the majority of the waiters at this restaurant were Brazilian, therefore they also were not Korean-speakers - they spoke Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese, but they were also fluent in Spanish and asked if we could speak it as well because they were more comfortable with it than English. My Spanish doesn't take me much further than being able to engage in simple conversations and, conveniently enough, restaurant Spanish, but it was enough to get by. Even though we were all speaking our second language, I felt like I was communicating with our servers on a level I am unable to in most restaurants I am in in Korea. It made me feel great.

So I felt like we had become kind of chummy with our waiters and I thought he could point me towards a bar that would have hookahs. I asked, in English, "Hey man, do you know where I could get a hookah around here?" To which he responded, without missing a beat, "No. No hookers around here." I lost my shit. I was laughing so hard I didn't even bother to try to continue the conversation and figure out where a hookah bar was. I was just content to walk out of the restaurant with our waiter thinking I was that comfortable loudly asking where a man could find a whore. It's amazing how highly people think of Americans over here.

Love from Seoul

What about the Muslims?

In many of the subway stations around Seoul there are large projection screens placed on the median in between the two sides of the tracks. On the screens they show some news highlights, stocks, commercials and public service announcements. My favorite public service announcement is an anti-terrorism ad. The whole ad is Korean, so I don't fully understand it, but I think I hava a pretty clear understanding of the message they are trying to get across.

The ad begins with a typical subway station during a busy rush hour. People are going this way and that as police officers keep a watchful eye on the commuters. Then, the camera zooms in on the face of a white man - the only white man in a sea of Koreans. The white man's shifty eyes and scruffly beard make it evident he is up to no good. Then, and this is the part where my heart starts to race, the white man places a backpack under a seat in the subway. What is in the backpack? I usually carry books and an umbrella in my backpack, and I am a white man, but one can only assume the shifty man in the ad has a backpack full of WMD's. Really, it's the only logical solution.

The ad now shows a young girl and her father noticing the terrorist and his actions. They rush to a phone and dial a number, presumably the number that is flashing on the screen. In an ironic plot twist, these people must have seen the very ad they are starring in.

Next, they show police officers checking the subway for any backpacks that may contain bombs. They have WMD-sniffing dogs at their side and their faces make it evident they will be all business on this search. This a stark contrast from the usual demeanor of the Seoul subway officer - they are essentially the equivalent of American shopping mall parking lot security guards, the kind that stares you down as you enter the parking garage and then goes right back to napping once you have passed. The kind of securtiy guard that has a car with yellow blinking lights on the top that are used only in emergency situations - like when he runs out of donuts or has take a leak really bad. In the station by my school I actually saw one of the subway officers wearing slip-on shoes - not the best attire for the terrorist-chasing seen in the ad.

This is where the ad gets a little confusing, but I think I've deciphered the meanings. The next image flashed on the screen is a close-up of the young girl. Her face on the screen looks one part terrified, one part worried and one part freedom-loving. Suddenly, her visage becomes engulfed with flames. The drug-sniffing dogs and their masters have failed the little girl and the terrorists have won another victory in the war on terror. Or have they? I think her face may be engulfed not with the flames of terror, but with the flames of freedom because she was wise enough to call and report the white man with a backpack on the subway. Without her courageous action, the terrorists would have won - but she has saved many a life today and we will all get to work on time and alive because she did her duty. It really makes me feel at home to see such patriotic and paranoid propoganda.

I sometimes forget that we are all soldiers in the war on terror and this ad offers a sobering reminder that at any moment, a white man could be plotting to take my freedom-loving life. I try my best to be ever-vigilant as I walk through Seoul - always keeping an eye out for white people with backpacks. In a city where there are about 10 ESL teachers for every 1 citizen (that's an exaggeration, but there are a shitload of us over here) I encounter many potential terrorists each day, but I make sure to report each and every one to the police. One can never be too careful - there is a war going on.

Kill Whitey

Love from Seoul