New Year

One of the best things by far about Korean New Year is that about three weeks after it they have another New Year, meaning that if it is shit (which let's face it, New Year often is) you can have another stab. My New Year was fucking brilliant. I was on a beach with more than 150,000 people, at least four of which were drunk, watching the sun come up while someone set of the equivalent of the Moldolvan GDP in fireworks and ten thousand Koreans formed an orderly queue to have their photo taken with yours truly before skipping off giggling.

I needless to say, was absolutely plastered. This is mostly the work of a beer that they sell in Korea and has become close to my heart: OB. You see, OB beer isn't like other beers, because it has 'Blue Technology' (see attached pic.). Most marketing strategies in Korea inadvertently serve as accidentally acute parodies of what we are subjected to in the west. Things are often marketed as having some colour technology or other. OB is the best example as it is written in english and is beer. The main role of the Blue Technology is that they can charge an absolutely piss-taking 25 pence a can instead of the normal 19 or 20 pence. Anyway it's difficult to translate how much I love this beer, which now anyone in Korea who has been drinking with me refers to lovingly as 'Technology'.

Now, i'm going to be a bit of a prick her but it has to be said. Korean's can't hold their drink. Considering that the national alcoholic beverage costs about ten pence a litre, tastes like water and gets you absolutely pissed they don't really go for it in the slightest. Most of my 'drinking' buddies (friends) out here are from the USA, and for all their loud mouthed, crude, over-enthusiastic, language-abusing, large-foam-finger waving intentions they fall firmly into the four beers and you're out category. So when on New Year's eve I found a bar that sells tequila for about thirty pence a shot I took it upon myself to get everybody in the bar absolutely brain-fucked in the most efficient execution of compulsory fun ever! I am so proud. These people were scared of me. If I saw someone attempting to sly out the exit they were immediately reprimanded through the medium of tequila. Failure to dance, match me stupid grin for stupid grin, help carry or distribute tequila or drink tequila were offences also punishable by tequila. As is said, absolute power corrupts absolutely and towards the end of the evening summary tequilaings were frequent to the point where even I didn't know what the unfortunate individual had done to deserve the tequila- eventually I was presented with a bottle of tequila and a bar-branded t-shirt and begged to leave by the one individual who had managed to escape my tequila wrath on the basis that it was actually his bar. I left with my head held high. The Americans I was drinking with now refer to me as 'The Terminator' and refuse to answer my Friday evening text-messages.

I now know why alcohol prices are so high in the UK. Once, a Korean asked me if we had Soju (the Korean national drink) in the UK and I began to laugh uncontrollably as my mind produced an image resembling a mix between that epic opening scene from Twenty-Eight Days Later and Begbie's bar fight in Trainspotting.