Confessions of a Dangerous Blogger:

Last Friday, I neglected to mention the lovely dinner I had. I had seen a restaurant near my house which had a nice interior and had marked it in my memory as a place I should check out at a later date (or maybe while I was on one). So, Friday being the day I went out with a friend, I decided that it was the perfect day to try. Actually, it was not planned because we had intended to eat at a nice Italian place, but destiny and the gods of inconvenience made that impossible.

So, we sat down to eat and it turned out they didn’t sell beef or pork, but actually fish. I looked at the fish tanks outside the shop. Ahh, it made sense. I’m adventurous and it was still a nice restaurant so we ordered some fish and some soju and waiting for it to arrive so we could cook it on the hot coals.

If you haven’t dined in Korea, then you may not be familiar with the style of some restaurants. Often you will find a hole in the middle of the table and then a bucket of hot coals will be placed inside, with a grate over the top. You cook the meat yourself over the hot coals and eat it straight away. It’s fresh and often you will wrap the meat along with some rice in a piece of lettuce. Mmm! So that’s where we were.

About 15 minutes later, the lady approached with the fish, freshly cut. The fish I saw in the tanks were a special sort, a long eel looking thing, maybe it was eel, I really don’t know. At any rate they were the extremely placid type. That is, they were in the tank. As the lady put the fish over the hot coals, I felt there was something different about the fish. It was not like all the other meat that I had cooked over coals. There was something about it which I couldn’t quite place. Then it hit me. THE FISH WAS STILL MOVING!!!

Of course, it took me all of a millisecond to realize this and I stared in shock as the different sections of the eel thing writhed and bent over the coals. I wasn’t put off, I was intrigued and puzzled as to how I was to feel about it. Then I realized what my true feeling was. I was excited! This was probably the coolest meal I’ve ever cooked. It was so fresh it was actually alive while cooking. After about 20 seconds, it stopped, but I can’t forget the little pieces bending about. Maybe if they had made the same effort in the tank when it was catching time they might have missed our coals that night.

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Last night, as predicted, I went with my businessman friend to a few bars. We initially just went for a quiet drink in Itaewon to chat about life and work. However, at 3am he decided that he was in the mood for a nightclub and we went to a club called Juliana which incidentally is the name of an old friend. It may seem a strange time and day to be going to a club. It was a Tuesday night and it was really late. However this is Korea and things are a little different here. Let me explain…

See in Korea, the traditional nightclubs are completely different to western clubs. For starters, seating is arranged and everyone sits at a table. There is a dancefloor, but it’s not really the primary feature of the club. The men will have drinks and a fruit platter brought to their table. This is part of the service that you have paid for (through the nose). Now comes the interesting part…

The girls sit at their own tables and are taken by the waiters to sit with the men at their tables. It is known as ‘booking’ whereby the introduction is done by the waiter to save the men having to go around chatting up women. It’s quite a spectacle. If the woman is attracted to the men, she may stay and have drinks with the men, or feast on their fruit platter. If she isn’t really into them, she’ll make an excuse to leave and 10 seconds after sitting she’s gone again.

Clubs like this are all over Korea. I suppose the attraction is twofold. First, Koreans don’t really like to meet new people in bars. You don’t see bars or clubs here with free seating and an open bar. Generally, people like to form their own groups and sit together at a private table. Booking is the second part of this strategy, because the men and women still want to meet each other. The problem of private rooms and seats is overcome by waiters dragging unwilling girls and plonking them down onto the seat.

So we were in one of those. Actually we were in one of the most exclusive clubs in Korea. It was so exclusive that my friend had to make some calls to people who had to make more calls to get us in. Not only that, but the price for our table was $500US dollars. Now I protested before entering. I said about 100 times that I didn’t have the money and even if I did, I wouldn’t be spending it so girls could get plonked next to me. Why I could spend that money to travel to the Phillipines, stay in a hotel for 2 nights, swim on the beach, eat some good food, come back and have money to spare. The Porshe outside the door reminded me that this was not the venue to think cheap. Anyway, he insisted that it was his treat, so we went there.

Amazingly, despite the night, despite the lateness of our arrival, there were girls to be dragged. They came, they left. Some stayed a little longer, drank some whiskey, then left a little later. All in all I couldn’t imagine why people would pay $500 on a regular basis for this privilege. I put this to my friend. He said that, sure, it was a lot of money, but that money was allowing you to meet dozens of beautiful young girls, screened by management so that only the best entered. It was the pinnacle of quality that one could hope to find on a random Tuesday. Indeed, the girls were quite good for that time. I can only imagine what it must be like on a Friday night. But it’s still not worth it if you ask me.

So after my friend was completely drunk and I had finished gorging on the fruit platter, I went home. I did miss my night of West Wing, but it was fun and I had a nice Korean experience.

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