15 pints and I'm still standing...Come on and make me smile

Toasting with the mayor of Namhae

The last three weeks have been a blast.  The first weekend was a Boryeon reunion of sorts in Daegu to celebrate the birthday of everyone's favorite drunken Irishman.  Due to lack of coherent memory, that trip would be difficult to write about, though.  The following two weekends were back to back Oktoberfest parties: one on Namhae Island and the other back in Busan.  The festival in Namhae had the best beer I've tasted in a long time.  One of the big downsides of Korea is a lack of diversity in their brewing styles.  On a normal night in Korea, you basically have your choice of the three different versions of the same weak piss.  The Hilton Namhae imported 3 or four different varieties of German beer for the event and it was a welcome change.  The food was also delicious and well suited for the German celebration.  There was a noticeable lack of sauerkraut, but the Koreans must just view that as a giant waste of perfectly good cabbage.  Namhae is a much, much smaller community than where I currently live in Busan.  There's less than a hundred native speaking teachers on all of Namhae Island(compared to the 1500 waygook teachers in Busan).  Basically, we were treated like rock stars.  We got pulled in to toast after toast for another photo op.  It's a bit intimidating at first, but ultimately its just a huge ego-stroke to have twenty or thirty cameras flashing away at you every time you take a step.  They were everywhere.

I haven't seen the picture yet, but I was told that there is a huge full page spread of us drinking in the local paper.  On top of the professional photographers, we had a fairly regular stream of Korean girls who wanted their picture taken with with the foreigners.  Naturally, I was quick to cede to their requests, being a guest and all.  The mayor even took a break from kissing hands and shaking babies to come over to pose for a few pics with us.  I'm pretty sure he randomly stole a bottle of wine from a family just to pour for us; all of this to the constant click of the photo shutter. 

Another fun, but sometimes disturbing aspect of Namhae's Oktoberfest was the near constant flow of contests and musical acts.  The acts were mostly made up of dance classes consisting of little old people:  think the female version of the Shriners dancing the foxtrot with each other.  The contests were a little more entertaining and we tried to take part in them as much as possible.  All of the guys were embarrassed in the arm wrestling competition by a Russian built like a fire hydrant.  All of the girls were beat by a behemoth of a Korean woman, a strange site on any day.  We avoided the hammer and nail contest (?) and were chased off stage before the drinking competition began.  The dancing competition was split up by gender and age and was fairly uncomfortable to watch.  Most Korean dance moves look more rudimentary than the half time performance at a peewee basketball game so the stage wasn't exactly stacked with talent.  We avoided that one, too.  All in all, the festival left a lot to be desired, but it was still a good time.

The following weekend started off with a barefoot hike up the side of a mountain in Busan.  The event was part of a weekend long Oktoberfest party and mountain clean-up sponsored by a hotel/spa near PNU.  Let me start off by saying that I don't like hiking.  I'm not really a big fan of walking, in general.  And I think it's especially ridiculous to walk up the side of a fucking mountain, over rocks and sticks and other things that cut without wearing a goddamn pair of shoes.  I needed to get that off my chest... I apologize.  That being said, it wasn't really that bad.  The ground was fairly clean and easy to walk on and the trip up wasn't that bad.  The trip down was another story, though. 

Winning!!

The meaty balls of my feet had been well-tenderized on the upward journey, so it was particularly painful on the downward slope.  Luckily, like any good Korean hiker, I had came prepared with plenty of liquid pain reliever to make it more bearable.  Once we made it to the bottom, we were awarded prizes for a loudness contest and our ability to pick up trash.  (Full disclosure:  my "trash" was mostly made up of the soju bottles that I managed to empty on the hike.  We were the last group to go, though and all the good trash was taken... was just easier to make our own.)  For our hard work in clean-up and our uncanny ability to be loud, obnoxious foreigners... we won 4 bottles of dish detergent and a facial cleanser.  So I got that going for me. 

The event cost a total of $20, that included the hiking event, entry to one of the best spa's in town, and a commemorative mug that was used at the Oktoberfest party back at the hotel.  With the mug, it was a buck-a-beer and we did our best to get our money's worth.  There were many, many "Gun bae"s and "Wi ha yeo"s that were only matched by the low clink of the mugs as they were repeatedly raised in a toast.  The beer was better on the first weekend, but this was still more tasty than our normal offerings.  And the buck-a-beer in a beefy mug was a lot easier to justify than the $5 dixie cups on Namhae.  There was a constant stream of entertainment on the main stage in front us and a constant stream of "dancing with a foreigner" at our table.  To be honest, the "dancing with a foreigner" was only being proliferated by one old Korean man, but what he lacked in numbers, he made up with enthusiasm.  You haven't really lived until you've seen an eight year old Korean doing the Macarena.  By the time a two man violin band broke out Cotton-Eyed Joe, the entire party was doing an impromptu epileptic square dance.  And as I looked around at the warm glow and light haze, it was nice to know that all it takes is a few cocktails and some shitty dance music to make a southern Illinois boy smile...