Drinking with Koreans

October 27, 2010

Today was my first experience “going out with my co-workers”, which was a very, very interesting encounter indeed. The day – Wednesday – was good. I had afternoon classes (well, class starting at 4:30, technically) and then in the evening I spent all three hours doing phone tests. That involves calling up the students and talking to them for about 3 minutes while they try to remember fairly significant facts from their reading books. Such as: where do we find trees? Answer: a forest. Yeah. That was a question. And no one got it right.

After that we headed out to 5500, which is a Korean BBQ place right next to the school. Sacha warned me in advance that Koreans drink a lot, and that if I tried to keep up with them, there’s no way I’d win. So I didn’t try. I stuck to beer – I probably had only 2 glasses the whole night – which turned out to be a good plan, because holy cow can those Koreans drink.

We got there early and had some BBQ while waiting for our coworkers to show up. When the Koreans finally arrived, out came the soju almost instantly. I can’t imagine how many bottles we went through – 15, maybe? Even the tiniest of the girls did like 8 or 9 shots, and believe you me, they can hold their liquor. It was actually really impressive, and I don’t know if I could duplicate the feat.

The interesting part was the social interaction. They do this thing where they ask “Are you okay?”, which is a way of being friendly and showing concern for your fellow coworkers/friends. CK was apparently concerned that I was being too nice with the kids, and that they were walking all over me, which is really only the case in one class, so I assured him that I was perfectly fine. But one of the girls was particularly adamant – Young Sun, the TA who helped me out for the medical checkup a few weeks back – and I’m going to say she asked me if I was okay at least 20 times throughout the course of the evening.

All in all it was fun, and very intriguing to watch. Next time I’ll definitely join in the soju fun, although I’ll have to make sure I don’t get carried away, and therefore need to be carried home after. I still haven’t gotten used to the all-night-partying mentality that they have here. When I was ready to head home at 2 am, the Koreans indicated that they were heading out somewhere else to continue drinking. I couldn’t believe it!