~ Gnawbert dot com ~

My first genuine “Fuck Korea” moment happened the other week.

That’s right, my first moment where I, for lack of any better description, got so frustrated with some practice, ritual, custom, and illogical cultural behavior here that I blew up like Bill O’Rielly after an hour with Al Gore and George Clooney. I got mad. Not just mad, very VERY mad. Atomic mad. Destroyer of Worlds style mad.

Why?

Let’s back up a little. For the last three months, my girlfriend and I have been going to the same galbi restaurant on an almost weekly pilgrimage for their mouth watering marinated meat. It’s the kind of hole in the wall place where the tables are packed with locals and any white face is a rarity and is often stared at with bemused, shocked, intrigued and excited looks. It’s run by a husband and wife team with a few old grandmothers pitching in. The cast of characters would make Hemingway happy.

Husband mans the oven outside and carries the red-hot coals with tongs, deftly lifting them over your head and dropping them into the grill in the center of your table. Wife scuttles back and forth from table to table, quick enough to slop some marinated ribs on your grill and pass out eight dishes of vegetables and top off the beer. The place is a kind of lively hive where locals feed, laugh, drink themselves silly, and occasionally probably fight. It’s a soup kitchen for kimchi; the last place you’d want to take a first date. A guaranteed place NOT to score, but get a good meal and an earful of conversation from the Korean shoulder to shoulder with you at the next table. It’s a noxious den of coal fumes, burning meat, soju, cigarette smoke and garlic that almost seems so downright dirty it would probably fail any health inspection if such an agency even existed over here.

Basically, it’s my favorite kind of place, and the best place to eat, period. Screw the chains. For my money, if it’s where the locals go to grub, it’s four stars in my Zagat.

So after three months of eating there, we swung by after a particularly long day, my heart set on feasting on flesh of pig slow roasted over a bed of coals then curled up in a lettuce wrap and packed full of onion and garlic like a protein bomb to the belly. It’s the kind of meat that could solve world conflicts, if only we could set those damn vegans straight. The girlfriend wasn’t hungry, but I was ravenous, so I got us a table while she went to use the restroom.

Five minutes later, she comes back to a nasty scene. Me, yelling in English at the husband and wife while some drunk businessman acts like the U.N. and translates my frustrations into his native tongue, and the husband and wife’s words back into mine, often taking great liberties to tone down the obvious profanities, and trust me, there were quite a few on my end.

What set it off?

They wanted to charge a fee for having my girlfriend sit at the table, even though she wasn’t eating. That’s right, they wanted to charge us for two sets of ribs, even though she didn’t want to eat and was content on simply ordering a beer. A ’service charge’ was the word they used, but all I heard was: “rip off the whitey“, especially when the service charge was the same price as a second set of ribs.

This wasn’t a buffet, it was a blue collar joint kept open by spit, booze, good meat and better memories. For three months we’d been dining there, bringing our other waegook friends and raving about the food like a pair of pentecostals in the throes of the Spirit. And suddenly dinner for one and drinks for two turned into a full blown stand off that went something like this:

Me: “She doesn’t want kalbi, she just wants to drink a beer and hang out.”
Them: “You, kalbi. Her, no kalbi. Service fee, same price kabi”
Me: “No, her beer. One beer. Me, kalbi and beer.”
Them: “Yes, service fee, her. You kalbi. Her, no kalbi. Service fee, same price kalbi.”
Me: “That’s bullshit.”

I was pissed. On principal alone the practice was silly, but I’d hyped this place up and dragged in a few friends over the course of our three months and practically eaten a few pigs worth of pork rib alone! We were regulars, dammit! White faced monkeys the locals laughed at and and drank with. It was like Woody from Cheers cutting Norm off because he was worried about his liver.

I’m not proud of my outburst, and I still maintain that their policy is bollocks, but it happened, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve had my share of moments in my life where I’ve been a total prick, and this was certainly one of them.

“Fuck Korea,” I remember saying, before storming off, the husband and wife bowing and saying “Sowwee” as I passed, swearing to badmouth and boycott their place worse than Rosa Parks on a bus to the Republican National Convention. All the little stresses of living abroad had built up, and this silly little custom that’s hardly practiced anymore (that of charging a fee for someone who doesn’t eat) was the spark that set off the powder keg beneath my ass.

Several years ago I spent the spring semester of my junior year in college circling the globe on a ship with a thousand other Americans. We saw a dozen different countries in just over a hundred days, and somewhere between the beers in Brazil and Beijing, I remember one of our professors explaining something he called the ‘Bell Curve of Travel’. Tourists rarely feel it because they only stay long enough to fall IN love with a place, yet not long enough to fall OUT of love. They go through the honeymoon without going through the divorce and the messy trial over child custody and who gets the house in Hamptons and what’s left over after legal fees.

Travelers feel it.

It’s that slow simmer of frustration that builds up and blows over at something so silly a tourist would think you were crazy. I’d seen others feel it; witnessed friends at school flip out over nothing and watched good nights go bad on a dime because the bartender can’t mix a decent margarita, or the taxi driver over charges you a tiny bit. I’d sworn it would never happen to me and in my hubris, for a moment I’d become what I hated.

So here I was, over three months in, and the honeymoon was starting to wear off. I was on the downward slope, the double black diamond of my bitterness towards my host country. Sure, there’s enough to get mad about anywhere, but nothing was more revealing, and even personally disappointing, than my own over reaction to a nine dollar fee for a meal. I simply could not get past the idea that Korea was not like back home, and this was the issue that brought it to a boil…or a flame broil, in this case.

Every traveller has at least one “Fuck fill-in-the-country” moment, and I had mine over a nine dollar side of pork ribs. Like I said, not my proudest moment. In all of the lists of things one could hate about Korea, this was about as silly as getting mad over the quality of Soap Operas on daytime TV.

Over the last few weeks I thought about that inverted bell curve; that valley of vitriol that travelers often slip into when the very quirks about a country that make them fall in love with it are the things that slowly drive them mad. Was it the Purveyors of Pork’s fault? Sure it was. In their constant quest to turn a dollar they’d pissed off an otherwise evangelical customer who’d take a bullet to save their marinated meat.

But it was also my my fault. It was MOSTLY my fault.

I couldn’t get passed the idea that something as illogical and selfish was ritual and custom to them, and that I was the one being rude as well, and this was before I told them to go die in a fire.

Cut to: yesterday. After a long day at the English Factory teaching kids phonics and plate tectonics, we stopped by the bar on our way home for an evening martini, happy to people watch and have people watch us. Our friend from Philly, let’s call him M, spotted us and stopped by to share a drink with us and swap tales from the trenches of teaching. M’s been here over a month, and he’s already able to read Hanguel (Korean) so well it puts us to shame. None the less, he’s the kind of upbeat guy who gets along with us well and rarely has a bad thing to say. The cynic in me always says: “Give it another month,” but the truth is, he’s just a good fellow and he gets along well with my usually upbeat-and-twisted sense of humor.

One martini became two, and the bar nibblies soon revealed themselves to be a poor substitute for dinner. The conversation went something like this:

M: “You guys hungry?“
Me: “Absolutely. What are you thinking?“
M: “I’ve lost ten pounds since I’ve been here, I need to eat something heavy.”
Me: “I’ve lost twenty, but I’m up five, so it’s only fifteen.”
Marissa: “I hate you both.”
Me: “Feel like sushi? Udon? Katsu? There’s a good bibimbap place around the corner.”
M: “I could really go for some BBQ“
Me: “Me too.“
M: “We could walk to that other galbi place, or…we could go to those shiesters around the corner.”
Me: “Those assholes…?“
Marissa: “They DO do really good galbi.”
Me: “I know…it’s just….well...“

Five minutes later, we strolled up to that little meat market on the corner, the facade lit with the flames of an outdoor oven; the marinated meat smell wafting through the air like a sirens call at sea. Husband was out there, hands clad in gloves that no doubt covered blisters the size of quarters from the years of manning the oven. He saw us, waved, raised his shoulders as if to say: “Hungry? We have room!” I nodded, he bowed, and gave me a smile as if to say: “Welcome back.“

And in we went. Wife was there, busy as always, shouting phrases in Korean that I’ve only begun to start understanding. She gave Marissa a pat on the back, a friendly gesture of affection in a country where affection is rarely shown, then ushered us over to a table set up outside.

“Three kalbi?” she asked.
“Three kalbi,” I said, then added: “and beer.“

She took our order, smiled, then said: “Korea. America. Different.” Mark helped translate, but in truth it wasn’t needed. Gestures and smiles and deeps bows crossed language barriers better than words. She was sorry she offended me. And I was sorry I flipped out over so little. Very sorry. We both laughed, smiled, and just like that, we crossed back over our own cultural DMZ’s and shrugged off the conflict as if it happened in another life and maybe…it just had.

Maybe I was a little better for learning that not everything has to make sense, at least not ALL of the time. After all, this is Korea, and sometimes logic goes out the window to old custom, and if you cling too much to what you makes sense where you are from, you find yourself mad at where you ARE.

All the past drama seemed to dissipate amongst the smell of marinated pork, the excellently spiced kimchi and the Cass that was brought to the table as if it were a bottle of 1945 Cabarnet saved from the basement of some French monastery. It was like coming home and we’d only been away a few weeks. The prodigal waegook had returned. We ate, we drank, we put their meat in our mouths in a non-gay way. We were happy waegooks.

Will there be another ‘Fuck Korea’ moment? Maybe. Hopefully not, but maybe…
But will it be over meat?

Not this meat. It’s too damn good.