Seoulscapade

This is the famous Woodstock bar, well known to many foreigners and Koreans alike, in the middle of the Sinchon bar and restaurant district. It’s rough and casual, and all about loud music, loud reverie, quick waitresses, and free flowing beer. Small and dimly lit inside, it is full of old wooden tables and chairs and booths; and by the door, a wall of shelved LPs are presided over by a DJ. You can request any song you like and there’s a good chance he’ll have it, or else your second choice, on vinyl, and he’ll add it to the list. It’s grubby and unkept looking, with garbage strewn just by the main entrance. It looks like it really has been there since the 70s. What a romantic venue! This is where I met my wife.

Every kind of bar you can think of can be found in Seoul. And there are bars everywhere. Three kinds exist that I know of. The first kind is like Woodstock, just a straight forward drinking bar, the second kind is known as a hof (the name, I think, has German origins), where eating and drinking are done, and the third kind is a Girly bar where throwing away money is done.

At a hof one is obliged to have food; you can’t order a drink on its own, although this rule has been bent for me once or twice. I love these places and their variety. You’ll always get served as quick as they can. But you have to understand going in that the food won’t be of the highest quality for what you pay. It will nonetheless go well with what your drinking.

I haven’t taken nearly enough bar pictures given the number of bars I’ve been to. I often haven’t a mind to because that’s usually not the priority on a night out drinking. At the bar above, however, everything about it called for a photo. It’s the Platinum microbrewery bar in the wealthy Gangnam area, whose decor on three floors is themed according to the elements, earth, fire and water. Water is obviously the theme of the basement bar here.

A great many bars and hofs are not nearly as classy. And as a rule, if the bar looks a bit shabby the toilets are going to be very basic. At another bar in Sinchon, the gents was like a long narrow passage and did not even have a light. That’s not to say there wasn’t light; there was neon filtering in through a hole in the wall at one end, where you could see people passing by. It only had one urinal, and what the floor was made of is anyone’s guess; dirt, I think.

At a hof I visit in Shillim, a renowned student area, I went into the toilets in the stairwell to find two cubicles side by side, one male and one female. These were the old-style squat kind of loos. I went into to do my thing and was squatting there while next to me some strange women, obviously drunk, was doing her thing. She sounded like a horse. Not only did I hear it all, I could see part of what was going on because of the gap between the floor and the thin partition. Quite frankly, as I am free of most fetishes, this did nothing to delight me.

On another occasion, at a coffee shop in another part of Shillim, I sat myself down in a cubicle (on a regular porcelain this time) only to sense that a woman was already occupying the female one next to mine. Now, the trouble with these arrangements is that you become incredibly self-conscious of every sound; your body is put under a lot of stress with the restraints imposed on it. It’s bad enough as a foreigner, never really being anonymous, but if you were to emerge from a toilet and someone in the place has recently heard your ablutions and can now put a face to them, well, it’s just too much exposure for me.

While I was concentrating with all my faculties on keeping it quiet, the woman next to me began talking to herself. I thought she must have been on her cell phone. Really, I wanted her to just get it over with and leave, so I could let go, so to speak. I waited, and it was then that another woman started talking—in the same cubicle. There were two of them in there!

Here’s a photo of a room at an upmarket bar/coffee shop in the ritzy suburb of Apkujong. The bar/coffee shop had a number of different rooms like this one. It was a slow night. Upstairs was a stylish bar with girls wearing fishnet stockings. I wanted to sip my beer up there—yes, I confess, I do have one fetish—but I was with a work crowd, and we took over another room similar to the one photographed, with no girls in fishnet stockings, for a private party.

Well, that’s a start. I’ll try and be more diligent about getting photos all the weird and wonderful premises I come across and put them here.