Clubbing in Hongdae

Not having Friday classes is fantastic. I'm gonna miss the extra day off back at GW.
Also, still no camera, but there will be pictures to better explain the experience I had last night.

Last night was my Korean friend's birthday and he wanted to go clubbing in Hongdae, a trendy neighborhood in Seoul. I didn't have high hopes, but it was his birthday and he was newly single, so we decided to do it right. We meet up at the subway station and start walking around.

Hongdae is very different from Anam, taller buildings but a little more spread out. Fewer alleyways and wider streets with more street vendors. We wind up going to this restaurant near the subway and sit down for dinner. We order drinks, one of which came in a hollowed out pineapple, and some Korean food. The food was amazing. Pork with tofu and kimchi followed by ramen, rice cakes, dumplings and seafood mixed together in hot pepper sauce. It was the kind of spicy that makes you sweat. My favorite.

After that it was time to go to our first club. The cover was waived until midnight, so we got in for free. Korean clubs are great for coat check, it was less than $3 per big bag for your stuff, we could fit our three winter coats into this bag no problem. Cost was highly reasonable so far. Drinks inside were expensive though, so it evened out.

The club was a black room with 1.5 floors. That is , there was a main dance floor and bar area with a balcony for people who paid the huge amount for table service. The dance floor had a HUGE DJ stage, 3 DJs were up there with monster LED screens for graphics. Two stripper poles flanked the stage. The DJs also had a huge lighting rig with lasers, spotlights on the poles, and strobes to light up the crowd right before the bass hit. It was a pretty neat setup. It's a shame it was 3:1 guys to girls. There were a ton of guys in this club ranging from tattoo covered hipsters, guys dressed like LMFAO, and this huge guy in an argyle sweater with a Kim Il-Sung haircut. And Kim Il-Sung face. This guy was a dead ringer for the original North Korean leader.

His communism was indirectly proportional to his dance skills

The Korean guys were also insanely good at doing the Shuffle from Party Rock Anthem. They were covering yards and yards of the dance floor shuffling to every song. It was cool, but then got kind of weird watching these guys come dangerously close to blowing out their knees every few steps. 

The DJ was playing some weird mixes too. Shot Through the Heart, Bette Davis Eyes, Do Wah Diddy, he was going nuts. My friend James and I would not stop laughing. More women came in after about 20 minutes and immediately flocked to the stripper poles. One of them had one of the worst stuffed bras I have ever seen in my life. I've seen guys doing camp drag shows with a more convincing bust than this girl. It was asymmetrical and full of sharp angles. It was pretty funny. Mr. Kim would not leave the girls on the poles alone. 

Then the DJ put up a very strange graphic on the big screens: Swastikas. Lots of them. Just a ton of swastikas . And not the Hindu kind, these were Nazi style; black in a white circle on a red background. I guess the connotations in Korea are different than in the US. We stayed at this club until about 1:30 and then leave for another club. 

The next club we went to was called NB, which stood for Noise Basement. Which was the single best title for this club. We walk downstairs... and then down another flight of stairs. The place we walk into is already looking pretty damp from sweat and spilled drinks. We walk through this neon lit mirror tunnel into the main club area. If you've seen the original Total Recall, think of the whorehouse on Mars where the three boobed lady is. Metal construction with a downstairs area and a catwalk second floor around the dance floor. (If you don't get the reference, watch the movie). It was  This club was packed. And smokier than any movie made in the 1950s. I mean not only was everybody smoking, but they had smoke machines everywhere. And everybody was chain smoking. The laser show looked pretty cool with all the smoke though.

The dancing scene was a lot like a bar mitzvah; lots of dudes jumping around to hip-hop music while girls danced in packs and wanted nothing to do with the guys unless they had a boyfriend. The ratio here was also terrible, 5:1 guys girls. But the music was great. Lots of classic hip-hop which the crowd loved. Naughty by Nature, 2 Live Crew, Ice Cube, some really 90s and 80s hits.

 I was also one of 3 white guys in the club that night. It was myself, my friend James and this one other guy who blatantly came to the club with a prostitute. This girl's dress was about two centimeters from blatantly exposing her vagina and the top of her fishnet stockings. She was also the only girl in the club Jersey Turnpiking, so I filled in the blanks pretty easily. It was pretty awkward watching them dance, but then again, so were some of the characters we met at this club.

The first one was a 40 year old guy. I was at the bar at the club when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn to see an Asian man with a salt-and-pepper ponytail who then asks me, "What are you drinking?" I looked at him with a confused expression and he responds by throwing 350,000 KRW onto the bar and exclaiming "I'm buying!" Amid the cash were plastic baggies full of fishing lures. I am not making this up. He then proceeded to ask for Jameson, an alcohol the bar clearly did not have. He then sat at the bar staring off into space for the next 45 minutes. 

The next character was someone I could only communicate with by pointing and hand gestures. He was wearing a green army hat and had a pretty bitching mullet. He then proceeded to tell me to "Leave". That was the only english word he knew. When I replied with the Korean word for no, he laughed, patted my shoulder, and began to point at women and then at me. He pointed at women, gave me the thumbs up, then tapped them on the back and pointed at me like I had done it. The problem with this was not only that I couldn't, nor can I speak Korean, but he was walking about 20 feet to the girls and tapping them. It was clear that I had not touched them, so they all looked very confused. He then came back and started pointing at girls and saying yes in Korean. I assumed this meant he thought they were cute, and I wasn't going to disagree; they were very cute. He then saw the hooker dancing and we both replied with no and shared a good laugh. 

The clothing at the club can only be described as a bizarre post-modern blend of under and over dress. The first outfit to catch my eye was that of a stout Asian man. He looked a lot like Tito from Rocket Power; heavy set and dark skinned. He had a haircut and glasses like Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds. Yeah, I'm not making that up. His hair was orange and the frames of his glasses were about a half inch thick and looked like they were drawn on with a chisel tip marker, one of the big ones with the metal body because plastic just isn't gonna cut it against that ink. His outfit was the kicker though. It was a schoolboy outfit with the shorts with the 8" inseam, a Hawaiian shirt with a tie, and knee high socks and loafers. Now imagine this in a club blasting hip-hop with strobes everywhere. Just imagine these three images combined. 

It's beautiful

 The next outfit I noticed was the guy in the 5XL FUBU sweatshirt that went down past his knees. Next was the girl wearing a shirt that said "Collage" on it. I assume it is a poor translation of the "College" sweatshirt that Belushi wore in Animal House. The rest of the outfits came in differing degrees of formality, some girls wore blazers and high waist jeans, others wore short tight dresses. There were  a few guys in suits and others in jeans and Marty McFly style vests. You see the full gambit of Korean fashion in a club from 2-5:30AM.

5:30 is when the trains started running again, so my friend and I finally boarded the first train of the morning. It was full of businessmen and college kids who reeked of cigarettes and the club. The looks were clearly noticeable, but it just seemed like another Friday morning on the Korean Metro.

Itaewon's the next club neighborhood to hit in Seoul, I just don't really feel like coming back to my dorm just in time for the sun to rise any time in my future.