Not, just another Monday night

Sitting curbside on the darkening streets of Seoul waiting for some friends to arrive. It's as if the city has just started to come alive. Encroaching on 8pm, swarms of suits exit office buildings. Groups of women stroll past, arm in arm. Most importantly, street vendors are setting up shop. Potentially the most meaningful part of the day; tents are deconstructed, booths are erected, rice cakes and odeng begin to boil as seafood and veggies are battered and fried. Accessible, quick and cost efficient, it's no mystery why the street food stand holds such an integral place within the Korean eating culture. Barring illegality (and in some cases ignoring it) street food is widely available and revered the world over. The beauty of Korean street snacks, is that while theses compact cooking stations thrive during the dim hours of the night, it's not hard to find a quick fix no matter when you're craving it.

So there's one bit of truth, and here is another:

Sleep is irrelevant, time has no boundaries and common sense seems time blur between the endless bottles of so-mec (soju and beer) and makgeolli (semi-fermented rice wine). At the same time that many Seoulites descend from high rise office towers and parlay into the streets, cracking open a button on their collard shirts (if their feeling frisky), is when the metal tops of green-glass soju bottles begin to crack as well. Whether it be a Korean BBQ restaurant or a pojang macha (beer and food tent) the echo of popped tops and the clink of shot glasses will chime endlessly until the ungodly hours of the morning. After all, why let day-break break up a proper bender?

Tomorrow is imminent, but let's not pay too much mind into thinking past today. At this point it was last night, but when a friend of a friend decides to pass through for a 24-hour visit in a city like Seoul there's only one option on the table, with one definite end. Moreover, when my good friend and Korean fixer extraordinaire, James, decides he'd like to join in on the fun, I'm just thankful that I'm one of the few who remembers the night. It's never long before slabs of meat get tossed over embrued coals and bottles of soju and beer are flying down our throats at a furious pace.

So, what should you do if you're only in Korea for 24-hours? As cliche as it sounds, if you're not going out to party at the bars in Hongdae or take in the ritzy clubs in Gangnam, check you and your buds into a Noreybang (Karaoke room) for an hour or three, and let the laughs unfold. I must admit, I've been living in Korea for over 6-months now and up until last night I'd only had one previous Noreybang experience, dragged out against my will by some Korean friends, but then quick to re-up on an extra hour of time when ours expired. Aside from the Noreybang being a favoured pastime of Koreans living all over the world, Seoul offers them up with greater frequency and variety then coffee shops. Luxury Noreybangs with fancy white leather couches and stripper poles, alien themed, or hole in the wall dumps, each one offers the uninhibited enjoyment of watching your closest (or newest) friends humiliate themselves with nothing more than the aid of a TV screen and echo-tuned microphone. The simple combination of great, or hilariously horrible music, dozens of bottles of cheap alcohol and a big group of tone-deaf and inebriated friends cannot be argued with.

Once you manage to stumble back into the night, or day, tight-cheeked and horse-voiced from excessive laughter and screaming the only thing left to do is locate the closest curbside curator of all things tasty and hangover-curing. Unfortunately for us, we had our guts set on tteokboggi (boiled rice cakes in red chili sauce--one of my favourite and most talked about street foods, which I recently found out I've been poorly transliterating as duk bo gi due to its pronunciation) yet, there were no stands to be found in the immediate vicinity. Thankfully for us, we were with James. The all-knowing and ever faithful guide to gut busting and mouth watering eats around this fair city. Of course, he knows a great place to go, an actual restaurant in a nearby area called Shindang-dong, which is the most famous place to indulge in tteokboggi. "Ya! I think.", he says, with a confident and well-versed nod. He's got me convinced with little effort, and while our 24-hour best friend, Brad, is feverishly faded and already in bed, suffering from 36 hours of straight transit, three different cities that day and a head full of distilled beverages, my other new friend Adrian, a lucky sap whose signed on for a mere month-long summer school contract, doesn't intend on packing it in like the 5 other fallen soldiers.

Different from the standard tteokboggi; a radioactive, red colored slop of tube shaped rice cakes that's shoveled out of a large metal trough with a paddle, placed on a small plate wrapped in a plastic bag and picked at with a toothpick; this was some high-brow shit in comparison. Simmered slowly at your table over a hot plate, and containing a fresh mix of tteok (rice cakes), ramen noodles, hand peeled dumpling noodles, fried mandoo (dumplings), odeng (fish cakes), green onion, carrots, cabbage and a flavourful, natural tasting chili sauce, this was the real deal. James has yet again lived up to his good name. Mildly spicy and with a great contrast of textures from soft, to chewy, to crisp and crunchy. Along with the two bottles of makgeoli, it went down as fast as my head on the pillow once I got home.

Another epic night with the lads. Another memorable Korean experience. Not, just another Monday night.