Since I am now the King of Poetry on Jeju (can a King make his own official title?), I will post at least one haiku every day this week. And maybe I’ll even write about the Haiku death battle which happened.
This morning’s haiku:
SPACE IS FULL OF STARS
THAT LOOK DOWN ON RUSTY CARS
AND MEN BEHIND BARS
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A few weeks ago I wrote this:
“After a long and mostly crappy weekend, March is finally here. That means springtime, baseball, and a new paycheck…generally lots of things I’ve been waiting for for a very long time.”
Now its deep into March and I haven’t posted anything on this blog.
A few weeks I suffered severe burns from an explosion of Korean club culture so tacky the only way I was able to recover the next day was to get the song “Private Eyes” stuck in my head. Then I freaked out a friend because I texted them that private eyes were seeing their every move, and I had to apologize later.
But I should mention that I really really liked the Aromadome. The venue is in such bad taste that in the right frame of mind (ahem) it is the perfect way to spend the first hours of a Sunday.
I should also mention that I completely avoided the ridiculous cover charge (20,000 won!) by sneaking in with a bunch of ladyfriends. This dramatically helped me appreciate the experience since there was no money at stake.
The Aroma Dome is a giant four-story nightmare whose roof opens up every ten or fifteen minutes in between crazy hyper-kinetic dance “shows” that the whole crowd participates in. The Dome is the signature calling of the club, and it looks like this:
The rest of the place is decked out in horrible retro-future decor. Think lots of bright laser lights revolving around, tons of weird metal scaffolding. It would be a great place for a rave. Kind of like if people had hosted a dance party in the trash compacter on the Death Star.
The security there is also dressed up in these weird light-up business suits. A DJ comes down from this platform and makes some loud cat-calls at the audience while on a separate stage above the dance floor, this weird troupe in skin-tight silver suits is performing a choreographed shit show.
I know it’s hard to believe considering what I’ve just wrote, but part of me wishes I could spend every evening from 1 to 4 am there. To make sure things get funky, I would like to promise myself that the next time I’m there I’m going to either:
a. going to join the performers on the dance floor
b. going to at least take my shirt off
c. demand a Korean woman from the waitstaff since apparently this is appropriate, or so I’ve been told. Maybe that’s what the 20,000 won cover charge is for.
I wish I convey with pictures some idea of this place, but the only photo I found is this:
That’s the roof opening up.
Over on the other side of Jeju, near City Hall (where most of the foreigners are hanging out on the weekends), is another bar I went to called Red Cats.
Red Cats is located just below the gutted space formerly known as the Reggae Bar, which had a really attractive Russian bar wench but not enough reggae, and closed due to the lack of a keyboard or piano to use on open mic nights.
On the night the Reggae Bar was closing, my co-worker Charlotte said she wasn’t having fun so I downed a bottle of soju (foul tasting rice wine vaguely like vodka) and then “found” the fun at the abandoned bar downstairs at Red Cats, a wasteland of dusty cement and aluminum tubing so thoroughly gutted that there was a hole in the toilet that went down into the floor below.
And at first it was really funny. One of us took a piss through the hole in the floor. I won’t say who because its not very flattering information but you have a 50% percent of being right with your guess. I tried pole dancing with the tube shit coming down from the ceiling.
But then it turned out that an empty bar isn’t meant to have any patrons. When you come from a drink at Red Cats, you don’t leave. The door only opened one way and when we were really to “close our tab” it turns out I had locked us in.
So me and Charlotte spent the next twenty minutes trying frantically to open the windows, all but one of which was sealed shut. I spent a lot of time banging on the door and screaming to try to get someone on the other side to hear me. I tried screaming through the hole in the bathroom in case someone on the floor below could hear.
At least nobody had a breakdown. Nobody cried. I’m pretty sure Charlotte kind of gave up after a while, but this could just be selective memory/dramatic effect.
Anyway, after 30 frustrated minutes in a place that was not really meant for human beings any more, someone let us out. Not a grand finish, I know, but its 4 am and I’m supposed to play tennis in 5 hours.
The original title of this post, written about two weeks ago, mentioned Indian restaurants. That will have to come later.
At various points over this week I hope to write about: Dinosaur World Theme Park, an abandoned resort called the “Paradise Hotel”, the new school year on Jeju, some staff changes at Yale Academy, the Haiku Death Battle, and motorcycles.
Culture Time 