Annie Koh

Daytime Drinking

Breakfast of champions: ramen & soju! from the Korean film Daytime Drinking

Korea is not a good place to be a teetotaler. Even the Korean drinking spot we frequent here in Honolulu — Little Seoul — has a seven-hour-long happy hour.

I’m thankful none of my professors here demand their students drink Korean car bombs (shot of soju in beer, naturally) but then again, drinking in America is too restricted/restrictive. The Puritan origins of the American colonies peep through. Except for Fourth of July bbqs and those horrible brunch mimosas, I can’t really think of socially acceptable daytime drinking in the U.S.

In contrast, I’m pretty sure every time I walked past the corner store in my neighborhood in Seoul there was someone drinking. Filmmakers having some soju and breakfast, waiting til the morning rush hour was over to hop on the subway. Grandpas sobering up at 2pm before going home to their wives. Troubled SAT cram coaches drowning their complicity in test prep misery with bottles of Cass.

Korean elderly men actually have a sort of fabulous outdoor drinking option near Tapgol Park - pushcart vendors sell single shots of soju and snacks to the men who set up their Chinese checkers and other game boards for all day gaming. But my favorite daytime drinking venue, hands down, is at the top of Korean mountains. After much huffing and puffing, a hiker emerges at the peak, only to greet the grandma who had hiked up there first thing in the morning with a barrel of rice wine.

On our way back down Maisan, we stopped at the side of the road for some rice wine

Prompted by this NYTimes essay “The Subversive Charm of Day Drinking”

I used to frequent a corner bar in TriBeCa that looked like the setting of a Hopper painting. It was down the street from the college where I taught intro literature courses, and I decamped there in the early afternoon for a beer or two while slogging through freshman essays on Blake. But I didn’t get much work done. The company was too interesting: ironworkers, painters, sculptors, people whose workdays started unusually early or uncommonly late — people for whom daytime is nighttime. And unlike their after-dark counterparts, no one was there to party. Pretty soon, I gave up my lonely corner banquette to join the guys sitting at the bar. I never looked back.

Drinking in the day is an occasion unto itself, to be enjoyed on its own congenial terms. And there are terms. It shouldn’t lead to drinking all night. It can’t happen all the time. There is such a thing as starting too early. That said — we’re all adults here, aren’t we? — after lunch sounds about right. There’s still time before the rackety after-work crowd descends; the pace is calmer; and this is the best time to get to know your bartender. Whatever you’re drinking, you’re more likely to savor it.

Disappearance of Continuous Place

my father’s maps

[Via Slate, a map drawn by artist Alexander Calder]

My father writes the most meticulous directions. He uses street names, number of stoplights, and landmarks. I always took it to be a symptom of his engineer training and a need to build-in redundancy. After living in Seoul for five years and struggling with the general non-usage of street names (we navigate by subway stop exits and landmarks, sometimes ones that no longer exist like how I told cab drivers to drop me off at the “old district office”), I decided that his triple-threat directions were just a merger of American and Korean directional structures.

So as much as I appreciate Google Maps in all its satellite glory, I really adore the spatial oddities collected by the Hand Drawn Map Association.

It’s a situation we are all acquainted with: planning to visit friends in an unfamiliar part of the city, you draw yourself a rudimentary map with detailed directions. In March 2008, graphic designer Kris Harzinski founded the Hand Drawn Map Association in order to collect just such drawings of the everyday. Fascinated by these accidental records of a moment in time, he soon amassed a wide variety of maps, ranging from simple directions to fictional maps, to maps of unusual places, including examples drawn by well-known historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, and Alexander Calder

Going by gopher

(pre-subway Seoul, back in the day)

Every long-term resident of Seoul and observant short-term visitor has that aha! moment when they realize the tangle of stations and transfers and ROYGBIV subway lines translates into two blocks and a right turn up on the sidewalk above. It’s not always obvious how a city is knit together(*). Underground, you can’t navigate by the smell of soup or seaweed, and only sometimes do the names of stations evoke their above-ground counterparts. The subway is a self-contained breathing apparatus that only comes up for air before it crosses the Han River.

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From a joint blog that popped into my inbox many months ago, courtesy of Google Alerts (“Korean American”):

“I read in an adoptee art exhibit brochure that many adoptees say riding the subway is their favorite time in Korea. “Because we’re not expected to talk and for just a fraction of the day, Koreans aren’t questioning who we are, where we’re from, and why we don’t speak Korean. We’re just one of them.”

The Seoul subway functions as both public and private space. Plenty of commuters feel comfortable enough to apply makeup (foundation, concealer, blush, eyeliner, etc etc), eat (snacking thankfully still legal unlike the Tokyo subway), and sleep. I always imagined my outsiderness was visible through how unabashedly I stared at everyone else, marveled at male affection or middle school swagger. The subway absorbs us into the hum-and-thrum of everyday Seoul, makes no distinction between insiders and an outsider quietly passing as Korean.**

(*footnote) Legible London says “…most Londoners’ mental map of London is based on the tube map which is geographically distorted and can be very misleading.  For instance there are over 100 connections on the underground where its quicker to walk than take the tube!  Legible London maps will often show users that their destination is closer and more walkable than they think.”

(**footnote) However, most expats have at least one run-in with a grumbling grandpa outraged by a too-loud English language conversation (enraged even more if seemingly Korean faces were involved).

traffic is always faster in the other lane

Oahu traffic is terrible. Perched on the back seat of the bus, I see drivers (almost always by themselves) make the most of stoplights. Drive-thru breakfast sandwiches. Application of eyeliner. Paperwork. (I think he was alphabetizing his files?) Compared to Seoul traffic though, it’s a Slip-and-Slide. I remember the first time I realized that walking from Yeoksam Station to Gangnam Station was literally faster than driving in rush hour traffic. And not just a 30-second difference, but 10 minutes faster. With my little legs and all.

(The North Seoul traffic below is a lot less stupid and way more picturesque)

Seoul Sub->urban (walking the city is knowing the city)

Seoul Sub->urban takes you for a walk with open eyes.

원동 Won-dong: stories on the neighborhood

This children’s playground is not the only one in the neighborhood where time has stopped. “Wonseo Realtor,” an approximately 6.6 sq. meter village real estate shop, “Mimi Barbershop,” a small shop with a worn-out green awning, and “Ladies’ Shop,” a dress repair shop with a shabby-looking signboard… The entire neighborhood looks just like a filming location with scenes and images of the 1960s and 1970s. Women still wash clothes at a village laundry place. (Won-dong: stories on the neighborhood, introduction by Insa Art Space curator, Kang Sung-eun)

Listen to the City (Seoul)

“…the city’s mindless, impatient development will constitute a serious setback to its plans to become the region’s main city in the future. Seoul’s architecture plays a central role in the alienation of its citizens. The indiscriminate demolition of normal people’s architecture - a problem that is excluded from architectural discourse but constitutes a form of architectural genocide - is steadily widening the gulf between the city and its people… The term, genius loci, refers to the unique memories and spirit that exist in a particular place. If the buildings that have become part of a place disappear, so does every trace, every smell, of the people that lived in that place. Architecture is about more than providing a space to shelter from the rain; it is about spiritual spaces that collect memories of life.” Listen to the City 2009