"This is a joke."

I was in the Hongdae area of Seoul on a Friday night a few weeks ago after searching the area for English language schools to work at. I happend to be sitting on a park bench doing some 3 ball juggling for passerbys. It was already dark out, but enough street lights to make me visible.

Another foreigner was watching me for a minute, so I said hello. His name was Falko, and he was here from Germany presenting at a conference for computer programmers. He was hungry, so I showed him where some street vendors were selling food. After that, we agreed to grab a beer somewhere.

We walked around for a little while, looking for the right bar to drink at. Then, Falko pointed to a window and said "that looks like a bar I would drink at in Germany!" From the street, it didn't look like a bar to me, but I thought "what the hell?" So we walked around the other side of the building and discovered that it was indeed a bar.

This was the bar space in front of me. You can see that it is very dim in this bar. There are just a couple of ambient lights and several candles lit everywhere. The glass bowl in front of me has whole, dried fish in it mixed with nuts. The small bowl inside the bigger bowl has a spicey sauce used for dipping. I was hesitant to eat the fish at first, but I liked them by the end of the night. In retrospect, this change in attitude toward eating the dried fish had something to do with the amount of alcohol I was drinking.

This photo shows, although very blury, that the owner had about half liquor and half music discs on his wall. The entire time I was there, he played wonderful jazz music.

To my right was a Japanese man named Abey Chan. He was here on vacation. He spoke broken English, but we were able to have some decent exchanges of dialogue.

To my left was the German man, Falko. At one point in the evening, Abey Chan leaned over and said to me, "This is a joke." Sure enough, a Japanese man, a German man, and an American man were sitting in a Korean bar... add your own punch line.

I hardly leave home without my juggling equipment. This evening was no exception. The owner even got me to do a small performance for the bar. Considering the amount of alcohol in my bloodstream, I did really well. Afterwards, my two new friends posed with my stage balls.

This evening went really, really late. I wound up hanging out with the owner's brother and buddies in a hidden room on the side of the bar. Falko was with me for a little while, but he stumbled home a couple hours before I did. That meant I was the only English speaker in a room full of Koreans for a couple of hours. This evening was certainly worthy of the title, an Edventure.