In Da Club or Big Night, Long Post

Be warned now, this is a long post. I apologize, as there's really no good way to break it up, so bear with me.

Last night, the firm took all of the interns out for our welcome/farewell party (certain people started this week, others finished up--I have another month here, so it was somewhere in the middle for me). About 40 of us went to a restaurant near the office for Korean-style shabu-shabu. We ate incredible pieces of roasted duck, dipped in a sort of wasabi sauce, and followed that up with shabu-shabu, a rich beef broth with noodles, vegetables and paper-thin slices of beef. Also, we drank. I mean, we drank a lot.

The following is from the Harvard Law Office of Career Services (reproduced here entirely without their permission in sarcastic tone): "Watch your alcohol intake and limit yourself to one or two drinks at an event, depending on your tolerance. Getting drunk or even "buzzed" [what the kids are calling it these days] will impair your judgment and loosen your tounge. If you feel pressure to fit in and drink, order a beer or a glass of wine and nurse it throughout the evening. This is absolutely not the time to take advantage of the open bar."

If you work for a law firm in Korea, you would be best advised to forget this advice immdiately. All 40 of us were instructed to make a brief toast and drink an "atomic bomb" (in the U.S., a Boilermaker--a glass of beer with a shot of whiskey mixed in). Then, we drank another atomic bomb, this time sans toast (they took too much time). Then, we drank another.

Lest you think this was a sort of fraternity hazing, I want to make clear that it's just a cultural difference. While alcohol is a part of legal culture in the U.S. (Thursday afternoon keg parties at HLS ring a bell?), it's a major part of Korean culture too. You bond with your attorneys, mentors etc. by getting drunk, singing songs and having a good time. People senior to you are called your Sonbe and they are supposed to take care of (i.e. pay for the getting-drunk-of) their juniors or hoube. It fosters a great deal of comeraderie. Following Harvard's advice in this case would be a major insult. Of course, given that I found this firm through HLS's website, and given that the Office of Career Services nevertheless had no recollection of having any sort of contact with Korea, to say nothing of particular students who had worked at my firm, I wasn't relying on them as an authority to begin with.

After dinner, we went to a norebang (karaoke) place called Cafe About. In Korea, you sing karaoke in a private room with your group, and not in front of a crowded bar full of strangers. Because we were such a big group, we had a large room with sofa-style seating around two big tables, on which there were many bottles of beer and whiskey (Johnny Walker has made a name for himself in Korea), as well as fruit and some dried fish to snack on (not awful, but too salty for my taste). Let nobody tell you otherwise--folks here can sing! Korean pop was the genre of choice, although we did a fair amount of american rock and rap music (always a good call for those of us with limited vocal range). Songs sung by Art included but were not limited to: "Billie Jean" (again), "In Da Club," "Come Together," "More Than Words" (rock ballads are really popular here) and the ultimate crowd pleaser, "Hot in Herre" (if I had known I would be singing this ahead of time, I would have found a Nelly-style band-aid). And yes, there was more drinking involved.

The weirdest moment at norebang came about an hour and a half into it. We were all rocking out, having a good time, when a bunch of club employees came into our room and told us all that we had to sit down because "the dancers are coming." Somewhat reluctantly, we sat down as an over-excited DJ put on a techno-CD and switched on a strobe light set to "induce epileptic siezure." Two guys bounced into the room and started breakdancing. One even did the robot. This was fine and good until one of the dancers tried to do a handstand on the table where all our booze was and lost his balance, falling forward. He broke several glasses and spilled beer on four of us. His dancing wasn't that good either. Seriously, the robot? The Macarena is more timely.

One other thing about the norebang club. We were there for a few hours, and I went to the men's room twice. The first time I went, there was a man crouching by the urinals, smoking a cigarette and frantically text-messaging on his cell phone. When I went back an hour later, he was still there, in the exact same position, doing the exact same thing. For all I know, he was smoking the same cigarette. Apaprently, this happens all the time.

We endured the dancers for several more minutes until they mercifully left and allowed us to resume enjoying ourselves. Then, a smaller contingent of us made our way to another club, a booking club similar to the one I went to over the weekend (although since we were a mixed group, we did not participate--I politely refused the overtures of one of the bookers who took a liking to me, and the women in our group um, declined to be booked). We had a private room with more food and alcohol and a karaoke machine, and there was a dance floor downstairs. When the DJ played slow songs downstairs, we would hang out in our room and sing (note to all crappy singers: "Play that Funky Music (White Boy)" is an outstanding song if you have no range. In my case, the lyrics were also oddly appropriate). When the beat sped up, we went downstairs to dance.

At one point, the Korean DJ playing techno pop left the stage and two black guys from the States came on, one working the turntables and the other emcee-ing. Frankly, they were awful. The DJ kept messing up his mixes so there was a lot of quiet air, or cutting a beat just as it was reaching a crescendo. The MC was even worse. There's a skit from the first season on Chappelle's Show about a rapper named Fisticuffs. There's footage of him recording a song, preparing to launch into his rhyme, saying things like "turn my headphones up! Okay! Okay!" but he never actually begins rhyming. Our guy was the same way. He basically bounced around and did "hip-hop things" (or more accurately, what he thought Korean people thought of as "hip hop things"), but never actually did much more. Regardless, the crowd ate it up. I don't know how much of it was just the excitement of being in the club and how much of it was, frankly, excitement over seeing two black men performing rap (a rare sight in Korea), but they were a huge success. So, if you're reading this, and you're black and own a football jersey and a microphone, and you want to make some money, you've got a business opportunity in Seoul.

Anyway, we danced until about 2:30 in the morning before heading home. Definitely a memorable night in Seoul.