yong-pyoung ski resort

<

so, saturday morning rolls around like marbles roll around a boat caught in a typhoon; so it is after a late night of doing whiskey shots with your mates because problems such as scurvy, the english FA cup, testicular rash, and that ever-unsolvable one with redheads.

my wife reminds me that we have an obligation that we must uphold because i'd bellowed ceaselessly in the early hours of the morning that we had to get up at a decent hour and make the rounds to pick up ryan and then penny so we could rush the 30 minutes to yong-pyoung ski resort to meet steve and stacey, who were presumably already going to be up there doing some skiing.

penny and ryan had also been out the night before and though we'd all been at the same bars together, it was not they to whom i'd had to administer the aforementioned whiskey-shot therapy; together, the three of us decorated the car with the pungent scent of a non-stop distillery. if my wife had been stopped by any nosy cops, she very well could've tested positive for a DUI. as it was, we made it without a hitch, though the hangovers were starting to induce us to massive hunger and alarming levels of head-pounding, as if a jolly green dragon had started learning how to jump on the trampoline of our brains. if you don't believe how anaesthetised we still were, please consider the below photo of ryan. it seems that we'd gotten into a jagermeister-shooting contest and the loser had to have some fun by walking around the resort looking like the big buck on the label of any good bottle of said jager. no explanation for the pair of feet chasing steve riding a sled down the slope.


as with most any public activity done in korea, there was an authority-controlled chaos as to how to mow down old people, er, ride a sled down the slope. first, we took a moving sidewalk for about a distance of a hundred meters to the top of the sled run. next, instead of autonomous chaos as we all took our turns running sensibly down the run, making sure to look out for others, we had to queue up row by row and wait patiently for the starter to blow his whistle and get us started (see orderliness below). it made sense only because it was korea. as we sat around waiting for our row's turned, we were entertained by some dumbass kid who kept calling all of us "mi-guk in", which means, "american," in korean. when i explained to him that not all of us were american, he was so shocked to see me--some still-drunk "roundeye representative" his xenophobic parents have always told him could never speak korean because it's the hardest, most incredible language on the planet--speak his language, that he didn't pay attention to what i said. when he continued calling us all americans (instead of foreigners, or esteemed older people, or cueball head, or rudolph, or yeti, or something), i asked him if he were japanese--a question to curdle the blood of any good, patriotic korean (is there another kind?)--he responded with the unexpectedly indignant reply of, "no, of course not." i then explained to him that if he didn't want other people to mistake him for japanese, then he shouldn't call all foreigners--black, white, amphibian, martian, cave-dwelling, religious-right-leaning--americans.

~

as the look on his face above shows, and as on the people waiting in their queue to the left, i think my thoughtful suggestion fell on deaf ears.

~

just another day in korea as a non-korean...