WHITE WATER BIRTHDAYS

Charles had put together a white water rafting trip that just so happened to fall on my birthday weekend. It was a lot of fun, but there were times I was embarrassed to be a foreigner. The white people here take the whole motherfucking ten miles when given an inch. We get away with so much here, and the foreigners take full advantage of that fact. One of the few rules that you really, really shouldn't break is the 'never hit a Korean' rule. On one of the stops at a rice wine factory, after everyone was pretty drunk from drinking on the bus, a bunch of foreigners broke into the water park we weren’t allowed to go in, and someone ended up smacking a Korean. The police were called, and a long, uneventful wait took place as the police tried to get to the bottom of this debacle. I felt incredibly bad for Charles, who doesn’t deserve any of this bullshit. He didn’t want to get involved, but because he was the only one who spoke Korean, he was forced to mediate.

ANYways, that aside, the white water rafting trip was great. It had rained the day before we hit the waters, so the rapids were pretty intense, and a lot of us got thrown around. We were allowed to jump off the raft at certain points and be carried down the river by the current. A bunch of us attempted to do back flips off the raft, with only a few people succeeding. One guy’s attempt had his head bouncing off the raft before the rest of his body fell into the water. We were supposed to go bungee jumping as well, but the rain made the water rise too a point where it was unsafe to jump. I was really disappointed--I think I was more excited for the bungee jumping the the white water rapids.

The trip was an overnight excursion, and that night Charles gave Rich and me a bottle of traditional birthday whisky, along with two wooden hammers. The two wooden hammers were used to break the whisky bottle out of its ceramic casing. I was really excited to try this drink, and Charles poured two big shots into two rather large Dixie cups for the two birthday peeps. Oh, fuck, it was the worst tasting thing I ever let caress my tongue. After one shot, my stomach burned and did things I didn’t know it could do. I had to calmly excuse myself from the group to throw up quietly in the bushes. I wasn’t drunk at all when I had this shot, but every fiber of my being rejected that drink. I was kind of hoping that maybe it was just a strong drug and I would be coming up at some point...but all it did was make the pizza and galbi I chowed down on taste a little off.