The original posts I wrote while looking into the Gin Craze. I didn’t know then that I would be writing a novel set in the time period… at the time, I was just interested in how Korea seemed to have a relationship with its own horrible-tasting, industrial-strength hard-liquor, soju, as the Londoners of the Early Georgian era did with gin. From such humble beginnings… well, you know.
Right, so I said this would be a long time in coming, but yesterday afternoon and evening — during my train ride in and out of Seoul, as well as during a couple of breaks I took when the humidity and heat and human density proved too much for me at the protest I attended […]
So I was in the cinema waiting for a movie to start, and I saw this advertisement for 참이슬 soju. I found it both interesting and depressing. If you watch it, I’ll be you can see why: Basically, the ad suggests that all human social interactions that aren’t lubricated by alcohol suck. Alcohol is, of […]
A long time ago, I started a planned series of posts that didn’t go very far, drawing some parallels between the England of the Gin Craze era (the early 1700s) and Korea in the first decade of the 21st century. I’m still not feeling like continuing it, but I am reading up on the Gin […]