Next time someone throws around the stereotype about how Westerners in Korea are drunken sots who behave badly, remind them of that Korean guy who went drunk driving in Cambodia in July 2008, killed a family, and refused to tell his name to the cops (and anyway cannot speak English or Khmer). Ask them when was the last time a Westerner did that in Korea. Seriously, ask them. And don’t accept the thing about the tank and the two schoolgirls on the country road back in 2002: the drivers weren’t drunk, two girls is not a whole family, and it …
Tag: Gin Lane & Soju-ro
Gin Lane & Soju-ro: Part 1 — The Preamble
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 — I all but inhaled Jessica Warner’s Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason, a kind of legal and cultural history of the Gin Craze that swept through the poorer classes in London in the first half of the 1700s (and, to use …