Nightclubs

The western community in the Paju area is great, I had been in South Korea for less than a week and I had already met four great people, however on Saturday evening that number increased.... dramatically! One of the teachers from the Wonderland School in Geumcheon was leaving and having leaving drinks and a trip to a nightclub and I, as a newbie, got to go along and meet everyone! Geumcheon is a 20 minute bus journey from Munsan and is the location of the weekly Social. We headed to a rooftop bar/restaurant which funnily enough is on the roof of a rather high building. Within about 5 minutes of arriving I was introduced to about 20 people - a whole bunch coming to the end of their contracts and a whole bunch who had just arrived (its changeover time at the moment with lots of people leaving and thus lots of people arriving and others just swapping schools and apartments!) All english speakers it was a combination of Americans, South Africans, Australians, New Zeakanders, Canadians, Brits and Irish. I got introduced to the 'table service button' you press a button and someone takes your order - and sampled some more Korean beer and chatted to a whole bunch of people about everything... and then as the hours tripped over we started to gather our belongings and head down the road to what was described as a rather sleazy club with strong similarities to The Venue in New Cross. I was intrigued... I mean can anywhere be on par with The Venue when it comes to sleaze?? We turned up got shown to our table, given beer, two platters of snacks per table (we had two big tables) and then got told we owed 2.3 million won between us - working out at about 84000 each. 2.3 million is just over a grand in english cash... this was one fricking expensive nightclub and seemingly run by dodgy con artists... as panic started to filter through cries of 'they are having a laugh', a few conversations later and we discovered the guy in charge had accidentally added an extra zero and instead of owing about fifty qui each, we only owed a fiver! After that everyone started to relax and we hit the dance floor and dancing to some crazy kpop songs. Now the most ingenious things about Korean nightclubs is the DJ and the way he keeps the dance floor rammed. Basically every 20-30 minutes he plays a slow song so everyone can have a break -sit down, get a drink etc before starting again with a blast of more crazy music, where everyone runs back onto the dancefloor. It means you never have that moment where everyone gets knackered all at the same time and the dance floor just empties! The other brilliant thing is the way Koreans have dance moves for everything and the girls spend half their time in lines along the edge doing various different dances. The place was similar to the Venue in many ways but just classier - I mean it's in Korea not South London. All in all it was a brilliant night - and to get home? We paid about 6 quid for a 20 minute cab ride. Score on all parts.