Progress Report 18.1 (extra salty edition)
Annyongh hasseyo, goggins.
If you've just arrived here via the 'teaser' email, then the answer is, of course, that (ahem) they're both stuck up c*nts. Aren't you glad you came?
And if you found that salty, then I hope you don't suffer from hypertension, as things are about to get a whole lot saltier. Don't worry though - the forecast isn't for continued saltiness, but we are due a brief heavy blizzard of saltiness, though that will be followed by a warm front throughout the rest of the report. If you can't take any more salinity, then please skip ahead to the paragraph marked with a '+'. But if you're strapped in and ready for a full-on salting, then get ready to get salted as I tell you all about what I found in a hotel room in Seoul last weekend...
Michelle and I will often get a hotel whenever we go out in Seoul, as it's easier than heading back out to Anyang or Paju at six in the morning, and prices are such that it's not financially herculean, even at the end of the month. The reason that these hotels are cheap though is because they occupy the lower end of the market. This doesn't necessarily mean that they scrimp on comfort or space (often quite the opposite, in fact), but the facilities offered are aimed more at the customer who might not necessarily be staying the whole night. This is why these budget-market establishments are more popularly known as 'love hotels'.
Don't get the wrong impression - these love hotels aren't like the kind of backstreets-of-downtown, rooms-by-the-hour flophouses that you get in gritty American cop movies in the 70's, but rather a place where the courting male can take his paramour instead of his parent's pokey apartment, or where the soju-drunk salaryman can take the teenage prostitiute he's just picked up and give her three or four of the best angry thrusts he can muster before he passes out on top of her. It sounds seedy enough, but because this is Korea and Koreans don't ever do anything disreputable ever, these hotels like to maintain an air of respectability. Hence, the rooms, though cheap, aim to provide all the comforts you'd expect from a hotel room you'd stay in til morning, and hence, they've found a market with penny-wise Western types who would happily sleep on broken crockery in their own capital cities provided that it only cost the 25 quids a night that it does here.
I say an 'air' of respectability, but this doesn't mean that your room will be 100% seediness-free. You can expect to find condoms laid on at no extra cost, and free porn on the TV, but these are just the salty edges of what will most times be a perfectly functional hotel experience (save for what salaciousness you might choose to pollute your accommadation with by your own will). The sheets will be fresh and stain-free, the bin emptied and the toilet flushed and any evidence of prior impropriety thoroughly banished, and whilst you may not want to hold a bible discussion group there, there's no reason you'd need to feel dirty or lecherous for taking advantage of the rock-bottom room prices at such an establishment, despite what Koreans might think of them. However, once in a while, you get a room that underlines without flinching its intended purpose. This might be (like we got last month) a jacuzzi in the bathroom and a projector TV for the scud, or it might, like last weekend, invoke the presence of a big round bed and a sex chair.
'Sorry, SB - what was the second thing?' I imagine your asking.
A sex chair. A chair designed specifically for having sex in. Let me describe it to you.
At first glance, you might take it for a dentist's chair - a seat sits raised atop a pedestal, upholstered in cheap vinyl, with two arms and a head rest and an adjustable backrest, but here the similarity ends, for were you to make yourself comfortable in this particular piece of specialist furniture, you could expect a very different kind of filling to the one you get at Dr Tugwell's (though there might still be some requirement for you to spit-and-rinse). You see, this part of the device is for 'her' to sit in. She can adjust the backrest to suit, from straight-as-a-ramrod to looking-up-at-the-stars, and there's also somewhere for her to prop up her ankles, though the only choice she gets here is to splay herself out like a first-time ski-jumper. The ankle rests are thoughtfully padded, just to avoid any unnecessary discomfort or distress.
The options for 'him' are twofold. Set ahead of the seat and furthest away from her is a raised hassock, presumably so that he can kneel down and thank the lord for these gifts that he is about to receive. Alternatively, he could use it to provide him greater comfort when, er, kissing her belly-button. However, the real fun starts with the seat directly ahead of hers. See, this is when the mechanical aspects of the chair come into play.
He sits oppositie her, with her shins either side of his midriff. Once he's made himself comfortable, he'll find that a combination of design ergonomics and human physiology has presented him with an opening. He can do with this what he will, but all being well, it will be the last bit of work that he has to do. You see, once he's appropriately housed, all he need do is reach out his right hand and switch the sex chair on. His seat is connected to a series of moving parts that, once motivated, will shift his hips in the thrusting fashion that's as familiar to man of every creed of colour as it is to the beasts in the field. This assisted movement appears to be fully adjustable, from the gentlest of cat-licks to a more probing, reflective stroke to an honest-to-goodness, 'six-nowt' gut-stirrer.
I say 'appears' because, alas, at the time of our visit, the sex chair was out of action. The poor thing looked like it had little recent attention beyond the occasional swilling down with a bucket of warm soapy water, and, as its design suggested it was conceived and delivered in the 1970's, one can only imagine the number of frantic, time-is-money couplings it has overseen. Hopefully this state of disrepair shall sufficiently answer the intrusive and highly personal question that's no doubt currently playing on your mind. And even if it had been working, the answer would still have been no, on account of the sex chair being just too, too gross for words.
So that's the sex chair. I was unaware such a device had ever existed until 19:55, Saturday 14th October 2006, so if you were similarly innocent, then you were not alone. And frankly, even after sitting in it (in the 'he' seat, obviously), I still can't conceive of the need for one. How lazy would you have to be to let a machine do your sexing for you? I'm forced to wonder if it's part of the same Korean work ethic that refuses to recognise the notion of a day off sick, the idea being that, whilst it may be necessary to sate certain urges once in a while, there's no reason why you can't take care of the quarterly audits whilst you're at it. Or perhaps it's that a Korean woman is so demanding in the bedroom that she requires not only a Korean man but stirrups and a two-stroke engine to ring her bell. I just don't know, and neither am I too keen on finding out.
+ Now, to get things on a much less salty track, you may remember that two reports ago I promised you the Top 3 Things That Koreans Do That Are Quite Cool. No man can justly call me a liar, for I present them for you right here, right now, in all their shallow and dubious glory.
1) They drink outside of convenience stores.
That's right - they sit outside of convenience stores and drink alcohol. In Britain, this is the preserve of 14-year olds and the homeless (and the cross-section where the two sets meet), but here, it's not only accepted but encouraged. The shops themselves lay on patio furniture and parasols all summer long, so you can pop inside, grab yourself a can of Hite and maybe a tube of Pringles and while away the day. Forget your bar beer prices and your no-vertical-drinking, just get down the Ministop and settle in for the duration. It's ideal for the warm weather, as very few Korean bars have outside seating. Also, you can happily watch the world pass by in all its long-haired, short-skirted glory. And Korean common sense (so often an oxymoron) has deigned that no matter where you are, you're never more than pissing-distance from a public convenience. Let's hear it for the Korean convenience store!
2) They eat prawns shell-and-all.
How many man-hours have you wasted peeling prawns? How many futile days have fallen by the wayside as you fiddle and fumble and faff with the sticky pink shell of a shrimp, sending yourself close to batty trying to battle your way to the soft, fleshy, fishy insides? But besides buying those awful, ready-peeled clits of prawn-meat that serve as sorry excuses for shellfish in the supermarkets, what else can you do? Surely you have no choice but to wrestle the shell off with your fingernails, getting yourself into a proper state in the process? Well, now your crustaceous quandary is at an end - the Koreans have come up with the perfect, one-size-fits-all solution.
What is it? Just eat the whole thing! Pluck the head off, of course, but other than that, just munch the whole creature, legs and shell and tail and all! Crunch that mother good! At first, it seems distinctly odd, and goes against every squeamish, limp-wristed urge in the Western body, but I say go with it. Take a deep breath and just go for it - it's like eating a giant, fishy beetle. And it reaffirms my much-vaunted theory that shellfish are the insects of the sea, so are perfectly okay for vegetarians to eat.
3) They're open 24 hours.
Forget London's laughable claim to be a 24 hour city - here, you can sing karaoke at 6am, buy ramen at seven, check your emails at eight and finish off with a Hite at half past. In the past four months, I can't ever remember being asked to leave a bar so that they could close (though that's not to say I've never been asked to leave a bar here). Want to sit down to a kimbap at four in the morning? No problem, son. Fancy kimchi mandu an hour later? Also not a problem, son - if it's of dubious demand and limited appeal, then it's open 24 hours.
There is a contrary side to this apothegm. If it's a vital requirement, or if there's no reason it shouldn't be available at any hour of the day, then it's not. It's Korean common sense in the oxymoronic sense of the term at its absolute darndest. For example, no matter how good the Powerpoint slideshow and the printed matter and no matter the logical clarity of your exposition, neither you nor any man alive could possibly explain to me why - WHY?!?!? - Korean banks have to close their ATMs at night. Nor could you explain to any level of satisfaction why you can't top up your phone after midnight. It doesn't bear thinking about. All you can do is roll your eyes and smile wistfully and say, 'that's Korea for you!'
So that's the Top 3. There are many, many other things that Koreans do that make me smile, of course, but there's only so much syrup I dish out in one report. There remains only for me to give you the results of the last's Report's A-Team quiz. I was both shocked and saddened by the healthy response I received - it's a children's programme, for God's sake - but as it turned out, there were two winners, one who got his answers in first, and one who got all his answers ultra-right. They were, respectively, Ben 'Benny Blanco from the Bronx' Hudson, and Simon 'Step-Son of the Desert' Clough. If you recall, I stipulated that the winner would get a prize, but as this was in the singular, the current situation of there being two winners means that no prize will be awarded this time. Better luck next time, boys. A special mention has to go to John 'Never Heard of Google' Beckett for getting all the answers wrong. He made a clear statement of his intent to being completely, ludicrously incorrect when he suggested in his first answer that 'BA' stood for 'Brutus Abacus'.
The correct answers are:
1) BA stands for Bosco Albert (and not, as popularly thought, Bad Attitude).
2) The team were jailed for robbing a bank in Hanoi. They had been ordered to by their commanding officer, but during the mission, their operations base was captured and their CO offed. As the mission was secret, they were unable to prove that they were acting under orders and were promptly marched off to the stockade.
3) Face's real name is Templeton Peck.
4) Hannibal was a Lieutenant Colonel, BA a sergeant, Murdoch and Captain and Face a Lieutenant.
5) Murdoch was not actually a member of the A-Team as he was only the pilot on the mission to rob the bank in Hanoi and was not convicted of any crime. A couple of people suggested that Amy was the non-paid-up member, but in fact, she never claimed to be a member of the team. Her character was written out after the first season when Melinda Culea (who played her) started presenting the producers with ideas about how Amy could play a much larger role in the series. There's a lesson for all women there, I think.
Anyway, I hope the quiz was as much fun for you as it was for me. Maybe we can do it again some time. For now, I have to go and eat some haemul udung.
Annyonghi kasseyo for now, chump.
S
If you've just arrived here via the 'teaser' email, then the answer is, of course, that (ahem) they're both stuck up c*nts. Aren't you glad you came?
And if you found that salty, then I hope you don't suffer from hypertension, as things are about to get a whole lot saltier. Don't worry though - the forecast isn't for continued saltiness, but we are due a brief heavy blizzard of saltiness, though that will be followed by a warm front throughout the rest of the report. If you can't take any more salinity, then please skip ahead to the paragraph marked with a '+'. But if you're strapped in and ready for a full-on salting, then get ready to get salted as I tell you all about what I found in a hotel room in Seoul last weekend...
Michelle and I will often get a hotel whenever we go out in Seoul, as it's easier than heading back out to Anyang or Paju at six in the morning, and prices are such that it's not financially herculean, even at the end of the month. The reason that these hotels are cheap though is because they occupy the lower end of the market. This doesn't necessarily mean that they scrimp on comfort or space (often quite the opposite, in fact), but the facilities offered are aimed more at the customer who might not necessarily be staying the whole night. This is why these budget-market establishments are more popularly known as 'love hotels'.
Don't get the wrong impression - these love hotels aren't like the kind of backstreets-of-downtown, rooms-by-the-hour flophouses that you get in gritty American cop movies in the 70's, but rather a place where the courting male can take his paramour instead of his parent's pokey apartment, or where the soju-drunk salaryman can take the teenage prostitiute he's just picked up and give her three or four of the best angry thrusts he can muster before he passes out on top of her. It sounds seedy enough, but because this is Korea and Koreans don't ever do anything disreputable ever, these hotels like to maintain an air of respectability. Hence, the rooms, though cheap, aim to provide all the comforts you'd expect from a hotel room you'd stay in til morning, and hence, they've found a market with penny-wise Western types who would happily sleep on broken crockery in their own capital cities provided that it only cost the 25 quids a night that it does here.
I say an 'air' of respectability, but this doesn't mean that your room will be 100% seediness-free. You can expect to find condoms laid on at no extra cost, and free porn on the TV, but these are just the salty edges of what will most times be a perfectly functional hotel experience (save for what salaciousness you might choose to pollute your accommadation with by your own will). The sheets will be fresh and stain-free, the bin emptied and the toilet flushed and any evidence of prior impropriety thoroughly banished, and whilst you may not want to hold a bible discussion group there, there's no reason you'd need to feel dirty or lecherous for taking advantage of the rock-bottom room prices at such an establishment, despite what Koreans might think of them. However, once in a while, you get a room that underlines without flinching its intended purpose. This might be (like we got last month) a jacuzzi in the bathroom and a projector TV for the scud, or it might, like last weekend, invoke the presence of a big round bed and a sex chair.
'Sorry, SB - what was the second thing?' I imagine your asking.
A sex chair. A chair designed specifically for having sex in. Let me describe it to you.
At first glance, you might take it for a dentist's chair - a seat sits raised atop a pedestal, upholstered in cheap vinyl, with two arms and a head rest and an adjustable backrest, but here the similarity ends, for were you to make yourself comfortable in this particular piece of specialist furniture, you could expect a very different kind of filling to the one you get at Dr Tugwell's (though there might still be some requirement for you to spit-and-rinse). You see, this part of the device is for 'her' to sit in. She can adjust the backrest to suit, from straight-as-a-ramrod to looking-up-at-the-stars, and there's also somewhere for her to prop up her ankles, though the only choice she gets here is to splay herself out like a first-time ski-jumper. The ankle rests are thoughtfully padded, just to avoid any unnecessary discomfort or distress.
The options for 'him' are twofold. Set ahead of the seat and furthest away from her is a raised hassock, presumably so that he can kneel down and thank the lord for these gifts that he is about to receive. Alternatively, he could use it to provide him greater comfort when, er, kissing her belly-button. However, the real fun starts with the seat directly ahead of hers. See, this is when the mechanical aspects of the chair come into play.
He sits oppositie her, with her shins either side of his midriff. Once he's made himself comfortable, he'll find that a combination of design ergonomics and human physiology has presented him with an opening. He can do with this what he will, but all being well, it will be the last bit of work that he has to do. You see, once he's appropriately housed, all he need do is reach out his right hand and switch the sex chair on. His seat is connected to a series of moving parts that, once motivated, will shift his hips in the thrusting fashion that's as familiar to man of every creed of colour as it is to the beasts in the field. This assisted movement appears to be fully adjustable, from the gentlest of cat-licks to a more probing, reflective stroke to an honest-to-goodness, 'six-nowt' gut-stirrer.
I say 'appears' because, alas, at the time of our visit, the sex chair was out of action. The poor thing looked like it had little recent attention beyond the occasional swilling down with a bucket of warm soapy water, and, as its design suggested it was conceived and delivered in the 1970's, one can only imagine the number of frantic, time-is-money couplings it has overseen. Hopefully this state of disrepair shall sufficiently answer the intrusive and highly personal question that's no doubt currently playing on your mind. And even if it had been working, the answer would still have been no, on account of the sex chair being just too, too gross for words.
So that's the sex chair. I was unaware such a device had ever existed until 19:55, Saturday 14th October 2006, so if you were similarly innocent, then you were not alone. And frankly, even after sitting in it (in the 'he' seat, obviously), I still can't conceive of the need for one. How lazy would you have to be to let a machine do your sexing for you? I'm forced to wonder if it's part of the same Korean work ethic that refuses to recognise the notion of a day off sick, the idea being that, whilst it may be necessary to sate certain urges once in a while, there's no reason why you can't take care of the quarterly audits whilst you're at it. Or perhaps it's that a Korean woman is so demanding in the bedroom that she requires not only a Korean man but stirrups and a two-stroke engine to ring her bell. I just don't know, and neither am I too keen on finding out.
+ Now, to get things on a much less salty track, you may remember that two reports ago I promised you the Top 3 Things That Koreans Do That Are Quite Cool. No man can justly call me a liar, for I present them for you right here, right now, in all their shallow and dubious glory.
1) They drink outside of convenience stores.
That's right - they sit outside of convenience stores and drink alcohol. In Britain, this is the preserve of 14-year olds and the homeless (and the cross-section where the two sets meet), but here, it's not only accepted but encouraged. The shops themselves lay on patio furniture and parasols all summer long, so you can pop inside, grab yourself a can of Hite and maybe a tube of Pringles and while away the day. Forget your bar beer prices and your no-vertical-drinking, just get down the Ministop and settle in for the duration. It's ideal for the warm weather, as very few Korean bars have outside seating. Also, you can happily watch the world pass by in all its long-haired, short-skirted glory. And Korean common sense (so often an oxymoron) has deigned that no matter where you are, you're never more than pissing-distance from a public convenience. Let's hear it for the Korean convenience store!
2) They eat prawns shell-and-all.
How many man-hours have you wasted peeling prawns? How many futile days have fallen by the wayside as you fiddle and fumble and faff with the sticky pink shell of a shrimp, sending yourself close to batty trying to battle your way to the soft, fleshy, fishy insides? But besides buying those awful, ready-peeled clits of prawn-meat that serve as sorry excuses for shellfish in the supermarkets, what else can you do? Surely you have no choice but to wrestle the shell off with your fingernails, getting yourself into a proper state in the process? Well, now your crustaceous quandary is at an end - the Koreans have come up with the perfect, one-size-fits-all solution.
What is it? Just eat the whole thing! Pluck the head off, of course, but other than that, just munch the whole creature, legs and shell and tail and all! Crunch that mother good! At first, it seems distinctly odd, and goes against every squeamish, limp-wristed urge in the Western body, but I say go with it. Take a deep breath and just go for it - it's like eating a giant, fishy beetle. And it reaffirms my much-vaunted theory that shellfish are the insects of the sea, so are perfectly okay for vegetarians to eat.
3) They're open 24 hours.
Forget London's laughable claim to be a 24 hour city - here, you can sing karaoke at 6am, buy ramen at seven, check your emails at eight and finish off with a Hite at half past. In the past four months, I can't ever remember being asked to leave a bar so that they could close (though that's not to say I've never been asked to leave a bar here). Want to sit down to a kimbap at four in the morning? No problem, son. Fancy kimchi mandu an hour later? Also not a problem, son - if it's of dubious demand and limited appeal, then it's open 24 hours.
There is a contrary side to this apothegm. If it's a vital requirement, or if there's no reason it shouldn't be available at any hour of the day, then it's not. It's Korean common sense in the oxymoronic sense of the term at its absolute darndest. For example, no matter how good the Powerpoint slideshow and the printed matter and no matter the logical clarity of your exposition, neither you nor any man alive could possibly explain to me why - WHY?!?!? - Korean banks have to close their ATMs at night. Nor could you explain to any level of satisfaction why you can't top up your phone after midnight. It doesn't bear thinking about. All you can do is roll your eyes and smile wistfully and say, 'that's Korea for you!'
So that's the Top 3. There are many, many other things that Koreans do that make me smile, of course, but there's only so much syrup I dish out in one report. There remains only for me to give you the results of the last's Report's A-Team quiz. I was both shocked and saddened by the healthy response I received - it's a children's programme, for God's sake - but as it turned out, there were two winners, one who got his answers in first, and one who got all his answers ultra-right. They were, respectively, Ben 'Benny Blanco from the Bronx' Hudson, and Simon 'Step-Son of the Desert' Clough. If you recall, I stipulated that the winner would get a prize, but as this was in the singular, the current situation of there being two winners means that no prize will be awarded this time. Better luck next time, boys. A special mention has to go to John 'Never Heard of Google' Beckett for getting all the answers wrong. He made a clear statement of his intent to being completely, ludicrously incorrect when he suggested in his first answer that 'BA' stood for 'Brutus Abacus'.
The correct answers are:
1) BA stands for Bosco Albert (and not, as popularly thought, Bad Attitude).
2) The team were jailed for robbing a bank in Hanoi. They had been ordered to by their commanding officer, but during the mission, their operations base was captured and their CO offed. As the mission was secret, they were unable to prove that they were acting under orders and were promptly marched off to the stockade.
3) Face's real name is Templeton Peck.
4) Hannibal was a Lieutenant Colonel, BA a sergeant, Murdoch and Captain and Face a Lieutenant.
5) Murdoch was not actually a member of the A-Team as he was only the pilot on the mission to rob the bank in Hanoi and was not convicted of any crime. A couple of people suggested that Amy was the non-paid-up member, but in fact, she never claimed to be a member of the team. Her character was written out after the first season when Melinda Culea (who played her) started presenting the producers with ideas about how Amy could play a much larger role in the series. There's a lesson for all women there, I think.
Anyway, I hope the quiz was as much fun for you as it was for me. Maybe we can do it again some time. For now, I have to go and eat some haemul udung.
Annyonghi kasseyo for now, chump.
S
posted by Stephen Beckett at 10:36 PM
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