Friday, December 17, 2010 was my 1,000th day in South Korea. For the nitpickers out there, I spent exactly one night on Japanese soil doing a visa run; not counting that day makes my 1,000th day Saturday the 18th instead. No biggie.

This milestone, however, was just a pretext for getting some awesome friends together for the Lady in Red's birthday. The plan was to get some lunch in Gangnam, head to a friend's birthday party, then check out a poetry night in the Noksapyeong area.

That all went well, with one shameful exception: Butterfinger Pancakes, you disappoint me. Sure, I knew arriving with a party of 10 on a Saturday afternoon would likely involve a wait, and there was - an hour. Over we went to Krispy Kreme for some coffee and conversation - including some great catch-up conversation with blogging friends and their wonderful spouses.

Arriving back at Butterfinger Pancakes, we were told to wait 5 minutes. This, of course, comes after I said we'd take smaller tables instead of getting everyone around one big table - Butterfinger Pancakes doesn't exactly have a lot of room for huge tables. After 30 minutes watching several other groups enter - and other groups get seated - we moved on to Dos Tacos. After some hesitation, we found plenty of room in their basement (for those in Gangnam, enter the basement by walking down the stairs next to the ground level's entrance). A shout-out to Steve from the Qi Ranger and his beautiful wife Jo, Dustin from Rip City to Seoul / Neh Magazine and his cute lady Whisper, Roboseyo and Wifeoseyo, my co-worker Celeste and her friend Maddie - thanks all for coming out.

This is what you get when you try to play Scrabble with those timeless 'Happy Birthday' candles.

Round two was elsewhere in Gangnam at another birthday party - a friend of the Lady in Red's turning... um, 27. Happy birthday, Diane - a cheer for combining youthful energy and sass in a effervescent outfit.

Round three involved heading up to the nascent Kyungidan area (that's near Noksapyeong station and within walking distance of Itaewon in case the name is unfamiliar to you Seoulites) for some poetry. Not just any poetry, mind you, but an event billed as the 'Jingle My Bells Erotic Poetry Christmas Party'. Presented by some of the same people as the recent Encyclopedia Show, it's a good sign for the artistic community that Carmen's filled up quite nicely despite being a fair distance from the subway / bus stops.

It's here where the story turns NSFW - click away if there are kids around to see your jaw drop.

As you might expect an erotic poetry party to be, more than a few choice descriptions would be censored or left unpublished elsewhere.

After the event started, David presented some of his darker and more morbid words - the latter poem actually got a brief encore by request of the host.

She should be legendary, but Heather Hong has to settle for titillating a crowd of a few dozen for now. While one of her poems was a welcome repeat from the first Seoul Encyclopedia Show (it's hard to forget the line about 'I want to sweatf*ck your talisman'), another featured the sentiment that 'love handles mean f***-me-harder'.

Looking a bit like one of the Boyz II Men, Andre suggested a gentleman's approach in his first poem - 'I'm confessing and suggesting that you bless me' was one line repeated multiple times - and a more aggressive approach in the second. 'When a man is using his tongue...', went one line, when 'Where?' rang out from the crowd.

I'll write a separate post about things I've learned over the past 1,000+ days, but for now, suffice it to say that it was an awesome Saturday. It may not have featured some exotic Korean destination, but it was definitely fun and full of friends.

© Chris Backe - 2010

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