Steak, Seoul Pub, Aladdin Sane

It was a slow weekend here in the Seoul Patch, as occasionally it should be. Caught up on some laundry, did some shopping, completed my lesson plans for next week ... I did take the time to slip out to Itaewon last night for a thick steak, seemingly unavailable elsewhere in this land, at least at semi-reasonable prices.

I will grant you that a thick juicy steak should be pretty low on the menu for a guy that just complained about a flare-up of the gout, but how do you think I got the condition in the first place? Well, the answer isn't necessarily gluttony, so hush up.

An article this weekend in the New York Times reported new research and new drugs for what it termed "the disease of kings", leaving off the second part of the saying, "the king of diseases" for a level of pain that my doctor told me is second only to childbirth. It's not something I've worried about too much, because I am rarely bothered by it--but when I am, Wow!

Anyway, after my steak I wandered over to Seoul Pub, where I sat near some heavy-lifters. One staggered out almost immediately, leaving his buddy passed out in a booth. A third fell asleep after his first sip of a fresh drink, leaving only the fourth, who waxed rhapsodic about Neil Young's "Harvest" album when some CSNY played. So he was okay by me.

His name was Shane and he claimed to earn about 8 million won a month running his own English lessons out of his home. The only way he has his own business, of course, is that he is married to a Korean. They have a small child--about whom he waxed as rhapsodical as he did Neil Young, maybe more.

He is a Kiwi, which for the uninitiated means he's from New Zealand, the land of Peter Jackson and sheep, and claimed also to have a tattoo of David Bowie. As an empiricist from way back, I wanted proof, so here it is:


Aladdin Sane, no less--the first Bowie album I consciously listened to, shared with me by my friend Tracy in the library at North Greenville College, fall of 1979, when so much more was new.