Looking back on a great weekend in Seoul back in 2007

It’s Sunday evening and today was the first time I could leave the house since I came home from dinner on Friday evening due to the blizzard. I could write about that or continue the Central America posts, but while both will be done soon, I found something interesting during the week that I thought was lost, so this will just be a very short post about that.

Although most of my time overseas has been spent living in Singapore, that wasn’t my first international home. In mid-2007 I moved to Daejeon, South Korea, to gain teaching experience for my eventual move to Singapore. My stay was initially supposed to be 12 months, but when the school discovered I had developed epilepsy earlier in the year I was let go. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

To be honest, my entire stay in Korea is a bit hazy. I know Anna came to visit a couple of times, but besides that I don’t remember much of it. However, I did try to do something similar to now.
I have mentioned in a previous post that I kept a small journal on Myspace, but it had been deleted since Justin Timberlake bought the company and I can’t find the copy I saved. Well, the other night I was chatting to a childhood friend of mine, Sam Agostino, on Facebook. I scrolled up in the message and saw a transcript from that blog that I sent to him in 2013, from when him and Andy Moore as their old band, Digger and the Pussycats, made the trek to Korea after their US tour so we could hang out in Seoul in late 2007.

This is apparently what happened on the Saturday night:

I am exhausted, because I just got back from Seoul. I went there to see Digger & The Pussycats play and catch up with Sam and Andy. They have been playing in the US for the last six weeks and they both say that the food there sucks. It is evident when you look at them, Sam says he put on about 15 kg (33 lbs) in the time he was there. They loved it in Korea, Andy managed to find a woman in Gwanju the first night he was here (Friday), so he was going to do a 6 hour round trip today to see her.

I caught both of their shows last night and the places they played were pretty nuts. The first place they played was called Skunkhell (the bars across the road were “Les Bos” and “Club Tool”). To get into Skunkhell, you have to go up a staircase where there is no handrail. Pretty dangerous after a few drinks, I fell off it, and you can’t avoid it, because Skunkhell is unlicensed so if you want to drink, you have to run across the road to 7-11 and bring it back in. Once inside, you realise that my apartment is bigger than the floor-space of the venue, and my apartment is tiny. The place is full of punks and skinheads, the walls are just covered in newspaper, it was a total hole. It rocked. Digger played after a Korean punk band, a Korean stoner band and a Korean hardcore band. They didn’t have their best show, but even when they are bad, they are good. Someone brought in a heap of soju and OJ and was mixing it up with a boat paddle in a barrel and serving it in paper cups for free, thus avoiding the licence problem. All the other bands were really cool guys (and girls) and hung out with us the rest of the night and gave us free CDs.

After the show we had a few hours to bum around, so we went and got a bite to eat and then hung out in a park opposite where they were playing next, Club Spot. The park had so many people in it considering it was cold and around midnight. Me and Andy just played on the swings and drank a bit more while Sam chatted to some guys who were at the last show. When Spot opened at midnight, we had a few more drinks. Digger were supposed to play at about 2.30am and Andy realised by around 1am that he was a bit too drunk to play and passed out at a crowded table for an hour and a half. By the time of the show, myself, Sam and Andy were all pretty tired, but they played and had an AWESOME show. The whole crowd was going nuts. A few free beers afterwards and then it was time to go back to my room above Dunkin’ Donuts.” Good times…

So there you go, a short summation of a weekend when a couple of old friends who came to visit me overseas over eight years ago! Hopefully I can locate the whole thing one day.

Digger and the Pussycats were an awesome band, but unfortunately they no longer play. Sam has another great band, however, called Brat Farrar, so if they’re in town make sure you check them out!