Coffee Girls
Often, Koreans are notorious for their hard work ethic.
Park Ji-Sung, Team Korea Football player, who also plays for Manchester, is also known as The Oxygen Tank, which I presume is an allusion to his stamina. In Thailand, after the tsunami hit, surrounding countries, including Korea, sent in contracts to help clean up and rebuild. The Koreans worked on ridiculous shifts, relatively speaking. Every one who was helping in the effort, eventually came to learn and know the word ‘bali’, which in englihs means, ‘faster’. When said two times in a row, it kind of minds, ‘hurry up!’.
What a lot of people don’t know is the average Korean businessman parties as hard as he works. These guys work from 7am, to 8pm, and then go drinking with their boss, or work buddies til 2am, and then sleep til they have to work again. In the words of my good friend Gloria, ‘90% of the country are alcoholics’.
Which brings me to the title of this post. Coffee Girls. Gumi, I have heard, is notorious for it’s copious amounts of Love Motels and accompanying businesses supplying sex. Sex, or just good conversation with a pretty girl. This type of thing varies. There are Karaoke rooms which double as brothels. Or there are da-bangs. A da-bang is a coffee shop…that doubles as a brothel, sort of.
With the high volume of two wheeled vehicles you see zooming around Gumi, and Korea in general, you don’t often see girls driving them. In Gumi, when you do, she’s usually wearing a skirt, and her scooter has a sign with a phone number on it. So a businessman can call up one of these ladies, and she’ll bring a (likely, crappy) cup of coffee. Apparently, a lot of these men aren’t looking for sex. They just want the company of a pretty lady, which is an apparant scarcity.
Brandon was telling me how there is an oncoming semi-crisis. A shortage of women. Some time ago people were aborting all their female fetuses because they all wanted sons to carry on their names. Which is funny, because a lot of them have the same last names. (I don’t usually like that stupid joke, but here it’s actually kind of funny). It is now illegal for the docotr to tell the parents the sex of the baby before birth.
Anyhow, these men can order these women, they come by, you can have coffee, stimulating conversation about why you think Korea couldn’t beat Switzerland, perhaps have a discussion about whether had the second goal not counted, and had been called an off-side, which it was in my humble opinion, would Korea have come back to tie, or even win? Then you can probably pay-up for a shoulder rub, or any other kind of rub I suppose. I can only assume theres an escalating range of things on the menu besides coffee.
Brandon also mentioned, (he’s a wise dude) that a lot of these girls are probably just working off credit debt. Korea’s apparently just giving out credit cards. His friend, who was a foreigner, got a Visa with a $20,000 limit, no credit check or anything. The thing would expire when he left, but still, 20 grand!
Yesterday, in one of my classes with sutdents about age, 11-13, we were talking about jobs.
“So, what do you think is the most difficult job?” I said to the class.
Sandy says “Doctor!”
Lucy says “President!”
Then Lona says “….hmm… a da-bang ajumah” (or, coffee girl).
I was astounded. All i could do is break out into laughter.
“What’s that?” Bin says in Korean.
Lona turns to him, but I had to stop it. “No, no, it’s ok” I said in Korean. “It’s ok.”