Western Condensation, Osmosis.

I’m standing outside of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. There’s a specialty hotdog shop across the street, I can see an Outback Steakhouse, and I can hear English conversations as background noise. My brain’s first reaction is to cling onto these like flotsam. Everything else gets sorted down to a lower priority, right now I need to think, process, sink my teeth into the important English waveband. I can tune in, even if the station’s only playing stupid messages like “Wow, this is just like New York!” or “KFC sounds good right now.”

Down the street there’s an old dwarf of a Korean man. He’s angry at everything, the type of drunk that stumbles when he walks, then stops to curse the street. His face is ribbed with wrinkles, and he’s got the thinnest frost of white hair. He’s wearing a backpack, carrying a white umbrella. He’s mad and he wants money, and no one’s biting. He tries me. Doesn’t even ask, just sticks his hand out and grunts at me.

“Get outta here,” I tell him. Don’t even bother in Korean.

“Ah!” he shouts, “Ah! Ah!” he aims his umbrella at me, looks around to see if anyone else can help. No one’s looking at this angry son of a bitch, no one likes him.  He keeps grunting and brushing the hair above his ear, cursing me.

“Alright, fuck off,” I said.

He stops swatting his hair, manages to look angrier.

“Ah! You watch your mouth. Ah! Get outta my country!” It takes about thirty seconds for him to say this, he’s too busy grunting and barking in Korean every few words. I give him a level look and don’t say anything else. No point in arguing with a bum. At this point he realizes that he’s definitely not getting any money out of me, curses me again, and shakes his umbrella one last time. I watch him stumble down the street, swatting invisible flies around his head.

Itaewon does that to people.

Some cities have Chinatown. Itaewon is the opposite, some condensation of the western hemisphere with Europe thrown in free of charge. The foreigner population is mostly fed by the large American military base nearby. There’s no theme, no planning, everything is slammed together. You can buy a shot of Jagermeister on the street, eat kebabs from Pakis, watch a football match at one many London-style pubs. It’s an international hub, the official language is neon light, the currency is liquor, the population is an even split of everyone from Earth.

     There are bars, there are clubs, and there's the nebula of social hierarchy to go along with these places. Dive bars exist underneath high-rise clubs with a twenty-thousand won cover. At one point I walked past a huge wearing a down jacket, its owner picking poop off the street with toilet paper.

"That's a Great Dane, motherfucker!" someone shouts. "Fuck yeah, I know my dogs like nobody's business. Hey, Wang! Wang! Don't you fuckers eat dog?"

"Yeah, but not like that, not the Korean way. You gotta stir-fry that shit! I'm barely Korean at all, I've gotta eat it like a Chink! Stir fry that dog up!"

The dog offered no opinion.

Whenever I go to Itaewon I rediscover a whole group that I hate. They’re the boorish, the too-drunk, the too-loud, the foreigners who have washed out or never tried in the first place. Americans in their mid-40s do the same awful shuffling dance they do on a girls night out in the states, cheer at tired old songs like Piano Man. People fall into a table in a bar, knock glasses over, laugh as they break, drunkenly walk away.

It’s the least Korean place in Seoul. There’s a hint of the country under the peeling wallpaper of American food and Ford Expeditions parked on the street, but you have to dig for it—after a few seconds you stop trying. More than anything, it’s a guilty pleasure.

Sometimes you need to take a break from the whole Asia thing, I get that and support it completely, but for some Itaewon is life-support. It’s a little bit of home for anyone from anywhere, but it’s stretched so thin that you wonder why anyone bothers with a bad imitation of something that might have been best left alone in the first place.