It was Saturday at noon and I was wearing my iconic J Crew blazer and pants, topped off with my favorite Tsubo shoes. I had decided to start dressing fancy because I had quit my job, and also simply because I'm a Yale graduate and if I'm going to black out on a street corner, I want to look good doing so. Saturday at noon in Korea means that you've likely been going strong since the night before. However, I had been going a couple of days, and was already sleepy.
Then I'm walking up the hill to my house for a nap when I bump into my roommate and her band of military companions. They were dressed like your typical American: flip flops, shorts, and wife-beatersleeveless shirts. They were all going to an amusement park whose name I can no longer remember, and invited me along. I hadn't eaten in a couple of days, and they all wanted to go to a typical American restaurant: McDonald's; but I'm a vegan so I just watched them eat.
Eventually we make it to the amusement park and I'm drinking beer because I'm hungry and it's the only thing that doesn't have fish sauce. In Korea there are no drinking laws, and you can sleep anywhere, so I knew that I didn't have to turn back. The lines at the amusement park were quite long, so I simply decided to sleep in the bushes until they called us up.
Eventually the guys running the rides decided that they should just let the drunk foreigners ahead of the line, since we were more amusing than the park itself. Turns out that me having a BAC above .27 was an advantage; we would get rushed to the front of the line by concerned staff who didn't want to kick out a group of drunk foreigners and who also didn't want to outrage all the Korean families out that day.
I was sure I was going to throw up, but it turns out that I blacked out during my first ride. We get off the first roller coaster and my army buddies have to carry me off. They carry me to the next line, but I just reach for the first bush and comfortably lay myself down. There I am lying by a bush when one of them wakes me up and informs me that [I can't recall]... but I think we got pushed to the front of the line again.
I don't recall much after that, but I know that we got on a bunch of rides and that a good time was had by all. However, the real insult to my dignity came on facebook. In one of the pictures that was uploaded chronicling the trip to the amusement park, I had my legs crossed, and then someone called me a "fag." It was the conservative sister of one of my Italian buddies in the army, but I didn't know. I thought it was a dude from her name, so I just wrote: "I don't know who you are, but fuck you!"
I could not believe that someone would be so classless and stoop so low as to call me a fag for crossing my legs and dressing unAmerican at a Korean children's amusement park. Somebody called me a fag in a public forum, I was outraged: children go on there. How can a person be so careless as to promote that kind of vulgar language in a public forum, I don't know, but it makes me lose faith in human beings. I think it's part of the reason why I drink so much: to drown out all the hateful words.