The switch

The other night while swilling the normal few pitchers of Hite, the Korean Budweiser, Traci, Will and I decided to give up the beverage for a month. This has several implications. One, obviously, none of us can enjoy our favorite libation for an entire month. And this during a time of Soccer matches every day or nearly so, resulting in more time spent in bars in close proximity to the bubbly beverage we're come to love. Did I mention that it's getting hot, too? Two, our alternatives in this heavily taxed alcohol market are limited. Basically we can spend our entire paychecks on good tasting booze or we can save our money and jump into the soju diet. We have done the latter, embracing the rotgut as if it's our long lost relative. Soju generally comes in little green bottles for very little money. If you want to, you can get wasted on a few dollars. Traci did Friday night. She spent a grand total of 8 dollars on food and liquor. And the only reason she spent so much is that one of the bottles she bought was in a restaurant (where I was busily consumming far more swine than I needed to)where a bottle is three times the cost of a store's.

Soju is a clear alcohol, distilled from rice and other grains. For the last 35 years of the twentieth century, the S. Korean Government feared a rice shortage, so soju was made by diluting ethanol alcohol with water and flavoring. Yum. Most of the cheap brands are still produced in this fashion, though Traci and I are looking for brands that are actually distilled.

It doesn't exactly taste good, not the way beer tastes good, and I've never actually thought to myself 'man, I could go for a shot of soju right about now.' But it doesn't taste that bad. Certainly doesn't taste worse than turpentine or gasoline. It's somewhat like vodka, though usually weaker with it's own distintive difficult to describe taste. Traci says bad vodka, but something else is there . . . After the first few shots, they start to slide down, though those first few can wake you up.

And wake us up they did. Last night we went to Daegu with Daeyoung for his alpine club's 30 anniversary. We arrived to eating and drinking, becoming quickly bound in a bramble of soju and introductions. We met a man who climbed K2 back in the day. And drank several shots of soju with him. I met the first man who was a swimmer and could whoop me in 100m fly--he was jacked, and kept feeling my arms, probably wondering where the muscles were. We drank several shots of soju with him. We ate more, drank more, watched the ceremony where envelopes full of money were put into a pig's mouth--only the head was present--and at one point, ears. Towards the end of the night Traci was standing singing and we had to go to bed. We woke to dogs barking and all those still drinking when we went to bed, already up and beckoning us to breakfast. It was 740am. We were hiking within an hour.

So why would we give up beer and submit ourselves to the temptation of cold beers on hot days after hungover hikes?