This weekend was really fun. Friday night there was a new club opening up at Gwangali beach, which is an area I have only ever been to twice before because it’s been so cold for what seems like sooo long. A new club opening out at the beach is a harbinger of good weather on the horizon, so I was really excited. The club was called 'Womb', but I insisted on calling it 'Placenta' all night, and still do, because I think that 'Womb' is a stupid name, and that’s what it makes me think of every time somebody says the name of the club. And I think 'Placenta' is really catching on. You’re welcome, new club.
Saturday night was Wordz Only 3, which is a spoken-word event (involving mostly original poetry, although some people read original stories or something they enjoy from well-known writers) that Marcus co-hosts each month. I still haven’t gotten up the courage to ‘perform’, but every time, I do give it serious thought. I just want to make sure I have the exact right piece, that’s all. After that, a new jazz club called Monk was opening around the corner, and there were some great bands playing and local artwork for sale. I am contemplating becoming a groupie for this band Lhasa because I dig them so much, and there was another band from Seoul
Later in the evening, after hanging out with a group of around 20 people outside Family Mart for about half an hour, I found myself sitting at a booth at U2 Bar (a bar located at Haeundae beach… I am loving that it’s becoming time to start hanging around the beach more. Twice in one weekend? That’s unheard of.) with my two Bulgarian friends Maria and Daniela and another friend, Jessica from Missouri
Another thing, the way the Bulgarians look is… notable. Discretion is not what they're going for. Because they are in a rock band, their on-stage style (which are the clothes they continue wearing when they get off work and meet us out somewhere) is what I would call rocker-chic, and by that I mean pulling out all the stops. Pretty much how I would imagine Whitesnake would look if they were actually women. And it was 1982 again. Their clothes and hairstyles are so funky and badass, and they are so unconventionally hot, that every time I hang around them I feel at once lame (in my cotton dress and cowboy boots) and super cool (because my proximity to them instantly makes me look cooler). And I feel way more of the latter.
So anyway, the four of us are sitting in a round booth, and it’s getting later in the night, and I guy I don’t know sits down at our table. Maria whispers to me “He always hits on us,” just to give me a heads up on this guy. He’s definitely a westerner with no discernable accent. And I don’t remember exactly how it went down, but he knew that Maria and Daniela were Bulgarian, and he “accused” Jess and me of not being Bulgarian, guessing that we were Canadians or Americans. I say “accused” because it’s perfectly possible that he merely used context clues (such as the fact that we were dressed very dissimilarly and clearly did not have Eastern European accents) to discern that we weren’t Bulgarian and was just working the law of averages on guessing us to be North American. Plus the fact that we ARE Americans, so it’s not as if he was really being offensively stereotypical.
I, however, pretended to take offense to his dismissal of us as merely American or Canadian, and this prompted me to claim that I was a Russian, just to teach him not to assume things. This is the obvious next step to take when someone makes an assumption that is dead-on accurate about you.
How did I attempt to convince him of my Russian heritage? Not by adopting a fake Russian accent – I know my strengths, and accents aren’t one of them. I always end up sounding like Speedy Gonzales meets Apu from the Simpsons. So, not Russian. I decided to go with what is one of my strongest suits (and a personal favorite), a display of trivial knowledge.
So I start off by saying, “Um no, I’m not American” (in my regular voice, mind you, and with haughtiness in my tone), “I’m Russian. Hello? That’s why we are friends, because Eastern Europe is right across the Ural mountains from my homeland.” (I was pretty proud of that one.)
Then, “You know my favorite drink? Vodka. It's delicious and I could just drink gallons of it. And you know where the coolest city in the world is? Moscow Siberia is awesome. That’s like my favorite part of Crime and Punishment, when he gets sent to Siberia at the end. And they have the prettiest tigers there.”
The dude obviously knew I wasn’t Russian, convincing him had never been on the docket, but by this point, my goal was just to list as many things about Russia Canada
Now the goal was just to make my friends laugh at every ridiculous random Russia US Bering Strait . But Gorbachev with that silly birthmark… what a likable guy. Also, Anna Karenina is one of my literary heroes (never read the book, wasn’t really taking into account Anna’s tragic demise when I said this). And I really like borscht (no idea what borscht is other than a soup they eat in Russia USSR"
It was somewhere around this point, either because he couldn’t get a word in edgewise or because I was ignoring his attempts as I racked my brain for Soviet Union knowledge, that the dude got up and left. As he walked away I called “Spasiba!” It means “Thank you”, and I bet every woman between the ages of 20 and 40 knows how I knew that one word of Russian – from the Sex and the City episode where Carrie is dating Mikhail Baryshnikov. It was a good thing the guy split too, because I was getting dangerously close to the scraping the bottom of the barrel. The next thing out of my mouth was, “And we Russians can see Alaska Russia
So I have to brush up on my Russia knowledge for when I eventually go on Jeopardy! Because unless I get the chance to say "'Cliché Facts about the Former Soviet Union' for $800, Alex", I’m probably screwed.
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