Well, depends on the length and width of the cup, that is. Average Korean beer cups are way too thin, I tell ya. That thing is more time spending on pouring than drinking. They love pouring so much that they made specific rules and myths about how to pour. And none of them ever drink any alcohol out of a bottle.
Beside me, that is.
Yeah, I'm keep forgetting that I'm one of them as well. Maybe that's it. All of my friends are keep telling me that I'm so not Korean, which is a complement for me. Maybe one of the reason is because I like to drink beer out of bottles and other Korean don't do such thing unless they're doing some sort of supposedly a public stunt? I have my reasons, though, you know. What's wrong with owning and spending my own quantity I paid for? It also helps me to count how much alcohol I can drink and I should drink, how expensive I am to hang out with myself, that much of my own responsibility I'm taking for myself. I don't owe anybody and nobody needs to owe me anything for beer I drink. I drink as much as I earned and as much as I can. Nobody force me to drink anything, I don't force anyone to drink, and nobody need to feel the need to drink any more than they should. Nobody ends up screwing around about payments. What's so wrong with that?
That's kinda like that habit of how Korean pubs are working, I think.
I like to pay things I buy up front because it's easier to count things that way either for customers or for bartenders. What I did for pleasure, I already paid for. No one can accuse me for otherwise when I walk out of that place. I walk out clean after drinking my drinks. No potential fraud from using facts that how drunk customers can't count.
Korean pubs, they don't work that way. You still can in westernized pubs. I was a bartender in one of them. Korean always wanted to pay their drink after they finished their drink. And that made things unbelievably complicated. And I served both foreigners and Korean almost equally enough that I can tell the differences.
An example. There's a group of Korean claiming a table drinking for hours. When they leave, they've been drinking total amount of about 200,000 Korean won, which is about little less than 200 U.S. dollar. One of them feels pretty good about drinking that night for variety of reasons and he decided to pay all of it by himself. Maybe it was his payday. And couple of his friends accompanied him watched him encouraged him while he paid all of their stuff because that's what friends to in Korea apparently. So I told them they owed somewhat about 200,000 won. And I counted that manually on a piece of paper, of course. If that was any busier day, system like that is highly likely to be overwhelming and cause of errors and miscalculations. And that's probably what they thought I did, that I must have miscalculated. They accused me that they didn't drink that much of an alcohol altogether. Outnumbered by being the only bartender working that day. And all they discounted themselves was only like couple of cheap beer bottles at most. And they're drunk as hell. That conversation was not reasonable at all. I would have just let them go with a bit of a random discount because I didn't wanted to deal with that kind of trouble just for some several bux. But you know my boss wouldn't let me getting different numbers from what I wrote down and what I actually got from customers and what is actually in the fridge. So we argued for a good 10 useless minutes. But they're drunk as hell, they're celebrating something, I kinda felt sorry about making their day go wrong. So I decided to let them go. And there weren't many choices to make excuses for that. Wether I say I miscalculated, or they were actually wrong but I'm just letting them go. What I actually told them was "it seems like a good day for you guys, so how about I give you guys a bit of a discount for tonight?". And they paid even less than what they said they did owed, and they left peacefully. They never came back. And I opened my own wallet to fill in the numbers. Months later my crazy boss accused me as a thief and we argued. Me sort of left, she sort of fired me. That bar was closed in 3 months after that argument. That's a different story, but anyway.
All of that could have been avoided if this was a system where people pay things up front when they buy drink in the bar. And they usually don't do that in this country for some reason. Maybe for better pleasure? Better social connection even though it's kinda been forces? I can't quite get this density of their logic. Because I have this question that none of them have been able to answer up to this day.
Why can't they just take their own freaking responsibilities of their own doing?
I'm sick of listening of their responses saying "because this is Korea."
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