22 It's crap but it is the best it is

Continuing the BBC Prime theme "it is crap but it is the best there is", let's talk pubs.

If you grow up in the UK the chances are you spend a large amount of your youth in pubs: outside in the garden in the summer, inside with a fire blazing in the winter. We all try the scabby city pubs, gorgeous country pubs, tiny local pubs hidden away and only known if you live there - just great pubs all over the place, and even crap pubs that you only go to because you can walk home (the Riverside in Christchurch, for example).

There are about 3 pubs in Seoul, maybe 4. The first one is run by a guy called Gunter who has a a kind of hybrid bar called the 3 Alleys. Not really a pub, nor a bar, nicer than a drinking hole and with reasonable pub grub, the 3 Alleys has a bar surrounded by diner style booths, darts and pool. In the front there is a kind of hotel dining room style conservatory room - the kind of place you would take your folks to Sunday lunch and have a sherry before your Avocado and prawn marie rose starter (with melba toast!). Drinks are served by wait staff which is great, so you dont have to get up, but most of the locals sit at the bar and chat with the landlord.

Opposite 3 Alleys is a second floor place called Scrooge Bar. This is Korean owned and last weekend we piled in there to watch the New Zealand South Africa rugby match. The atmosphere was good and I thought that it seemed like an alright bar. Went back in last night to find two military police checking for wayward soldiers, an empty bar blaring Guns n Roses and decided to leave. Ugh, not a nice spot to spend time.

There is another American Bar which I havent visited yet, and a bar called Jesters. And I think that it about it. Apart from the bar in the British Embassy which only opens on Friday nights, and frankly, is a bit weird (feels like the bar in the sixth form centre when I was at school where you paid with tokens and there was a strict limit of 2 pints per head per night (although when laced with additional potions this was truly plenty!)).

We have decided we are going to try and find some more Hofs - Korean bars with korean grub and cheap beer. Much cheaper these places are: about 3 dollars a beer, good food served on the table, and the kind of place where Korean's go out in the evening. If we have to spend the next three years in the 3 Alleys we may well go mad.... keep reading though, because I bet in about three months we will have decided that the 3 Alleys is not so bad, and it will become our regular haunt. We are soooo lazy.