Misadventures True to Form

So, just about every year I have one very random and ridiculous thing happen to me. I’m not sure why this happens, but it’s pretty regular. There seems to be something about me that just attracts odd occurrences. On to the story.

Sunday mornings I play in a community-rec basketball league. Most of the people on the team are college aged early to mid 20’s. So, Saturday one of the kids on my team was in my town and heading back to his apartment near where we play (the gym is about 35 or 40 minutes from my house), and offered to let me crash at his place. This didn’t seem like a bad idea. I would get to sleep a little later and actually hang out with some people. In fact I even brought my PS2, fighting games, FIFA, and Guitar Hero along. Two other guys from our team came over, they drank, we played games it was good fun. FIFA was the preferred game, and I was the undisputed king of both 2-D Fighting and Guitar Hero.

It was during the FIFA playing that things started to go awry (in retrospect, at the time I thought nothing of it). We worked the FIFA playing in pairs and switching off at halftime. So in the third game of our best of three match-up I scored the winning goal in stoppage time. This prompted a, slightly to fairly drunken kid on my time who I was staying with, to hug me and exclaim, “I like Mayama!” Now at the time I attributed to the aforementioned drunkenness of the kid, and also his relatively rudimentary skills in spoken English. Shortly after this the other two kids left, we played a couple more songs of Guitar Hero and got ready to hit it.

Now he had the standard tiny ass one room apartment. So, there was no bed, no couch, and only one set of bedding for the floor. Not wanting to freeze and not really caring because it was a guy I shared the roughly double bed sized “futon” and blanket with the kid. A little bit into my attempting to sleep I had a hand flop onto my shoulder, I was facing away from the kid, but I shrugged it off and figured he was just a tosser/the drunk sleep made him restless. A few minutes later the hand flopped again, I again shrugged it off and scooted away a bit. Everything seemed to be settled at this point and I was just drifting away when suddenly I felt the hand again. This time it felt like a little more than a flop. Sure enough seconds later there was definite wrapping around action, and the hand started to move down. Before I get onto my reaction I should note that atleast a few times throughout the course of the evening I had mentioned the fact that I had a girlfriend. Why that was not respected/processed I will never know. So, right about the point the hand made a definitive move I pretty much jumped straight up to standing and was like no, nuh-uh, and I packed up my belongs. The kid mumbled an apology and I did say thanks for playing video games with me, and I left the apartment. It might have been safe at that point to try and remain for the rest of the night, but I wasn’t going to have it.

At this point it’s 2am, and I only have the vaguest ideas of where I am. Also, because I’m a girl, I’m getting a little teary eyed do to the fact that I thought I had finally made a friend my age, and then all he wanted to do was grope me. Admittedly there were also teary eyed thoughts of just wanting to be with Yukino and have her give me a hug. Anyhow, about twenty minutes later I found a 24 hour public bathhouse. I paid the $5, and found a corner in the common room. There I proceeded to curl up clutching my things and tried to dozen on the hardwood floor. I got a little sleep, but as it was uncomfortable, and I constantly startled awake to protect my things it was largely ineffective. In the morning I got a cab, and tried to get to the gym. However, I wasn’t completely clear as to where I had wandered to, and I can’t give directions in Korean, this was a failure. So, I just took a bus home and skipped the game.

There you have it. My first tale in Korea of a non-annoying student trying to grab me, and doing so in a definitely coming on to me way. Why these things always happen to me I don’t know, but I really wish it would stop.