Lesson learnt today – don’t wear cream trousers on the last evening of a business trip in Korea

Ok so it was kind of my fault, well, all my fault actually.We went for Korean barbecue and started on the beer, I made my usual mistake of drinking even when there’s not a toast, this gets me proper hammered when you add in the regular toasts where you have to down a full glass of beer (nobody else drank outside the toasts). After the beer came the soju, we swiftly polished off a couple of bottles.

When I thought we were all done the customer went out to his car and came back with an unmarked 1.5 litre bottle of what looked like red wine, apparently it’s called Bokbunja (korean fruit wine) and was a bottle of our customer’s homebrew (I brought a bottle back with me too!), it would have been rude not to finish it all right?

The customer explained the legend of bokbunja, apparently Bokbunja means something along the lines of “knock the pisspot over”, it’s “good for man” he told us (yet it tastes really nice so it can’t be any good), “after you drink this you will piss so powerfully that it can knock over the piss pot”, unfortunately I was too hammered to remember but I reckon I knocked a hole straight through the urinal in the restaurant just before we left.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked here, let’s get back to the trousers, when we ran out of alcohol I decided to order some more by grabbing the smoke vent (the one they pull right down over the barbecue to extract all the smoke), pulling it to my mouth and shouting “WE NEED BEER” into it. Everyone at the table said “NOOOOOOO” at the same time, but it was too late, there was no stopping me and I’d just opened my mouth when warm tar started pouring out all over the floor and my trousers.

I think my cleaning attempts didn’t help either, they’re caked in soap from god knows where and I have this very faint memory (which may be imagined, I’m frightened to check with my colleagues) of me taking my trousers off in a bar and pouring beer and whisky on the stain to “clean” it. Hmmm…..