JEJU-DO—For many, a big part of the expat experience involves drinking, and especially drinking in bars. Be they mysterious, seedy, elegant or anarchic, watering holes for wanderers have a certain romanticism attached to them, a fuzzy, seductive corona of myth that frames them as hubs of intrigue, sex and adventure.

In spirit if not style, the archetypal expat bar is Rick’s Café Americain, the nightclub from Casablanca where Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick, delivers (or doesn’t) some of cinema’s most memorable lines. Peopled with refugees, soldiers, sketchy men and alluring women, the club is a magnet for foreigners stuck in the Moroccan limbo city of the film’s title, those running from war and waiting for a ticket to elsewhere, who in the meantime while away their time drinking cocktails and listening to Sam play his sad, sad songs.

In every place with more than a smattering of foreigners, there is a foreigner bar. This, I expect, is one of the first things many people discover when they begin travelling, especially those who do it alone and seek the comfort of speaking to people in their own language, or at least a linking language that allows them to meet in a conversational neutral zone. Some people seek foreigner bars out, some people find them by accident, but the general rule is that they’re places where travellers (especially backpackers) can go to get shitfaced drunk and try to sleep with each other without worrying too much about culturally-appropriate behaviour, and to look for Western-style breakfasts, beat-up guitars covered in stickers, djembes for impromptu hippie jams, personal-size pizzas, scuffed board games, used guidebooks and copies of On the Road, and advice on how best to score hash without ending up in a dingy prison wherein they will be considered valuable foreign currency worth their weight in cigarettes.

Because of this, foreigner bars can be both blessing and curse for the traveller, in that they can offer great comfort, but also all too easily isolate you from the culture you’ve (presumably) come to explore. In Casablanca, most of Rick’s regular wastrels aren’t in Morocco by choice; they’re fleeing the chaos that has made their homes alien, and the Café is a waystation, someplace to hide and clean their wounds with gin while they wait for a chance to escape. There are real places like this in the world — bordertown joints where the displaced congregate to mute their tragedy with talk and cheap liquor.

In South Korea, however, none of the ESL teachers I know is running from anything nearly as grave as a Nazi invasion (although this guy has a pretty weird story). I’d say most (i.e., me) are fleeing mundane things like the 40-hour work week, unappealing job prospects, cold weather and boredom. As such, the foreigner bars here don’t really provide a venue for communal pathos as much as they create a membrane of exclusivity to cushion the blow of culture shock, and a natural masquerade environment in which people can amplify the freedom of travel with shots of Sauza Silver, thereby losing any of the shame they’d feel in a bar at home when doing things like dancing on tables, trying to shove a pool cue up their own ass or stabbing strangers in the neck with pieces of stale nacho chip shrapnel.

(Lest I be taken to be passing judgment here, let it be known that the only instance of my wetting the bed since childhood came after a hazy night at just such an establishment — a little bar called the Blue Lotus in the backpacker town of Yangshuo in Southwest China.)

Such activities can be great fun if you’re in the mood, but some people seem to get stuck moving in a kind of foreigner’s rut carved out from bar to bar, drunk to drunk, and it never occurs to them to poke their head up over the ledge to see what all those Koreans are doing up on the streets.

Desire among expats for a familiar drinking experience is especially strong in Korea, because of the peculiarities of Korean drinking culture (which I would go into here, but that would make the post about sixteen pages long, so I’ll save it for its own installment). There are several so-called expat bars in Jeju-si, most of which have a clientele that consists of both Koreans and foreigners, but which tend to get swamped by the latter on weekends after 11pm and any time someone decides to mount a live performance that doesn’t include the fascinating but admittedly not-all-that-accessible Korean pansori.

The most infamous foreigner bar is the Blue Agave, a pseudo Mexican joint located down near the Tapdong boardwalk and the Chilsungno shopping district. The Agave boasts décor that mixes kitsch tropicalia with garage-sale dinge, serves bad quesadillas, has a pool table, hosts ’80s retro nights and is owned by a woman who is friendly with many of Jeju’s foreign residents. It has earned a reputation as a place to go after the bar — there is no last call in Korea, as evidenced by the many annihilated businessmen men I regularly see giving impassioned good morning hugs to Jeju’s svelte but unmarriageable telephone poles – and it is not unusual for people to head to the Agave for 1 or 2 a.m., to blissfully while away that part of the evening of which they will have no recollection the following day.

Since I arrived in Jeju, other foreigner bars have sprung up, or at least had their customer base skew heavily into waygookin territory to siphon customers away from the Agave. For straight-up drinking, there’s Led Zeppelin, which has a great big mural of Bob Marley on one wall and will play almost anything you ask them to, from Billy Ocean to Ministry. Across the road, there’s the Doors, recently opened in an apparent attempt to start a proxy battle for the title of most hackneyed ’70s rock icon.

A few blocks away, in the heart of the City Hall student pub zone, is the Bagdad Café, a more laid-back version of the foreigner bar that doubles as a fantastic Indian restaurant, often hosting the few South Asian visitors to the island who come in search of silky curries cooked by a team of chefs recruited from India. In fact, most of the Bagdad’s clientele is Korean, but the food and halogen lighting (in Korea, naked fluorescence is king) makes it a natural draw for white people.

In Sin-Jeju, the newer part of the city, there’s La Vie, a sparsely-decorated room with four or five tables that has the warm ambiance of a kitchen party. Finally, there’s GP Bar, a tiny hole in the wall that, as far as I can tell, started drawing a foreigner crowd when someone discovered they put about nine shots of liquor into their liver-liquefying Long Island Ice Teas.

Superficially, the elements that all these places share are easy to identify: Western-style tables and chairs, mood lighting, English music, imported booze. But in my humble opinion — as someone who’s spent a not inconsiderable amount of time in bars — even when the basic ingredients are the same, it takes a particular mood to make a foreigner bar a desirable place to be. The trick is a fostering a sense of limbo, wherein the bar’s palpable detachment from the surrounding geography and the norms of both the society in which it exists and that which it strives to emulate mirrors that of its transient patrons. I rarely go to the Blue Agave, in part because it’s too spot-on in its Westernness; everything is correct to the point of banality, right down to the club sandwich and the pennants strung up behind the bar. To me, what makes an expat bar alluring is the edge created by everything being just a little wrong.

The best foreigner bars aren’t so much a refuge from the unfamiliar; rather, they’re a space in which the stigma attached to the outsider is reversed, where the familiar becomes pariah among the whorl of cultures scumbling together for a brief moment on their way to the next stop. At Led Zeppelin, it’s manifested in the discord between the rustic lounge ambiance, which in Canada would inevitably be paired with trip-hop or vintage Cuban rumba, and the owner’s penchant for playing DVD footage of Metallica playing “Creeping Death” at scorching volume on the big projection screen over the bar. Its also in the distinctly Korean bar snacks, which include plates of tiny Ritz-style crackers, nuggets of candied chocolate and thin wafers of dried laver with a soy-sauce dip, being wolfed down by folks who are more accustomed to chicken wings. At the Bagdad, it’s even more obvious: as Jeju’s only Indian restaurant — and one of the few restaurants on the island offering non-East Asian cuisine — it’s automatically an oddity, a place where the island’s tiny Muslim community can come to enjoy Halal food while the local ultimate frisbee team drinks Hoegaarden and revels in their ardent delusion that ultimate frisbee is not deeply, irreparably lame.

As is usual when taking a serious look at imbibing, it’s interesting here to reference Hemingway, who, while he never showed up in Casablanca to have a martini with Bogart, is perhaps the most well-known frequenter of expat bars in the annals of literary history. Hemingway is closely associated with at least three bars: the Ritz (now the Bar Hemingway) and Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, and El Floridita in Havana. It’s at the latter that he spent the most time, where they still keep his stool empty, and you can go drink an overpriced double daquiri called the Papa Doble (invented by Hemingway on premises) beside a bronze statute of the man himself. Hemingway spent almost 20 years getting juiced at El Floridita. Yet, for this reason, I suspect that, of the three, it’s the worst candidate for a great expat bar — a place in which Hemingway became comfortable enough to make it his long-term local, rather than a place to take refuge and congregate with other great minds in the midst of great journeys.

Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, which boasts greater fame than the Havana joint (some call it the most famous bar in the world), has much more of the patchwork history, eclecticism and sense of cultures colliding into something unique that I associate with the ideal foreinger bar: a place in which, no matter how famous it gets, it will never be at rest in its own identity, because it will be subject to the will and spirit of those who pass through it, be they literary types like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; soldiers like the members of the American Field Service Ambulance Corps who frequented the place during the First World War; or the big money businessmen who these days gather there for after-work drinks. It’s fitting that Harry’s is renowned for being the birthplace of many famous cocktails, including the Sidecar and the Bloody Mary, because the cocktail, wherein ingredients are shaken or stirred into a refined and original whole, is as fine a metaphor as any for the mixing of cultures, ideas and experiences that should take place at a good foreigner bar.

I do my fair share of complaining about the foreigner bars on Jeju — it’s astounding how quickly, when you’re living in a foreign country, being able to understand the conversations of those around you becomes a source of teeth-grinding irritation — but I’m glad they’re around all the same. Nor, if and when I continue to travel, will I stop finding expat bars fascinating places to go and see what kinds of people have ended up in the same place as me at the same time. The expat experience is fueled by the tension between the desire to explore and expand one’s frame of reference and the pull of things that trigger the warmth and succor of home in the heart, and foreigner bars are some of the best places to watch that drama unfold — to see how what happens when everyone’s homesickness combines with local commercial hospitality into one heaving ball of beer, whisky, cigarette smoke, barf, road stories, intolerance, epiphany, bite-sized Ritz crackers and social transgression.

It may be lazy to finish with a quote from Casablanca, but then again, this isn’t one you hear too often, even though it’s one of the best. When the Nazi thug Major Strasser asks Rick, “What’s your nationality?,” Rick replies, “I’m a drunkard” — to which Rick’s friend Captain Renault responds, “That makes Rick a citizen of the world.”

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Posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 10:37 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.