Alternative Universe

Korea yesterday and today. After a long day of presentations to an audience that is really only getting every other word we say, the Korea team offered to take us all out for dinner last night. Going out to dinner is a big part of the Korean business culture, so it was not an offer to be refused without it becoming a huge insult, so of course we went.
The team had been talking all day about the restaurant they had chosen, a “western” place since they thought some of our crew didn’t like Korean food. It turns out this is not true, but were not all exactly sure what they would have fed us, so we let them chose something non-Korean. Our (half-serious) joke all day was that it was going to be a “Country and Western” place.
It was not.

After a brief walk from the hotel (at 27F and I only brought clothes for KL and Sydney, like a dolt), we arrive at an Italian place in the building where our offices are located. The front is decorated in taffeta and bottles of red Italian wine, some of it quite good. The night was looking up.

We were seated at a long table, while the twitchy staff buzzed around us like flies on Seabiscuit. Our tables were set with chopsticks and beer steins but, what I had assumed to be bottles of red wine at first, turned out to be 750ml bottles of blended scotch. Odd.
We sat, still anticipating Italian, when generous pitchers of cheap beer arrived and everyone was poured. Okay. Then the shot glasses arrive. “Hmmmm”, I think to myself, “this is going decidedly pear-shaped”. Our “meal” soon come out, a hot steaming plate of what I first feared was tripe, but soon realized was a large plate of brats, sausages and hot dogs. This was followed very shortly by a football sized ball of aluminum foil which was found to contain bits of very spicy Szechwan beef and veggies. The westerns all looked at each other nervously, but there was nothing for it, so we shrugged and began to eat.

I turned to Brian, one of the guys I’m traveling with and said, “We’re sitting in an Italian restaurant, eating German brats, with Japanese beer and chopsticks, what the hell is going on?”
“Maybe they are trying to show us what the world would have looked like if the Allies had lost WWII”

and we havent even started on the scotch yet...