Titanic!

One side-effect of having so many Korean schoolmates, and living in a city where the foreign population is predominantly Korean, is that I've gradually picked up a smattering of their culture.

The impression I have is that Korea has a great respect for hierarchy based on seniority and gender. It's an extremely patriarchal society, fiercely and sometimes violently patriotic, yet polite and sincerely so. Most importantly though, I've come to realise that Koreans absolutely adore drinking.

In that vein, I'd like to impart a bit of culture by teaching you a drinking game.

[Image courtesy of Wikipedia]

It's variously called Titanic, or the Korean word for 'bomb' and the rules are simple:

1) A glass is half-filled with beer, and a shotglass floated inside.

2) Each player in turn pours a bit of soju from the bottle into the shotglass. If any lands outside the shotglass into the beer, or outside of both glasses entirely, they must pour again, but otherwise they are allowed one and only one continous pour.

3) Play continues until the shotglass sinks, whereupon whoever touched the soju bottle last has to drink, irrespective of whether that player last poured.

At this last part, everyone cheers. Someone will grab a napkin and swirl the beer-ju mixture before slamming it down on the table, at once making a mess, mixing the two drinks, alerting everyone else that you're crazy fun-loving Koreans, and soaking the napkin. Finally, the sodden napkin is hurled at the ceiling where it hopefully sticks, and the unfortunate loser downs their punishment.

Touchingly, at this last stage, another player can offer to take the loser's punishment for them, in exchange for a dare or a gift. The former seemed to mostly revolve around finding an attractive girl in the bar and drinking with them, while the latter were invariably promises to treat the loser to dinner.

Here, Mai capably demonstrates what happens when you decide to take all the punishment yourself.

I asked Zhenyi what the point of the napkins on the ceiling was.

"It's so other tables know how much you've drunk" he replied.

Just then, a waitress came over.

"Umm... Please don't do that. It's quite difficult for us to remove napkins from the ceiling" she said apologetically.

Zhenyi grunted his agreement and spent the rest of the night throwing his wet napkins at the wall.