Let me be clear: we only went to see boobs. Keep this in mind. He stared at me, eyes narrowed in his attempt to stand upright.
He responded in Russian, prompting his friend to appear from behind me: a taller, stubbly, grey-haired man with whose smoking seemed to age him 20 years. He came within three inches of me.
If this had been the only miscommunication of the night, it would have been enough. But Texas Street is like that: you want one thing, you get another. But Texas Street is not that. Named by American soldiers sometime after the Korean War, the murky three-block stretch lies mostly in darkness but for the Cyrillic neon signs. Surrounded by cheap motels and willfully ignored by most native Koreans, it sits quietly one block west of Busan Station, cushioned to the south of Chinatown, by the water and the docks.
It has only sort of worked. Russian and American sailors can now buy cheap jewelry or leather goods there during the day, indulging in different leathered goods at night.
It felt eerily calm for a Friday in early November. We arrived near midnight, finding only tall, blonde-haired Russians and tiny, dark-skinned Filipinos standing idly outside. Instead we found only two middle-aged prostitutes, heavy-set with heavier make-up, sitting in black leather jackets and slowly drinking their beers in silence by the bar. We laughed it off, drank our 5,won bottles of Hite beer and left in search of a livelier club.
