Eric_Boyer said:
I have visited PR and the small island my sister in law is from (vieques). It's a strange situation, they love America and American's but hate our military.
They have a distorted view of things. All they see is the people leaving base and getting drunk or hitting on their young daughters.
While stationed in Korea I often wondered how some of the Koreans could even stand the soldiers.
If I went shopping in the village it was normally during the day and when sober lol.
Most of the time when the GIs were in the village at night it was because they were drinking, acting a fool and taking advantage of the rampant prostitution (not all but enough).
I happened to want to do some shopping one night and was by myself so I was not in the mood to go into the bars...hence I was sober. I think I was trying to do some shopping for gifts for the family as I was leaving the country in a month.
I was flabbergasted at seeing the village at night and the number of drunk GI's doing all kinds of stuff....Now I am not talking beating up people or harrasing women but still it was an eye opener and made me wonder how the Korean people who lived there felt.
Yet at the same time I realized they are making money off of these GIs...some families actually sell there daughters into prostitution for money to survive and some even had GIs going into their own house to have sex with their daughters....I also realized that the village would basically die if the Army were to pull out of that area as the GIs were their #1 source (and not a lose #2 anywhere) of income.
However it did still bother me about the whole situation there.
I have always told my friends that I would love to take people to korea and see some of the things I have seen over there....it truly is a form of culture shock when first arriving.
I remember the first night there me and some GI's went down to see the village and were badgered by MamaSons (madams of female pimps if you will) in the street to buy sex from a lady they managed.
We went into a bar, got a few beers and was playing pool when some of the prosititutes came up and just started rubbing some private areas on me...one bar we walked into the prosititutes came right up before we even sat down and grabbed certain areas....really culture shock.
The village was also a very interesting cross section of society.....some bars/clubs set up their own little niche. You had some that catered to the country music/cowboy type of person....you had a few that catered to the african american crowd and if white guys went in they(employees) would not even say anything to you...not even hello.....(of course that was about the same way some of my black friends were treated when we wondered into a country westeren bar).
Not that I care for that type of stuff but it was really interesting to see such things.
Shops where they made nikes and brand name tennis shoes right in front of you...stores where they had GQ magazines to find a style of suit they could make for you......not FDA to speak of so you had vendors on the streets with hotdogs and meat strips on a stick, fish jerky they would just through on a dirty half barrell with a flame under it......it was just crazy.
Sometimes you would be walking doing he street in summer and these korean guys would be whizzing down the small streets with mopeds that had some sort of smoking system on them to help keep the misquotos away.
You could only buy three types of alcohol....Budweiser, OB Beer (oriental beer was the name as I was told) and Soju ( a drink that was similar to a screw driver in taste but MUCH stronger and was served in various sized tea kettles).
The village was wall to wall shops and bars and none of them looked to be in good condition or care for cleanliness.
....
Wow we sure strayed from the original topic in this thread...sorry for rambling
