::A Geek in Korea::

The Alcohol Anchovy.

My wife and I were walking near a bus stop after both getting our hair cut earlier in the day. On the bus stop there was a typical advertisement for soju, Korean rice alcohol. These days, all the soju companies use young "heavy drinking" ladies in their advertisements. They’ve already got the male portion of the market cornered, so the only way to bring more alcohol drinkers to their particular products is to appeal to people that traditionally didn’t drink lots of soju, women.

My wife commented on the fact that all the women don’t really look like people that really drink alcohol anyway. Too cute. Too much makeup. Too much in love with posing with the bottle, not drinking from it. Much like these pictures below, which I have found to illustrate my point:

This comment struck me as funny, since she doesn’t drink, and has never really ever drank alcohol. I can’t recall seeing her drink more than one drink a night ever, even when we go out. In comparison, my single Corona beer a night when stressed out for work makes me the heavy weight drinker in the house.

She called me an sul korae, or "alcohol whale". I disagreed and said I was more like a sul myuelchi, or "alcohol anchovy", this being the smallest fish I could name in Korean. She thought it was very cute, even if it wasn’t an actual expression in Korean, and when we met her mom she was giggling about it and shared what I said. Good for a laugh at least.

Share and Enjoy:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

2 Responses to “The Alcohol Anchovy.”

• 1

  jonallen Says:
  September 25th, 2006 at 8:40 am
  

  Have you seen the movie “My Sassy Girl”? We saw it yesterday at the KNTO office auditorium in Seoul , a free showing of the movie with English subtitles.
  The heroine in the movie is also a heavy drinking girl. So much so that she vomits ( there’s plenty of that in the movie) and passes out several times.
  I thought she was the same girls thats in the adverts on the video screens at metro stations that continually play the advert for soju, but I gather she isn’t.
  They seem to make a big deal of it being “only” 20% too.
  I think there would be uproar in the UK if there were adverts like the ones you show.

• 2

  torgodevil Says:
  September 25th, 2006 at 9:17 am
  

  Have I seen “My Sassy Girl”? It’s a basic requirement of foreigners living in Korea for a while. I came to Korea right after that movie was released and had to deal with an entire year of girls saying, “Do you want to DIE?” to me.

  The girl in Han Chae Young. The girl in the movie is Jeon Ji Hyun, star of “My Sassy Girl”, who happens to be a popular model and advertising starlet in her own right. She advertises everything under the sun.

  Youtube has one of Han Chae Young’s soju promotions here:
  

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.