I’m going to share some hard-learned advice: don’t go to the foreigner areas. All it takes is five minutes dancing on a table with a girl before she pushes you off onto the floor and you learn from a passing stranger that she has a venereal disease.

As one of our friend recently described it, foreigner districts are “the lowest common denominator in two cultures meeting.” In Saigon, it meant, stay away from Pham Ngu Lao. If you’re lucky you’ll hear a socially inept English teacher tell you about how bad Vietnamese girls are in bed. If you’re unlucky, you’ll find the same guy in the alley later that night handing a red rose to a very young-looking prostitute.

In Tokyo, it meant, stay the hell away from Roppongi. When you meet most Japanese girls, they’ll ask you how often you go there to see how decent a person you are. If you want to know why, all you have to do is read this article, which advises you to pick up homeless Filipina girls there late at night, because their only other option is to sleep at the McDonald’s. Here‘s another site typical of the genre. His advice? Tell Japanese girls someone stole your wallet.

In Seoul, as I found out this weekend, the dark places are Hongdae and Itaewon. If you read Wikitravel, it’ll tell you Hongdae and Sinchon are popular with hip college students. Apparently “hip” is Korean short-form for “buffet of moral decay and indecency.”

A few of us were at a bar called Tin Pan Alley 1 (TPA 2 doesn’t allow foreigners) where I was hauled up on a table by an aggressive Korean woman. When I tried to escape from her gnashing maw, she became infuriated and shoved me off the table, onto the floor. After that, it felt like I was being chased by a rabid wolf, clawing at my jacket as I tried to run away. Another foreigner must have seen the scene developing across the room, because just before I got to the bathroom he came to me to tell me that the woman was “very nice, but she has an STD.”

Needless to say, I am done with that district.