True Stories

Monkey Beach In Jeju

An invitation to lose your mind for a bit

Image credit: Canva

You don’t know how quickly your assumptions about reality can be pulled from under your feet until you’ve lived in Jeju. In 2012, somebody opened a nightclub in the tourist resort area of Jungmun, on the southern coast of the island. This establishment invited all the foreigners to come and party their hearts out for free. They knew exactly what to do to entice us expats. Word about this planned dance party traveled fast. They called this nightclub Monkey Beach.

Nothing could have prepared any of us for Monkey Beach. To this day, it is the more surreal bar I’ve ever seen. While it wasn’t exactly a beach for monkeys, it was a place where native English teachers like myself could devolve a little bit to express their primate instincts.

None of us expats asked questions. We were used to things being nonsensical in Jeju by then. We had gone down the rabbit hole to Wonderland just by living there. An invitation for any of us to dance, drink unlimited beer, and mixed drinks for no charge at all? It seemed crazy, but we went with it. As a collective, we decided to go down to Jungmun and let them bribe us for unknown motives — and to allow them to re-program our beliefs about what’s possible.

All we cared about was…