And as we turned around the bend, the air is cut sharply by the cool breeze and in front of us, we found the riverside opening up. Chitinous chatter chirped out from the canopy of plants, in between the barks and dry thistle, the shadowy greens. Summer buzzed busily under the streetlights high above us. Stars were faint here, but the lights burned like suns. When I felt sudden chill down my neck, I whipped around, jumping, to see Heff standing with two cans of beer in his hands. He redid his backpack, and lobbed a can underhanded to me. I barely caught it, shaking it up, and I watched dumbfounded as he cracked his. “I prefer not to get deported for something stupid like public drinking.” I gestured to throw it back to him, but he simply smiled. “It’s not illegal in Korea, doofus.” I looked down at the tin can of Hite,
crumpling ever so slightly under the pressure of my fingers. “You wouldn’t have dared in Canada” I mumbled under my breath. “This isn’t Canada. When in Rome.” When I cracked my can, I fought against the foamy eructation, the tiny aftershock of Heff’s throw, and even when my fingers were sticky, the beer was cold as it went down. Heff crunched his can and threw it at the waste basket. “God bless this country.” We spent hours on the concrete banks of the quiet river, seated in between throngs of denizens who had buckled under the sticky heat fueled insomnia and sauntered out to the cool riverside. In their Adidas flip flops, they drank boisterously with their boxes of chicken splayed open.