"Mi mojito en la Bodeguita."

There's a bar in Itaewon called Naked, upstairs from B-One, where the owner is obliging and on Mondays they have 5,000 won Mojitos. Last night I met a young Mongolian girl there from UB. She said her mother was from Khövsgöl aimag and reminisced about riding bareback under the great wide Mongolian skies so infinite and blue, letting the horse carry her as she stared up drunk with bliss, passing whole days without looking at the road. She called it the freest place on earth. Last summer I traveled Mongolia by motorbike. The people there struck me as what you might imagine Native Americans would be today if the colonists had never come. Khövsgöl folks were some of my favorite, especially the Tsaatan reindeer herders. They ride the reindeer, use them to plow their farms, milk them, and live with them as other Mongolians do with horses. Unfortunately only 44 families remain, and these are dwindling as more Korean missionaries pursuade them to move to the valleys where they can attend church, but assimilation is erasing their culture and every summer more reindeer perish in the heat. In the last 40 years, their number has fallen 70%, leaving the Tsaatan increasingly reliant on tourism.

The Siberian Lapp are nearby reindeer herders of greater notoriety, due to their affection for Amanita muscaria, the red-and-white psychoactive mushrooms Mario and Alice ate to grow bigger, also home of the Smurfs and star of my favorite scene in Fantasia. In 1762, Oliver Goldsmith described how elder Lapps ate the mushroom and, according to hierarchy, recycled the yellow snow (containing the psychoactive chemicals) in descending order until the reindeer got to it, who then leapt wildly about, causing ethnobotanist Jonathan Ott to posit this as the mythological origin of flying reindeer and the color of Santa's suit, which is plausible since it's also long been associated in literature and painting with fairies and elves. How strange if Santa's paraphenalia were born of a people who centuries later are being wiped out by Koreans come to give them a distorted image of themselves via Christianity's most sacred festival.

I'm one to talk, living in a former colony profiting from Korean assimilation to my culture via English. An english missionary, though I'm pretty sure no animal have died as a result. Sitting with my Mojito, I reflected on the way English spread through the British Empire's reign, and how that success belonged to the Royal Navy, which in turn owed so much to their ability to stay at sea longer than anyone else because they'd discovered how to treat scurvy before anyone else. In fact, British seamen ate so much citrus fruit they were nicknamed 'limeys', which is how it became a slur for Brits in general. At some point in the mid 1700s lime got added to the daily grog rations, and in Cuba where the African slaves' taste for sugar cane juice caught on with the British, they added added this to their ration of grog and lime with a bit of mint as well to mask the harshness. So there I was talking to a girl whose culture may have given birth to one of Christianity's most loved icons, itself now being erased by Korean Christians, while I live in Korea selling grog and sneering at the Christian rumrunners, my presence here largely due to an early version of the Mojito, all while drinking one next her at the bar. God does have a sense of humor. By the way, the best limes for Mojitos are Makrud limes i.e. keffir limes, but 'kaffir' is a racial slur in Afrikaans so best avoided.