The quest for pineapple soju

A large part of this weekend was spent searching for pineapple soju. One of my friends mentioned it one night and ever since then the thought was stuck in my head and I had to have pineapple soju! Before my quest began, I got a tour of Myeonkuk-dong -- just another nearby neighborhood. The best view in the area is from the top of a mountain. You have to climb a bunch of wooden steps to get to the top, but its worth all the exhaustion to get to the top and see this.These are the wooden steps that lead to the top. Although, my friend Nolan and I did not just stop where the wooden steps ended. We ventured further into the unknown. We saw another trail, which we assumed would lead us to a better view, so we decided to follow it.These are the signs we kept seeing throughout the trail. They probably say danger do not go deeper into the trail because the mosquitos will eat you alive -- which was what was happening to us by this point. We went pretty far into the trail only to find a mini farm of sorts, where something unknown was being grown, there were a lot of buckets with green water and a bunch of frogs in the water. We never found a better view but going beyond the wooden steps was exciting.

After dinner, we slowly started our search for our pineapple soju. We went to a bar where we were certain pineapple soju was available. We got there and found the shutters bolted down. This was one of the many disappointments to come throughout the night. We went to a myriad of other Korean bars and kept getting turned down for pineapple soju. We decided we would not rest until we had some, and we weren't going to cave and just buy soju and pineapple juice to make ourselves. We wanted the thing made for us! After trying a bunch of convenient stores and E-mart our dreams of pineapple soju were slowly being crushed. My friend Lindsay joined in on the quest and we decided we were each going to get plastic flasks of regular soju and walk the streets of Changwon to continue our search.
I don't know how long or how far we walked that night. What made it worse was that we kept making circles from one part of town to another. We took a cab at one point and the cab driver said there are places called soju-bongs. So for awhile our search widened to not just the pineapple soju, but for a soju-bong. The driver said they existed all over the place but failed to point us to one specific location. We bumped into some of Lindsay's friends who knew of a place that served flavored soju. The closest thing we got the our pineapple soju that night was the lemon flavored one. At that point we were so tired from walking around, we made ourselves think that the lemon flavored soju was indeed the best pineapple soju we've ever had.