A day of highs, lows and a little bit of home…
If you’re not familiar with the concept of “losing face”, it’s basically about status — folks over here in Asia don’t want any of their shortcomings exposed, in public anyway.
The staff of my hotel are friendly enough, but out in the world I get the sense that people are a bit terrified of me — or at least terrified that I’m going to ask them something and their lack of English communications skills will be exposed for all to see.
So imagine my surprise and delight when two little girls run up to me on the subway yesterday to say “hello”. The conversation didn’t really progress much beyond that (entirely my fault), but the gesture got my day off to a pleasant enough start.
I was on the way to Yongsan Electronics Market, one of two high-tech meccas in Seoul. As soon as I got out of the station I found myself at the entrance to I’Park, a huge mall with the top floor devoted entirely to — you guessed it — mobile phones!
Most people associate Korea with the letters DMZ, but there’s another acronym that even more important to locals: DMB stands for Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, and it basically means you can watch full-screen television on your mobile phone and/or wireless PDA. Verizon is rolling out a similar service in the US and A, but it’s only short clips instead of full-on programming, and as my own video below will attest, the quality of DMB is much, much better…
Finding the market proper proved to be a bit of a challenge, so I returned to the subway entrance then followed the crowds through the byzantine path to another multi-story complex with even more computers, mobiles and other gadgets. The top accessory for Korean technophiles seems to be the USB stick. They make ‘em like jewellrey here, and it’s not uncommon to see them dangling from one’s mobile phone like a keitai charm — I guess if you had a DMB phone the USB stick could serve as your VCR…
You’d think I’d have overwhelmed by technology by this point but you’d be wrong… I spent the rest of the afternoon at Soeoul’s other electronics hub — Techno Mart. It was here that I experience my only incidence of Korean rudeness thus far. A shiny new LG handset had caught my eye, and I took a friendly young vendor up on his greeting as he walked by. I was fumbling through my Korean Phrasebook trying to tell him that I didn’t want the actual handset but rather, the much less expensive dummy display phone when his boss came over and, near as I can tell, told me that they didn’t speak English, and I was to get lost.
The bitter taste of rejection was replaced with some tasty street meat outside the mall. I tried to get some additional groceries at a Lotte supermarket in the basement, but the crowds shopping for foodstuffs on a Saturday afternoon at 5pm was about as insane here as any North American equivalent.
After a quick nap I headed one stop north on the Seoul Metro. I was well-prepared for it thanks to a to Jonggak station, where I delivered a care package of salmon, oatmeal and deodorant to Currie School of Comedy alumna Jen Waescher. In return she, her boyfriend and a visiting English-teaching colleague from Tokyo took me to an authentic Korean BBQ joint. We shared a full platter of tasty bite-sized pieces of pork that we cooked ourselves, then wrapped in lettuce with garlic and some other special ingredients. By the time we were done it was past midnight, and though the subway had stopped running I was able to navigate my way on foot back to the hotel, thanks to my intrepid reconnoitering the day before.
Today we’re all meeting up again to check out a palace… Stay tuned!
