flickering pictures

So it’s been a couple of days since my last post — sorry for that — but all is well and we’re gearing up to head to the port city of Pusan tomorrow morning.

I live in a pretty cosmopolitan city, and as such there are large ethnic and linguistic communities there, but it was pretty surreal to step out of a Seoul subway station and find myself in what is essentially an English ghetto, full of English signs, garbage, surly people and opium-den looking bars. It’s the only place in this city where I didn’t feel safe. In addition to Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and and the only souvlaki in town, it loudly offers all the dark pleasures that the U.S. soldiers stationed nearby could want, in what has become the seedy underbelly of Seoul. There are red light districts elsewhere in town — streets bathed in pink light where pretty girls in skimpy underwear sit in windows to show off the goods — but somehow those seem tame in comparison. Still sketchy, but less nasty somehow. Itaewon is like the stereotypical Asian pleasure town that springs up around American army bases in Vietnam war movies, except with more money and less, well, war. It’s a mini-town of litter, bling and cleavage, and it’s one of those places that I’m glad I saw, but even more glad I left.

Also, the most badass-looking people in Seoul are U.S. soldiers — except for the enormous Korean bodybuilder guy on the subway who flexed his thigh muscles for us in a gesture that I think was supposed to look nonchalant, but instead looked like rapid-fire leg-twitching.

After Itaewon, it was off to Myeong-Dong, the glitzy downtown shopping district, all Hermès and Versace and Louis Vuitton. Just down the road are the name-brand knockoffs, conveniently categorized by quality. A tier 1 fake looks just like the real thing, but will set you back a bundle — a tier 2 is less convincing, but the price is nice.

That’s another thing about Seoul — illegal activity seems to be tolerated to a fair extent, as long as no one seems to be getting directly hurt. Walking by the red light district in Yongsan, for example, I saw a police station not ten feet away from the nearest storefront lady, and a row of police bikes parked almost directly in front of one of the city’s infamous “love motels.” The idea isn’t to stop non-violent crime, but rather to contain it.

A ride on Seoul’s subway is a cell phone education — there’s wireless coverage throughout the network, and Koreans have been watching HDTV on their phones for years. Phones here swivel, rotate, pivot and flip like nothing I’ve ever seen, and they’re all decked out with self-extending antennas, wide-screen TV, advanced gaming systems and lightning-fast Internet connections. You can pay with your phone like a credit card, or swipe it to get into the subway. Korean phones eat our phones for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the maddening thing for a gadget-lover like me is that I can’t bring one back home because it won’t work there — Korean mobile networks are apparently five years and two tech generations ahead of North American ones. So no Samsung Omnia for me after all.

Oh, and speaking of the subway, public transport passes here have embedded RFID chips that keep track of how much money you’ve put on them, and they charge you both when you enter the network and when you leave. The only problem is that you never know how much it’s going to charge you on the way out — it depends how far you went — and you can’t add money to your card once you’ve passed through the turnstiles into the subway, so if you don’t have enough subway credit to get out, you’re stuck in a legal limbo and the only way out is to jump the turnstiles, shield your face from the omnipresent CCTV, and make a mad dash for the exit. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened to us.

There’s a ton more to tell, but it’s past 2:00 a.m. and I’ve got a train to catch in the morning. Pictures to come soon too.

Until soon,
Mark

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