Busan e-FM Week 18: Shopping, Vitamins and Other Imports

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

I think I mentioned LG and Samsung before on the show. In fact, it’s kind of hard to get through talking about life here without mentioning Korea’s ubiquitous [yes] brands. But this was the week I was told not to mention them – not even the foreign ones - even though this week’s subject was shopping - 20 minutes before I went on air.

One of the K-satire sites seems to have re-branded LG aka ‘Lucky Goldstar’ as ‘Fortunate Quasar’, and I was sorely tempted to go through the entire show calling them that, but 20 minutes is not enough time to think up alternate names for all the other chaebol, so the whole thing felt rather forced in the end for me. Well that’s live radio for you – next time I hope to be better prepared.

It’s fair enough that Busan e-FM doesn’t want to mention brands, but I have no such restriction here, so here it is, Week 18 – Uncut.

Introduction

So this week is about another very important aspect of life in Korea – shopping. I used to think we had quite a consumer-oriented culture in England, but it’s nothing compared to Korea.

The differences

There are a lot of differences between the UK and Korea when it comes to shopping. In the UK our shops are mainly in the city centres rather than everywhere you look, and we also have big ‘out of town’ retail centres – whereas here you don’t really have ‘out of town’ stores because there is no ‘out of town’ - everything is the town in a big city like Busan [seriously, it’s like Logan’s Run here]. And we have a lot of big brands in England, but here it often feels like a constant choice between LG and Samsung [or in the radio version – between a company beginning with ‘L’ and a company beginning with ‘S’ - see why it fell flat?]

I expected there to be a bigger variety of brands, and I actually thought there were at first, but then I found out that brands like Xcanvas, PAVV, Zippel and Hauzen belong to LG and Samsung. I suppose that’s the nature of the chaebol system, which of course we don’t have in England [unless you count the multi-branded tentacles of the government] – where almost all our products are made overseas anyway.

I found chaebol brands quite odd. For example, Daelim seem to make toilets and motorbikes. In England, the last car I owned was a Ford. But how would I have felt if my toilet was made by Ford as well? But I guess people here feel that the brand is more important than the object it’s attached to.

Purchases and consumer protection

In fact, the first thing I bought in Korea was a Korean keyboard for my laptop computer – it was made by a major Korean chaebol – but the quality was really poor. I admit, I realised later it was really cheap [I had no idea about the relative value of things here at first], but it made me think these companies will sometimes put their names on anything.

My experience with subsequent purchases has been mixed. My wife and I buy a lot of things from the Internet, but Internet shopping here is quite different. We have eBay in the UK, but most people choose to order from established online retailers like Amazon. Here, Gmarket and Auction – which are both owned by eBay – seem to be one of the main ways of buying online. So it feels riskier but from very small companies and individuals.

I also think we have much stricter consumer protection laws in the UK than the ones which exist in Korea. For example, we bought an aquarium online that was supposed to be 35cm deep, but it was shorter when we got it. The seller said it was because they had the wrong picture on their page, but they didn’t seem particularly sorry about it. Online prices are good though, so maybe you just have to take the risk.

Expensive item risk

But this means that it’s difficult to justify buying certain things online. When we bought a TV, the prices were much cheaper on the Internet, but we felt we couldn’t risk buying such an expensive item that way, so we bought it from Tesco Homeplus [declaration – I’m a shareholder] in the end. It’s the same with the DSLR I bought – I got it from Hi-Mart because it seemed too risky online. That’s different to the UK where you have big online companies that you can trust. And of course, it’s also difficult for me to shop online, because I don’t understand Korean.

Online and offline shopping

There are good things about shopping online. I love how deliveries are so fast compared to England, and you get these text messages telling you about when things have been dispatched – it’s really efficient. It’s just a pity I can’t browse through the Korean Internet to shop for things. That said, I’m not one of those foreigners who seems to think that Korean shopping sites should be available in English as well. I think if you want to shop in English, go home – this is Korea. If I can’t use Korean Internet sites, that’s my problem, not Korean people’s. I have to work on my Korean language skills.

So I find myself shopping offline a lot. Buying things from local shops here is also quite different from the experience in England – the opening hours are much longer here for one thing, and there’s an assumption that everything will be delivered, whereas in England you normally have to work that out yourself. Plus, if something needs installing, that will be done for you here as part of the service, even if it’s just a small aquarium from a local store.

The customer service is almost too good sometimes. For example, I bought a printer from a store, and because we lived around the corner and didn’t have a car, one of the staff insisted on carrying it to our apartment – which was a bit embarrassing [still, thanks Hi-Mart]. But on the other hand I find all the special cards which exist rather confusing - my wife has a special card holder just for all the extra points cards she carries.

The price is right

And prices are confusing, because I often can’t really work out what the prices in stores are supposed to be. This is partly because I have to convert them into my own currency to work them out, and partly because the ticket prices and the real prices are sometimes two entirely different things.

For example, when we were shopping for a TV, it became quite common for us to walk into a store, and immediately be offered 30% off the price of a TV we were looking at – and that’s before trying to haggle. In England, haggling isn’t as common, and you might get 5 or 10% off, but here we can haggle a price down 40% sometimes.

Ajumma rental servicet

Actually, my mother-in-law’s haggling skills are legendary – so we always take her with us when buying something expensive. She saves us a lot of money. Once we got a couch so cheap through haggling that when she told the store owner we’d come back later to buy bookcases, he actually said “Please don’t!” - and from the pained look on his face I think he really meant it too. [Shortly afterwards  he moved his business away from our district shortly afterwards and in my mind it was just to avoid her].

What else you can’t buy here - drugs

There are things you can’t buy in Korea that I wish I could. I used to take drugs [no, not that kind] to control my Meniere’s Disease in England, but when I came to Korea I discovered that they aren’t available here, and there isn’t any alternative. That’s a huge problem for me, and I was really worried when my pills ran out.

I started taking various vitamins and herbal supplements instead - because some people believe they help – but the cost can be very high here. You can get them a bit cheaper online, but I don’t really want to buy vitamins from individuals on auction websites. And some items just aren’t available, so I have to import them from the U.S.

Free trade and other myths

Importing things into Korea from overseas really isn’t easy. With vitamins for example, you can only import a maximum of six items – not more than two of one item within that six – and the customs limit is around $130, including the postage, which is usually $40. So in other words, the postage is around a third of the whole cost. And yet... often buying things this way is still cheaper than the prices in Korea, which makes me think that Korean prices are a rip-off. That’s really unfortunate because people have a right to their health, and somehow – because of the way the market is here – Korean people are potentially suffering.

So there’s no easy solution to my vitamin problem. In fact – my wife and I even looked at setting up our own company just to import vitamins for our own use, but the rules are horrendous. It’s a shame, because there’s a famous cosmetic product in England for example, that I think Koreans would love if they could get it here [it’s Boots’ – ‘No. 7’ brand]. Sometimes locally-made products are not always the best choices, and they shouldn’t be the only choices.

But I’m hopeful that the free trade agreements Korea’s signed recently with the U.S. and E.U. might change things.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-02-23 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 9: Christmas/Festivus

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

Oh the Christmas magic. I hadn’t originally planned to talk about this happy time of year, but as the day rapidly approached it seemed odd to be talking about my apartment experiences as originally intended on the 22nd December. So I volunteered to veer off course and tackle a topical subject. I wasn’t particularly well at the time though, so fed up as I was I seriously considered telling the listeners how I celebrated Festivus back home. But finally I decided that could be a bit mean, or maybe the Christmas spirit did finally get to me. I turned up at the station wearing a Santa hat with flashing lights, which nicely distracted everyone from the Meniere’s-related spaced out look in my eyes and inability to focus. Happy Christmas!

Introduction

Since it’s Christmas, I thought I’d talk about my Christmas experiences in Korea, and how they differ from Christmases back in England.

Giant dancing monster

I wasn’t expecting as much of a celebration of Christmas before I came to Korea, because I really didn’t associate it in my mind as a heavily Christian country, although yes, in reality a significant percentage of the population are Christians. But if nothing else, I should have realised that – like in England – Christmas is a commercial opportunity even without its religious element.

The first year I was here I saw a Christmas show on TV, but alongside the dancing Santa there was a dancing monster [OK – I said monster on the radio – let’s face it though, it was a giant dancing turd - no joke] and another dancer in a skeleton costume. I think it adds to the feeling that there might be a Christmas in Korea – it’s just not quite the Christmas you expect.

I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas

The weather in Korea at Christmas is quite different than in England. We get a reasonable amount of snow there because England has four seasons [see what I did there?] - so there’s at least a chance of having what we call a ‘White Christmas’ - snow falling on Christmas Day, or at least some snow on the ground. Even if we don’t get snow on the ground, it’s often could enough that when you wake up, the trees, the ground and the windows will be white with frost, so it feels more festive.

The problem with the weather in Busan is that it’s hardly ever snowed while I’ve been here, and there’s hardly ever any frost. Sometimes it’s cold enough to freeze water on the ground, but you usually don’t see the trees and everything else go white with the ice. It seems to snow a lot in the rest of the country - and certainly that’s to be expected further north – so maybe I’ve just been unlucky in the three Christmases I’ve already had here, or maybe this is the way it’s always going to be. But in my first year year – on Christmas Day – it was 15 degrees Celsius, so it really didn’t even feel like winter, let alone Christmas.

My first Korean Christmas

For my first Korean Christmas, we couldn’t find a tree to buy, but my wife found some Russian-made Christmas lights, and a bit of tinsel, and hung it around the apartment.

My wife’s uncle is a Christian pastor, and he insisted we visit his church for the Christmas Eve service. I was raised a Catholic although I don’t go to church any more, but I was so desperate to make things feel like Christmas I agreed. I didn’t get much out of it though, because it was all in Korean and I didn’t understand.

Then on Christmas Day we went out with my mother-in-law. She’s a Buddhist, so Christmas means nothing to her really, but she knew it was significant for me, and maybe a little for my wife as well because we always celebrated Christmas in England. So she took us out for a meal. I suppose you’d say that was my first Christmas lunch in Korea. Of course, it’s really a tradition in England to have a big lunch with your family.

Lunch was... mandu. So that really wasn’t like an English Christmas lunch, because in comparison it was quite basic. I guess Western Christmas lunches in general are very big affairs – turkey, potatoes, lots of vegetables and so on. A lot of fuss is made over it, so in a way it’s a bit like Chuseok dinners in Korea, including the tension.

I did enjoy the mandu, but I sort of felt a bit sad at the same time because it didn’t really feel like Christmas; we ate a a small shopping centre where the stores were open as though it were a normal day, and we shopped for clothes afterwards. There was one very lonely Christmas tree outside one of the shops, and a girl dancing in a Santa costume – well, the kind of costume Santa would wear if he dressed in mini-skirts anyway. In England all the stores are closed on Christmas Day – really everything is shut down – whereas in Korea it can feel like just another day.

Culture Shock

I suppose you could say it was a bit of a culture shock – I think as a foreigner who celebrates Christmas, it’s hard not to miss home on December 25th. In fact, it’s probably a little different for British people compared to Americans, because we don’t have Thanksgiving, so Christmas is our one big day of the year. It’s hard in a lot of ways – missing family, missing the snow and the Christmas food – but also because being a foreigner can make buying presents for people back home a lot more difficult.

I’ve tried to find Korean presents to send to people back home, but there’s only so much you can send through the post and the cost is so high I feel like I’m really giving the Korean Post Office the biggest present of Christmas. Last year I bought things from the Internet in England for my family rather than sending presents from Korea – but it’s very impersonal. Then there’s the huge problem of finding something to buy for people in Korea, especially my wife. I can’t really shop on the Internet because I don’t understand the language, and the stores aren’t much better. I find any kind of shopping in Korea completely overwhelming, and very stressful. Worrying about these things isn’t a great way to spend Christmas.

So that first Christmas felt like a bit of an empty experience, but I appreciated the effort my mother-in-law made. In the evening though we went to a café near us – it was called December and it had an all-year-round December theme – fake icicles, snow and so on – and that felt better.

Christmases since then have improved. The second year we planned things out a bit more, and went to Kosin University for the Christmas Tree Festival – that’s basically lots of trees lit up by Christmas lights, but it was nice – it made the day feel more special. There were some other cultural events going on in a theatre on the campus, such as Korean drumming and a religious show put on by some African students. And then we went to Nampodong, where we had a late Christmas lunch – pizza – but it had a hair baked into it so it wasn’t so nice. The streets were crowded with shoppers. I suppose I knew it would be like that with the stores open – but it was still a shock to see.

Christmas Day Shopping

Last year – my third Christmas here – I actually spent a large part of the day at Lotte Department Store. In fact, Nampodong has its Christmas Tree Culture Festival so we’d already been there to see that, and it was nice because it feels like shopping in the evening just before Christmas in England, with all the streets lit up by lights and trees. But the department store was hell – there were so many people you could hardly move sometimes. I’m not quite sure I’d do it again. And Christmas lunch that year was a Mexican tortilla.

This Year’s Plans

So this year I’ve put up our Christmas tree, but our Russian Christmas lights quickly stopped working. You know, having cheap Christmas lights stop working is very much part of the Western Christmas tradition so that reminded me of home. Anyway, I found that one of the wires had come loose, and it needs soldering. So I guess I’m going to have to learn the Korean for soldering iron and do some shopping. Other than that, I’m going to a Christmas party with friends tomorrow, but I don’t have any plans for Christmas Day yet. And now I have just over 24 hours left to find a present to buy my wife, which means even more Korean Christmas shopping pressure.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-22 @ ~19:30

Pirates of Silicon Valley

A few weeks ago my computer started to switch itself off randomly. Given the construction quality of our apartment building, coupled with the dubious nature of the electrical system here, I wasn't sure at first what the cause was. But finally I concluded it was probably the power supply unit, and that I’d have to buy another to test out the theory.

I thought that meant another trip to the large computer store in Nampodong. In fact it's not really one store so much as a series of separate businesses clustered together on two floors of a building near the station, and it's a rarity, because for all Busan often feels like a city full of shops, places selling computers are – I think - relatively thin on the ground. When I first came here in 2006 I quickly explained it as being indicative of the high number of 'PC Bangs' where people can go and access the Internet, and allegedly people were also using their phones to surf the Net, an assertion that later I came to doubt because of the high data charges. But before I travelled to Nampodong, I remembered seeing what improbably looked like a small computer store near us and went to investigate, and I wasn't disappointed.

Many years ago I bought my first new computer in the anonymous basement of an industrial air compression company, which served as a metaphor for the underground nature of the home computing market at the time. It was rough, you had to be careful to avoid tripping over some discarded piece of technology on the floor, and it smelt of cheap chemicals heated dangerously above room temperature by questionably built power supplies. So perhaps that's why I took an immediate liking to my local computer shop, because nothing had changed, and 30 PC power supply units stacked on a shelf by the door said I was likely to be going home with what I came for.

Perhaps it's indicative of the nature of crime in Korea that my wife had to shout upstairs to where the proprietor seemed to be living several times to get his attention. So my polite refusal to follow my instincts and start physically investigating the contents on the shelves and floor around me seemed rather redundant under the circumstances. Many shops are like this in Korea and it never ceases to seem bizarre coming from a country where it’s almost second-nature to steal anything which isn't nailed down. In fact, many people dismiss the British Empire as mere colonialism, but it was really organised as more of a global heist - a sort of Ocean's 11,000,000 if you will.

When a computer starts losing power intermittently, you can’t guarantee that the power supply unit is the root cause of the fault. CPUs are designed to shut off when they overheat, motherboard issues can come into play, and even wiring could be to blame, so there was always going to be a backup plan. And there had to be; the computer ran my automated trading bots and they need to be running all the time. So my backup plan was buying a new PC.

Because I ended up doing a lot of research - with time I really don't have - for the prospective new machine, by the time I stood in the local computer store I was able to speak fluent PC jargon so well once again that my wife barely needed to translate my prospective shopping list with the proprietor. I might not speak Korean, and he not English, but both of us spoke jargon. But I'd also been searching around online, a more difficult task than it should be, due to the Korean propensity to use eBay-like (and eBay-owned) sites Auction and Gmarket to buy almost everything, whereas I prefer apparently proper online retailers like Hacker that have their own websites.

A few years ago when I was last looking to buy a PC here, I went into a computer store, and the owner said that if I bought a machine there he'd "load it with all the software". Which software? Anything I wanted. It's a constant source of incredulity here when I explain that I want to buy a copy of Windows, and over the last few years the numerous Windows XP Professional screensavers I've been witness to in shops have raised questions in my mind as to why so many people in Korea woul buy the more expensive copy of XP, when it’s completely unnecessary in a retail environment – the suspicion being that they didn't.

Koreans generally don’t seem to concern themselves with computer security but I do, which is why I never run pirated software on my systems. It's a relatively trivial matter to insert spyware in pirated software installers or even the software themselves. As a financial trader I need to be aggressive about network security. So when I told the owner of the newly found store that I wanted to buy a copy of Windows, and he said that he didn’t have any in stock, a look of surprise completely failed to cross my face. But perhaps it was because I wanted to buy Windows 7 Ultimate, a version of Windows so completely unnecessary for all but the narrowest of niches of customers, that even the salesman at Hacker laughed when my wife asked whether it could be bought with a system.

Unfortunately my inability to buy Windows from the local computer shop meant that I'd have to be ordering that from Hacker, so why not the entire PC at the same time? Sometimes it’s the little details of a PC build that can set things apart, and while Hacker’s choices weren’t always perfect, they'd chosen a case from Korean manufacturer Zalman that I liked due to its excellent ventilation. I doubted whether my increasingly specific requirements could be met locally, and more to the point dragging my very busy wife to the store again one or two times to run through my now highly detailed specification while my mother-in-law babysat didn’t seem the best use of anyone's time. And sadly that’s how I ended up buying from Hacker, again, rather than supporting my local economy.

Hacker claim that any system bought before 3pm will be delivered the next day, but having ordered ten minutes before that deadline I wasn't too hopeful. On the other hand, much to their surprise I needed no hard drive partitioning or Windows installation because I planned to do it myself, so that undoubtedly helped. It arrived at 12.50pm the next day. In the UK, we'd call that just short of six business hours later. And Hacker are located in Seoul.

By comparison, I went through a period a few years ago when I ordered so many machines from Dell that I ended up with my own account manager, but my gods does Dell drag their heels on delivery – a symptom of their highly-vaunted just-in-time 'customer fulfilment' procedures which one imagines involves sourcing parts from Taiwan after you order. By post. Dell doesn't seem quite sure why their stock price is half what it was five years ago but I have some ideas. Dell have a token Korean web site which actually seems to be run out of Singapore and nothing about it inspires any real confidence.

The rapid delivery from Hacker is not unusual in Korea, and it's an incredible testament to Korean customer service standards – at least at the point of ordering. Unfortunately it must also make it very hard to compete locally, and perhaps this is why there are so relatively few computer stores in Busan. If delivery times measured in hours means immediacy of purchase isn't an issue, one might suggest this also drives local retailers to find their own unique selling points, and while I never got into that conversation this time, loading computers with 'any software you want' probably counts as one of them.

Off Key

Recently I met a man on the subway who fought for Korea in the Vietnam War. When I'm old, the only war story I'll have to tell my son is how I fought in the Credit Crisis. It's not nearly the same thing, but I didn't emerge from the financial battle we traders fought unscathed; my keyboard was damaged when a wall hit it after one of my data providers failed at a crucial point in the conflict. So for the last three years the keyboard has been propped up on my desk by the handle of a screwdriver. In this life you should live with the consequences of your mistakes... unless you actually caused the Credit Crisis, then apparently, not so much.

The Financial Crisis was a little like the Korean War; it ended in a stalemate rather than a victory. But now relative peace has returned to the financial world and our thoughts slowly turn to the process of rebuilding, I've decided to buy a new keyboard. I write a lot, so I'd like a nice keyboard, but that's always been a difficult task. These days keyboards are often made to the lowest common denominator because few people care enough to pay for high quality mechanisms beneath the keys, and I rue the day I let go of one of the early Model M IBM keyboards that some university friends and I liberated a job lot of from a dumpster in the grounds of a large company we'd trespassed onto. IBM spared no expense in making keyboards back then – I think they charged $200 for them. That was a lot of money in those days – to put it into perspective if everyone who bought one of those early IBM keyboards had bought something cheaper and given the rest of the money to Ethiopia instead, there would have been no famine. Ten years later the Ethiopians were still suffering from hunger but these excellent and still very usable keyboards were sitting outside in corporate rubbish bins all across the Western world. And we're very proud of our civilisation.

When I first came to Busan, I only had my English laptop and I needed a Korean keyboard to plug into it, but in those early days the quickest and lowest common denominator option was buying a $10 LG keyboard from a branch of Hi-Mart. I believed that the quality of the keyboard must be reasonable because it was made by LG and they wouldn't put their name to cheap rubbish. I was naïve about Korea back then.

Admittedly, $10 seemed quite cheap for a keyboard, but I really had no idea about Korean prices just after arriving here. As it happens, the keyboard had a dead feel to it which I quickly decided I didn't like, and a couple of keys which either didn't like to be depressed, or if they did, didn't like to come up properly afterwards. That was one of my first cultural lessons in Korea – the chaebols really don't care what they stick their name on, and rather more oddly, neither – apparently - do Korean consumers. In fact if I was in any doubt, shortly afterwards I figured out that Daelim make toilets, and motorcycles. Worse, in our neighbourhood we have a Daelim motorcycle dealership and the Daelim toilet dealership is only a few doors away, so it's hard to avoid. The potential for parody is enormous and you'd never, ever, get away with that in a Western country. I still don't quite follow how any self-respecting Korean youth can sit proudly on their Daelim while not thinking that back home their father is probably in the bathroom sitting on his.

Later I bought another keyboard from another Korean manufacturer which was a bit more expensive but strangely developed exactly the same fault. Then I bought a computer, which came with another keyboard. This had the now unique quality of actually working properly, but unfortunately it was also the one involved in the Credit Crisis friendly-fire incident.

Because I spend a lot of my life living in the dark these days – it's a Korean social metaphor as well as referring to the lighting in my office – I'd like a backlit keyboard. It won't help my life in Korea but it will help my typing. Even though there are quite a few backlit keyboards around, it's apparently little too specialist to find in the local branch of my unnervingly-friendly electronics store, and there aren't nearly as many specialist computer stores here as you might expect because people use public PC rooms, their phones, and if they need a computer at home, the Internet to buy things from. There are two billion clothes shops in Busan – I know – I've counted them - but in all my time here I've only ever seen six computer stores, seven if you include a store that improbably just sells games for the 0.1% of people here who don't seem to pirate their software.

I can't really ask my wife to help me because she's so busy with our baby these days, and she's suffering from ICSF - Internet Comparison Shopping Fatigue - a serious health problem which big media is suppressing for their corporate masters. Fortunately I don't have one of those Korean wives that spends her life looking lovingly at her husband's wallet, but now I'm living in Korea with an insufficient level of Korean language ability, it does make it difficult for me to buy things too.

So my trick is to search through Amazon.com, find product codes, and enter them into Korea's shopping search engines along with the smattering of Korean I know such as '키보드' and '바보'. It usually gets results but the problem is too many results. Sites like Gmarket and Auction are just like eBay – so much so in fact that eBay bought both of them - with multiple vendors selling the same item at sometimes suspiciously different prices. But whereas eBay is just one option in the online shopping space in England and the U.S., this seems to be how the vast majority of Internet shopping is done in Korea. Back in England, I'd know exactly which specialist online sellers to deal with – and when you found what you were looking for – it was only one entry on a page with one price and one set of claims, not twenty. And crucially, my attention wasn't being sapped by fifty different flashing boxes on the web page while I tried to read.

And there's another problem. After browsing through Amazon I found one of the Logitech keyboards I was looking for in Korea. But then I took a closer look at the product pictures – and while they were small, there was no mistaking the fact that they were pictures of the American product. That's the thing about keyboards with letters which are lit – it's easy to tell that there's only one letter on a key, and the Korean letter is at best, not lit up, or at worst, not there at all. I've encountered this before with another keyboard I was thinking of buying – there were no Korean letters, which surprised me before my wife told me that Koreans didn't necessarily mind that much because they knew where the Korean characters were as long as the English letters were visible, which is no use to me. Are these people selling the American product or the local Korean equivalent? I'm not sure, but what I do know is that despite this being a very shopping-driven culture, a lot of the actual selling technique strikes me as being half-assed. You'd think people would care about what they sell, but consumer protection law isn't very strong here, so perhaps issues such as accuracy and putting the right product picture up aren't so important.

I think there might be a business opportunity there. After all, if a tiny minority of Koreans choose to actually buy software rather than copy it from their friends, I can't help thinking that there might be a few Koreans who would prefer a more Westernised Internet shopping experience, where visiting an e-commerce page doesn't make you feel like you're tripping acid. Plus, with so many people here these days using their phones, iPads and other CPU and bandwidth-challenged non-Windows devices, maybe – just maybe – the era of Internet Explorer-only 10Mb Korean web pages needs to come to an end.

Meanwhile, my search for a keyboard goes on.

Aquatic House Party

"Our department store is turning into an amusement park."

When Lotte opened a large department store in the Gwangbokdong area of Busan it didn't seem quite finished. They were still building a new section but it finally opened last week to reveal even more designer stores, and to try and balance the cultural vacuum they create, a large bookstore and 430-seat concert hall on the higher floors. The centrepiece of the new space features fountains and a waterfall. A Lotte Mart and Lotte Cinema are next to be built. Construction will be completed in 2016 with a large Lotte apartment skyscraper which will provide - possibly in breach of the Geneva Convention - a captive audience for all things Lotte. It's a cunning business strategy but you certainly won't catch me living there. Well, not until 2016 anyway.

I went to Gwangbokdong the day after the 'Aqua Mall' opened to take a look, not honestly expecting to see very much, but Lotte were holding an 'Aquatique Show' which you can tell was meant to be something special because they used a French word. Some foreign gymnasts - probably not French - were performing a floor show and there may have been clowns buried deep within the crowd to add to that slightly uncomfortable circus feeling.

It appeared that someone from head office in Seoul was visiting, but perhaps he was not a fan of the entertainment - "Our department store is turning into an amusement park. Is this so fascinating?", adding words to the effect of 'people in Busan are easily pleased'. No, let's be honest, what he actually said was "What a bunch of countryside people". His Busan colleagues then nudged him to be quiet. You never know who's listening, but I think he got away with it. Anyway, I shouldn't be too hard on him, he's only saying what most people from Seoul think.

If he thinks people in Busan are easily pleased, he doesn't know the people here I do. In fact, 74.4 percent of workers in Korea said they thought their jobs had driven them to depression in a recent survey. People need their distractions. Plus, it's not easy deciding which of forty designer stores to buy yet another $1,000 handbag from. Very stressful.

It's also easy to be blasé about the importance of what you have when you spend your day working in a regulation 26°C air conditioned 50% humidity environment. Many shoppers in the crowd had just escaped from the 34 degree 80% humidity outside and after that, the sight of fountains and cascading torrents of water falling from the ceiling is practically pornographic.

Feat of Clay

Recently I stumbled across a shop selling art in the Gwangbok Underground Shopping Area near Nampodong's Lotte Department Store. There's nothing particularly unusual about this - the underground shopping district is extensive and there are a number of artworks on display, but they are usually the kind of typical Korean fare popular with tourists and apartment living rooms. Colours are often limited to black and white. What made this particular shop stand out were the vibrant reds and greens enticing the visitor inside.

The particular artist concerned has taken to updating traditional Korean black and white flat paintings with red and green coloured clay which also adds a relief and therefore more depth to the work. I doubt it's the case that what the artist is doing is unique, but in all my time trudging through the back-streets of Busan I've never seen anything quite like it. It's easy for art to stagnate and become almost a stereotype of itself, but it's exciting to think that despite the temptation to pump out the old clichés, that someone out there in Busan is prepared to take an old favourite and give it an updated spin. More images are available on the artist's (정창원 - Jung Chang-Won) website.

The Baby Fair

For a country with a 'plunging' birthrate, it seemed somewhat optimistic to find a large baby fair being held at the Busan Exhibition and Convention Center - or BEXCO as it's known. But as this was "The 8th Busan International Baby & Education Fair" (or if you're reading the Korean, the possibly less catchy "International Pregnancy Childbirth and Small Children Education Fair"), it's almost a tradition now. And an international one at that.

So with tales of birthrate woes regularly appearing in the media, and the Samsung Economic Research Institute suggesting that the Korean race might be halved to 25 million by 2100 (with the Korean race eventually becoming extinct by 2500), it didn't seem right that when we arrived at BEXCO it would be overwhelmed with Korean parents, pregnant women and babies.

The show was a predictable mix of pushchairs, educational equipment and other products aimed at babies and expectant mothers, though there were some more Korean twists on what might otherwise be a familiar theme the world over, such as the stand offering to create "baby's first homepage". Yes, you can never get onto Cyworld and start your social networking too early...

A couple of stands were trying to entice visitors to sign up for pregnancy photo-shoots, which I learned are quite popular here. I suppose that's not so unexpected considering the enormous amount of fuss which goes into creating pre-wedding photo albums. One thing I took away from the whole wedding shoot business was the often jarring lengths people go to here to evoke a sense of period-Western romanticism that never existed in Korea, and truth be told, probably never existed in the West either, except in movies. Perhaps that's how this pram - or perambulator as it surely deserves to be called, came to be on sale at the baby fair, confounding my initial expectations that it was merely a prop:

It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, called the Balmoral, and may just find a market among Haeundae's BMW-driving royalty. Given that a significant number of Korea's pedestrian walkways are built to the usual local construction standards and seem designed to keep the local hospitals in business, it's entirely possible that the large wheels of the Balmoral perambulator may provide a smoother ride. So it may have some appeal, though it doesn't look like you'd be going anywhere in a taxi with it, and certainly not the subway. Anyway, if you wanted it, the 'show special' price was reduced from 6,000,000 won to 5,400,000 ($4,487/£2,985!)

The big surprise for me was how relatively little technology was on display. A 'magic wand' read pre-prepared stories bilingually from a book, and there were a few electronic gadgets for baby monitoring, but otherwise the most cutting edge stands were for something entirely unexpected - biotechnology - and specifically, umbilical cord stem cell extraction...

On the evidence of the number of babies and pregnant mothers at the Baby Fair, the Korean race is safe for another couple of hundred years at least, especially if those stem cells are harvested.

Pong

Normally, I don't really sweat that much, and this may have been the reason why before this summer I've only had around five mosquito bites in Korea. In the last two days, I've been bitten seven times in our apartment, and I have the itchy red spots to prove it.

Having a large apartment can seem like a step up from the 'one-room' place we spent the first fifteen months in, but I discovered it had a downside: the air conditioning unit in the one-room could keep the air cool with only intermittent efforts, but the one in our four-bedroom apartment would need to stay on all the time to have any chance of making a significant difference to the temperature of our office on the other side of the building. The upshot of which is that I'm working in a room which hits 30 degrees and 80% humidity on the bad days, while three computers pump out warm air which has nowhere to go. It's hot, uncomfortable, and apparently it's made me more of a mosquito target.

The question of where the dreaded mosquitoes are actually coming from became a pressing one after their seven-bite feast. Our bed is protected by a large mosquito tent, so it isn't while I sleep. Logically then, it's almost certainly in the office where I've spent almost all my time this week. It wasn't long before careful examination of the large wire gauze cover which prevents insects flying through the otherwise open window (aka 'mogi jang' - 모기장 - mosquito net/bar) revealed it to have four large gaps in the frame where insects can enter the apartment as they wish. One of them is the gap beneath the window and the frame, which might be unavoidable, but the other three are a little inexplicable – they are lozenge-shaped holes which are clearly part of the design of the frame.

Since my wife became pregnant we can't liberally employ mosquito spray wherever we want to as we used to, and truth be told I was never convinced of its efficacy – only a direct hit at close quarters ever seemed to kill, so Korean Mother's strategy of spraying a room heavily and then closing the door for ten minutes before going to bed never seemed like it was going to harm anything apart from the person sleeping inside. I can't spray my office even if my wife isn't in the room now either, since we acquired an aquarium. So I've had to resort to using an insect swatter, which often involves cleaning up blood-splattered walls afterwards.

I hoped technology might come to the rescue, but was disappointed to find that most people on the Korean Internet felt that the kind of electrified lights which I often see in fast-food places back in the UK, but not so much in Korea, don't actually work very well. So we ended up buying an electrified mosquito swatter.

The electrified mosquito swatter seems typical of so much that is sold in Korea. It's made in China, and it's so dangerous that almost two-hundred people were injured by it last year. Shopping forums are full of cautionary tales of the huge sparks which are created and the dangers of it touching yourself or any close family members you'd like to keep. Despite this, the solution is not to ban the product, but rather to offer 100,000,000 won (£53,600/$81,500) of product liability insurance. A Samsung Insurance sticker is therefore attached above the handle for your peace of mind. If that isn't enough, the box has the word 'Safety' written in large letters in the corner, and 'As Seen on TV', though it isn't clear to me whether this was in an advert or a news report.

What kind of design aesthetic should such an apparently dangerous device have? Something that doesn't look attractive to children? No, worryingly it looks like a toy with a tennis racquet shape, a bright orange frame, and a friendly-looking cat face in the middle of the metal strings, inviting you in for a closer look.

The initial test came the day the package arrived. The device is activated with a button which must be held in while hitting the offending mosquito, although apparently it can retain a charge even after it's released. I quickly put the batteries in and pressed it – a loud crack accompanied by large retina-blurring spark immediately jumped off the metal wiring. There was no doubt this was going to be satisfyingly deadly, the only question remained as to who the victim would be. The second loud crack came as I moved the now electrified racquet gently towards the flying insect, which was left motionless in the wiring.

It's easy to be frightened by the rather cavalier attitude to public safety that exists in this country – but the electrified mosquito swatter stands as an example of how it can actually work for you; just because some ajumma set fire to her apartment with one, and just because a young girl put one in her mouth with predictably horrific consequences (yes, both actually happened), apparently nobody is going to stop you from buying it. Which is good if you're careful and responsible, but not so good if you might be Darwin Award material. Later, I'll let you know at a later time which group I fall into. Unless I can't.

Fish Out of Water

We never set out to own animals in Korea, but they seem to find us. First we rescued hamsters from a snake. Then we rescued a dog from some people who didn't really know how to care for him, followed by another dog from some traffic - although we managed to find that one's owner. And now, it's fish.

Personal relationships are quite important in Korea, and the social network is often how business will be done. This meant that when I bought into a health insurance plan here, it was only proper that I gave Korean Mother's insurance friend a hearing before running off to sign a deal with some faceless, but potentially more competitive, corporation. We eventually signed the deal with her anyway because we were busy, and didn't have time to wade through the complexities of all the various deals in the wider market.

The line between friendship and business gets blurred like this, meetings can be social with the underlying suspicion of being opportunistic, lunch can be bought, and the vague sense of obligation to return the favour grows bigger with every bill. Then sometimes, your insurance agent gives you an aquarium full of tropical fish with the words "I hope you will bring me some more clients".

To my mind Korean Mother didn't want to have the fish, but didn't want to face the rudeness of rejecting the gift, so they quickly landed in our office. I had mixed feelings about this turn of events - on the one hand I thought it might bring a little island of calmness to our increasingly stress-filled trading floor, but on the other hand it meant I suddenly had to learn all about keeping fish in addition to my DSLR learning curve, Korean studies, trading, baby related work and another sudden political campaign I'd become involved in back in the UK. But herein lies another lesson about language barriers. Korean Mother wanted the fish, but thought I liked them, so decided to give them to us. Had I known that, I would have readily set her straight and said "keep the fish". As it was, this fact only emerged two weeks later, after two of our thirteen fish depressingly died and another one was separated into a box before giving birth to seventeen babies.

So I read all I could about the fish in the limited time I had, and came to the conclusion that they needed some plants - or at least, the smaller ones in our tank did. I researched about plants, and then we went to a fish store, but we came away empty-handed - the woman in the shop just raised more questions than she answered. I could write a long story about everything that happened afterwards but suffice to say that my conclusion was that there are two schools of opinions on fish-related matters - the Internet consensus, comprising of various large hobby and commercial sites, discussion boards and Wikipedia, and the second school of opinion - Korean shop owners - which often appears to disagree with it. What I learned from the Internet was that the pH level of the water was quite important, and what I was told by the shop owners was "oh, you don't want to worry about that sort of thing". And I ended up with some plants - a random fish store selection - not the ones I thought were compatible with our fish. That was another one of those "oh don't worry about it" scenarios.

Another "oh don't worry about it" moments came when Korean Mother was given some more fish, including five babies, by her Insurance Friend, and she insisted on keeping them in a large jar. Now admittedly, the jar was so large that it probably held as much water as our aquarium, but there was no filter, heater or anything else you might think necessary. By this time I'd read about the basic needs of a healthy tropical aquarium, and was growing increasingly frustrated with the fact that I couldn't pursued her through my translator wife that this was not a good idea.

Korean Mother did, at least, change the water regularly, but she'd do all of it and clean the jar, which necessitated transferring all the fish to a much smaller container. Finally, for reasons I just don't understand and the language barrier prevents me from discovering, the large jar would be left to dry for gradually longer periods until one day she showed no inclination to move the fish back at all. "This", I told my wife, "is going to turn into a disaster". I suggested she buy an aquarium - it would be much less work - then I offered to buy her an aquarium with the proper equipment, and when that failed, I insisted on it, but to no avail.

So it had reached the stage where the only way anything was going to get done was by me going down to the fish store on my own, and somehow muddling through buying what Korean Mother needed, despite her considerable resistance. Korean Mother is a Buddhist, and holds all life as sacred, so I really couldn't understand it.

The next day we went out together leaving the fish in the small jar with my final words on the subject being "she's not leaving those fish in that jar is she?" Sure enough, when we returned in the evening, about ten dead fish were floating at the top. The remarkable thing was, that five one centimetre-long baby fish in the jar and an immature guppy had survived, although the latter took two days before it was able to submerge below the water surface again.

Korean Mother's plan to separate the dead fish from the survivors apparently involved pouring the water into the sink on the dubious principle that the latter would stay in the jar. This may or may not have worked but apparently it doesn't work if you pour really fast. She gets flustered sometimes. Following my horrified look, numeric hand gestures and some frantic translation work by my wife, Korean Mother somehow found the two missing baby fish in the unspeakable hole that is used in sinks in this country to collect festering masses of Korean food, and improbably they were returned safely to the water.

Korean Mother decided to buy a proper aquarium. She hadn't wanted to pay the money to buy one before, but once in the store I was not entirely surprised when the 50-inch LCD mentality took over and she chose a tank that was over three times the price of what we have. There's a lot which has frustrated me in connection with the fish - but file this under something positive which would never have happened in my country - the store owner offered to give us a lift back to our apartment with it so he could set it up and have a look at our fish to help us identify a couple of them we'd failed to.

What I took from all this is not about fish but about language. Aside from the fact I ended up with an aquarium I'd have been quite happy not to have, somehow, the fact that I can't effectively communicate in Korean makes it feel to me that I'm really not getting my point across sometimes. Perhaps it means I'm easier to ignore. I guess I play that game too. Touché.

And as for the story of those fish stores versus the Internet though, I have reached the conclusion that I'm going to side with the Internet; Korean Mother was at one of those shops recently to stock her aquarium, and when I looked more closely at their tanks, I saw they were full of dead fish, and they'd clearly been dead for some time. What's more, it wasn't long before some of the fish be bought started suffering from fin rot, and once again the treatment advice differed significantly from the Internet consensus. Something has to be done because it's not something I want to see; watching them slowly waste away while being constantly pecked at by the other fish can be uncomfortably reminiscent of life as a foreigner in Korea.

Shooters

Many people in Korea seems to be walking around with DSLR cameras, even 18-year old looking girls who don't exactly strike me as the most obvious target consumer. Expensive photographic equipment is stuffed in handbags or carried casually around the neck with little protection. Occasionally, even the lens caps are alarmingly optional.

I'd never buy a DSLR back in England, where my home town was ranked as the second most dangerous city in the country the year I first left it for Korea, which is a little safer than that. And if everyone is carrying around expensive gadgets here - and they do - there's an element of safety in numbers. After arriving in Korea, it didn't take me long to establish the limits of my Canon IXUS 800 (aka Powershot SD700), and I thought about buying a DSLR but never reached the point where I believed it was worth it. I regarded myself as more of a point-and-shoot person, and that suited the rough and tumble of my Korean life. With a baby on the way things changed because my wife and I want to take higher quality shots than my old 6 megapixel IXUS allows. The videos will be higher quality as well, but whether it's an acceptable if compromised alternative to a proper camcorder remains to be seen.

It's that rough and tumble that minded me to buy a Canon DSLR. I don't write about all my experiences in Korea for various reasons including lack of time, privacy and apathy, but a couple of years ago my IXUS went on holiday to Jeju Island without me and got dropped on a concrete floor. The upshot of that was finding that Canon had an official repair centre above their store in the Nampodong district of Busan, which meant that I managed to get my shattered compact repaired. It meant that it got stuck in my mind that the after-sales service for a DSLR Canon was going to be a lot easier than for a Nikon.

I'd also read that one of the DSLR cameras I'd been looking at – I'm afraid I can't remember which one now but - didn't have an English language option if bought in Korea. They probably do this sort of thing to prevent grey imports into other countries. Unfortunately, it meant that this camera was quickly struck off my list. I happen to use a Korean version of Windows which to the surprise of the retailer I insisted on buying with my computer (sometimes I think it might be the only legal copy of Korean Windows in the entire country), but I drew the line on living with a Korean-menu-only DSLR I might not even understand in English.

So I went to the Canon store in Nampodong recently to look at the Canon EOS 550D (which is confusingly called the Rebel T2i in the US). While there a young couple walked in, weren't quite sure what they wanted, were shown a 550D, and decided to buy it – just like that. I was still doing a lot of research. But it seemed like a very familiar attitude here, where gadgets are so ubiquitous they are treated almost like commodities.

When it came time for me to buy, I didn't really want to pay Canon's official prices, so I humoured myself looking at the prices on Korean Internet sites. But whereas back in the UK there are online retailers - and then there is the Wild West of distrust that is eBay - in Korea it's common to buy from sellers you've never heard of via sites like Auction and Gmarket, which to put it into context would be like buying everything through eBay back home. I'm not really comfortable with buying expensive electrical equipment from auction sites, but on the whole people in Korea don't seem quite as reticent. We eventually bought from the large electrical chain Hi-Mart, where we got a free Canon bag but where further attempts to haggle would prove fruitless on the grounds that there was apparently huge demand for the 550D and nobody seemed to have any stock. They certainly didn't need to discount when stock came in. The price was about £680 ($986/1,200,000 won) with the EF-S 18-55mm lens kit, bag, extra SD card, predictably useless UV filter and a few other bits and pieces. And we'd still have to wait - two to three weeks.

When we'd done the deal the assistant didn't seem enthusiastic – my wife jokingly asked him why – shouldn't he be happy with the commission? He said he wasn't because he couldn't give us the product immediately – and I believe he really meant it.

It took three weeks in the end to come, and when they got it they still didn't have a bag, so – unprompted - they gave us a new 'Samsung VLUU' bag to use in the interim. I didn't use it but suspiciously held it hostage until the Canon one arrived.

Three CDs came in the box. The first contained the accompanying software, the second, which contained manuals for the accompanying software was entitled the 'Software Instruction Manual', and the third carried the Korean description '소프트웨어 사용설명서' which approximately translates as the 'Software usage instructions' – in other words, it contained manuals for the accompanying software and sure enough the contents were exactly the same as the second CD, with instructions for the software in English, French, Japanese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish. Which meant that neither CD had Korean instructions for the accompanying software, despite one of them being given a Korean title. It looks like Canon made a mistake somewhere there.

But for all my research, while the camera can be switched into one of 25 languages including English and Korean, to my surprise there was no PDF manual on the CDs in the box, but instead a 206 page printed Korean manual which was useless to me. Fortunately it wasn't an issue since I'd downloaded the English manual a few weeks beforehand in order to do some final research. It's just as well it's readily available.

After I'd got the camera I went back over to Nampodong to have a look at filters and lens hoods, and discovered three new large camera shops in close proximity to Canon's store. That's the odd thing about Korea - shops in the same line of business have a tendency to cluster. Perhaps Nampodong is turning into Busan's camera district.

Dante's Inferno

Can you stop the cavalry?

Christmas Day in a Buddhist household be a rather anti-climactic affair so rather than stay in all day reading or watching TV, and considering that I'd already done the Kosin University Christmas Tree Festival two years ago, I planned to go to the Nampodong district, where we could have a quick look around the new Lotte Department Store before finding somewhere nice to eat in the shopping district. But leaving Korean Mother at home on her own on Christmas Day was deemed to be to awkward, even if she was a Buddhist, so she was invited along, and it became a fully-fledged shopping trip.

I had been taken aback at just how busy Nampodong had been when I was last there on the 20th, considering how cold it was, but even that didn't prepare me for the 25th. The first indication was the subway trains, which were much more crammed than usual, as were the underground shopping areas which are sometimes so large it's possible to walk from one station to the next without going up to the surface. Ominously, we started hitting advertising for the new Lotte store well before we reached it, even if the blanket coverage on the local news channels meant it hardly needed any introduction. Oddly, pictures of the Queen's Guard were being used to promote the store. I didn't get the link.

The Department Store is only one part of a Lotte World-type complex which is still under construction. Soon, a Lotte Cinema will follow, and possibly on the principle that there's nothing like guaranteeing an audience, a high-rise apartment block will be built behind it. It's unclear how tall this will be, but from the model it looks like at least 60 floors.

Inside was a vision from hell. Korean hell. Korean shopping hell - which as most foreigners here know, is a very special kind of hell. There was hardly any space to move. It was so bad, not only were there queues for the escalators, there were staff stationed at them to regulate the number of people getting on. Warnings about escalator safety played constantly over the store's PA system. Despite which, there was still nearly a nasty crush at the top of one we were on, as people almost fell over each other adjusting from a moving to a static floor. Later, a snaking pathway was set up with mobile barriers to separate the adjacent top of one escalator with the bottom of the next, to keep people apart. If you could hear the festive music playing over the wall of noise that was a thousand simultaneous Korean conversations, it was Jona Lewie's Stop The Cavalry. And can you stop the cavalry? Of course not.



Dante's Inferno has nine circles of hell, but the Lotte Department Store actually has ten floors - eleven if you count the rooftop - and another three underground. As we worked up through Lotte's circles of hell, the crowds at least did thin out. Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? now played over speakers imploring people to Feed the world, Feed the World as they browsed through the large number of high priced designer stores. And who knows how many people are starving just a few hundred miles from here?

What could be more deliciously ironic than putting a Zen garden on top of all this chaos? And they did, as part of a larger garden area which is fortunately surrounded on all sides making it somewhat protected from the elements of a cold Korean winter. The rooftop work isn't finished though - it's still under construction. In fact, construction workers could be seen amidst the scaffolding at what will eventually be a larger garden area. Christmas Day is a public holiday in Korea, and while it's a reality that shop and restaurant workers are going to be forced to do their jobs, it's more surprising that construction workers are pressing ahead with their tasks today.



The rooftop has two 'Observation Decks' at opposite ends of the building - the 'Sea View' and the 'City View', which afford good views of the city and the docks. No doubt it looks better on a clear day, but there aren't too many of those in Busan - and Christmas Day was no different, suffering from typically Korean atmospherics.




We worked our way back down through the circles of hell to the lowest floors where expensive clothing and even more expensive jewellery gives way to food - and lots of it. Certainly, there are no dangers of a famine here. My wife and Mother-in-law want to eat Korean food - I don't - so I have my eye on some nice looking Turkish food but then get lost in the river of souls pushing me on towards some uncertain fate, and I can't find the place again - more importantly, I lose the will to try. I end up getting a Mexican tortilla, which I ate in a chaotic area reminiscent of a school cafeteria - but much noisier. Christmas Lunch, 2009. By the time Korean Mother and Wife joined me, I'd finished and spent most of the rest of the time writing this blog entry on my phone-with-a-keyboard.

An announcement was made that the opening hours of the store would be extended by one hour, until 9pm. It wasn't clear if that meant staff would be getting an extra hour's wages, but I suspected not.

The slow progress of the war in the lower floors and our constant marching to and from the enemy meant that by the time we escaped from the Food Area Limbo it was dark outside, so I summoned the strength to fight my way back up the building to take some night-time shots of the views from the Observation Decks. With every other 18-year-old girl apparently walking round with a DSLR these days, it hardly seems worth the effort, but I press on regardless with my hacked digital compact. As well as watching Busan Tower change colour against the city backdrop, I could also see the Christmas Tree Festival snaking along Nampodong's main shopping street.




One might assume that the Lotte Department Store had sucked in all the souls that would otherwise we wandering the streets nearby, but this proved to be wrong. Retailers on the local TV news had claimed that since the Store opened on the 17th, business had increased by 30-40%. But Nampodong's main street probably had 300% of the normal number of people on it - with so many people, everyone's pace was slowed to an uncomfortable crawl. People bravely still tried to take photographs of the Christmas lights, but they were also fighting losing battles. I'd been here briefly on Christmas Day two years ago, but this seemed much worse.

It took us a long time to reach the main square, and it seemed appropriate enough that there should be people there offering "Free Hugs" - God knows, I felt I needed one by this time. I was impressed that the Free Hugs Campaign had made it here, and that it was still going a number of years since its inception. I was slightly less impressed at the suggestion from the small print on the placards that it seemed to be a corporate ploy by LG Telecom. I suppose this is Korea, after all.



Number of Koreans seen today - ~30,000. Number of foreigners knowingly seen - 15. 2 Russians, 2 Chinese, 7 Westerners, and 3 Southeast Asians. Even by the standards of Busan, it was a very poor turnout by the foreign contingent - I assume they sensibly stayed away from Christmas Day shopping.

Christmas Lights

As we entered the main shopping area of Nampodong the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel echoed around the streets. It was easy to believe for a moment that the sound emanated from one of the many nearby stores, which are never averse to using external speakers to capture the attention of those nearby, but this time the sound had a vastness to it belying a merely local source. Every street lamp for half-a-mile had a speaker, and every one played Emmanuel. Amidst the hustle of a Sunday's afternoon shopping in Busan, the calmness of the hymn seemed to trick the eyes into slowing down the movement before them. It was something simple yet extraordinary to experience, and was only slightly detracted from by the particularly strong odour of raw sewage - which one is never far away from in Busan - permeating the air. All this money spent on events - but they'll never fix the drains.

Nampodong, perennially locked in a battle for economic supremacy against its great rival Seomyeon, hardly needs an excuse to do anything, but on this occasion the speakers were here, and we were here, for the '1st Busan Christmas Tree Culture Festival'. Whether this truly is the inauguration of an event that will be here twenty or thirty years from now I cannot say, because Korea appears to create so many festivals one wonders how they can all be continually supported, although the Festival Festival has yet to be announced. One day, you know it will come.

While there had possibly been some activity on the stage in the central square before our arrival, this is really an event designed for the evening, and it was suitably dark when we returned after eating at a nearby Italian restaurant. The first impression was that while this may be called a 'Christmas Tree Festival', this mainly translated into putting lights in the trees that are planted in the area, rather than something more concerned with traditional Christmas trees as we think of them in the West. In fact, there were lights everywhere from the lampposts to the plants, which certainly created an atmosphere. Floor lighting, embedded in the streets, cycled through various different colours.




Stuffed reindeer shared the street with reindeer lighting, while trees and plants hung with individually written messages, presumably of a festive nature.




At the far end of Nampodong's main shopping street one comes face to face against the consumer paradise that is the new Lotte Department Store with its large anchor motif, which opened amid chaotic scenes earlier in the week. Coverage of the continued apparent dog eat dog madness inside on the local TV news has been so heavy, I felt no great desire to investigate it, and was instead content to photograph its Christmas lights from the other side of the road. Still, this is the store that will revitalise Nampodong - so goes the promise - not that it particularly seems to need revitalising - you'd never know there's been a terrible global recession on the evidence of the volume of people here in the last three years.



We worked our way back towards the square, where on the stage children were dancing to Korean rap music, possibly in the 'popping' style or some other such technique that I couldn't care less about after seeing it so much here. Worse, if I followed the English lyrics correctly, they might have been doing it for Jesus! The great truth about a lot of these new Korean festivals is that whatever the theme in my experience, they often quickly descend into anything-goes stage shows, often involving rap, which since moving to Korea I've developed a real aversion to. After the young Christian rap-dancers, we had a complete change of pace - switching into a traditional Korean 'Sogochum' (소고춤) - or 소 (small) 고 (drum)춤 (dance). It was hard to see a link between this and the 'Christmas Tree Festival' event title, but nobody cares, and as they danced their hearts out in sight of the 'Frisbee' Apple store, I was glad of it too - I fear the day will come when this aspect of Korean culture drowns in a sea of K-pop and K-rap.