Bananaman

When I started writing about my experiences here there were only two other foreigners writing blogs in Busan as far as I'm aware and so it enjoyed a level of mild popularity by virtue of absence of choice. This led to a few invitations to appear on Korean TV and radio shows, and I was also asked to write, but always for airline magazines - perhaps their editors had correctly surmised that I work best with a captive audience.

I always turned these offers down - even though I was invariably assured it would 'help promote my blog' - on the sound logic that I actually didn't want to promote my blog, and I have a face for radio and a voice for writing. Yes, perhaps with enough plastic surgery I too could look like one of those K-pop boy band members which women who are into the whole non-threatening-male-look would like, but it would represent the modern-day equivalent of The Six Million Dollar Man project, and cost about the same.

The other reason for turning down 'a great chance to be on TV/radio/write for people trapped on a plane' is that the offers invariably came in from bizarre addresses at Korea's equivalent of Hotmail such as 'ilikegoats', 'bananaman', 'pussy80' and 'bkmhbdmukkk' with subject lines such as 'This is Arirang TV' to make sure you know it's authentic. So you end up in a situation where Bananaman invites you to some part of the city to appear on a TV or radio programme. You could run a background check on Bananaman but it's time consuming.

It was once explained to me - and it's entirely logical - that since most people here share about seven surnames and most of them are in fact called Kim - it's almost impossible to get anything resembling a sensible email address from your employer because someone's already taken it. The problem is though, I don't think they're even trying. Take the Korea Times for example. It can't have more than a few hundred staff so it shouldn't be anywhere near as difficult to choose an email address, but someone still elects to be 'foolsdie' at their domain name, and that means sooner or later they end up writing a piece about a plane crash where pilot error is suspected and signing it 'foolsdie' at the bottom.

But mostly, Koreans seem to use their personal email addresses for work purposes - and this blurring of the lines extends to phones now, and chat systems such as Kakao Talk. This provides whole new opportunities for sexual innuendo because you can now not only expose your quirky textual inner thoughts but give the Freudians something much more graphic and substantial to sink their teeth into - such as the image below - the Kakao Talk avatar of a male bank employee who contacted my wife to tell her that her new credit card was ready:

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Having a baby in Korea can expose you to a great deal of culturally odd experiences. There are rules about staying in hospital, rules about keeping the rooms there at high temperatures, beliefs that new mothers shouldn't shower for a week, and when the fortune tellers get involved, the minefield of baby naming to navigate. Eventually, those first few weeks pass by and you're left with your newborn at home, and you think things might start to get a little less strange.

But when my wife came into our office and said "I need a picture of a chicken to hang upside down over the baby's bed", I was hardly even surprised even if I had no idea what the reasoning behind it was. Does there come a point where you've been in Korea so long that nothing surprises you any more?

In this case, it seems there an old belief which has its roots in the practices of Korean Shamanism, and the upshot of it is that if your baby is a bit of a handful, doesn't sleep at night - or at all - and generally cries a lot, you should hang a picture of a chicken (or technically I believe, a rooster), upside down over the baby's bed as this will - apparently - be a calming influence. The reasoning is that during pregnancy the baby generally sleeps during the day and is active at night, so the rooster picture is supposed to reverse the cycle, although it's important that the red part of the rooster's head (the 'comb' - really) is exaggerated, hence the reason why my wife extended it with a red colouring pencil.

Now, it occurs to me that several hundred years ago there wasn't an Internet to download chicken images from, and even having the kind of tools and paper around enabling a person to draw a fair representation of a chicken might have been rare, so I can't help wondering if this means that people back then used to hang real chickens - presumably dead ones - upside down over their babies beds. But I'm afraid to ask. When you can walk into your kitchen and find a pig's head staring at you unannounced from the kitchen table - and I have - anything is possible.

By the way, before you rush out to procure your own chicken, drawn or otherwise, I have to tell you that it doesn't work.

We the People

"You know what? I know we have a dangerous job to do here but... I'm taking this. I'm taking this couch" - Peter Griffin, Family Guy - Blue Harvest

About three weeks before the attack on my car which led to our sudden volte-face decision to return to Korea, we bought a Nintendo Wii. It's clear to me from people I know that Wii's are used for one of two things, either to provide an interactive gaming and exercise system, or gather dust in closets. It was soon clear that ours was going to fall into the former category.

This presented a problem because a UK Wii is a PAL output system and Korean TVs run on NTSC, which meant that even if we were prepared to ship it out to Korea, to my mind it wasn't going to work unless we could find a Korean TV that accepted PAL inputs. I may be a former software designer and one-time computer geek, but I'm no expert on audio-visual equipment and everything I read on the subject could basically be summarised as 'forget about linking a PAL Wii to an NTSC TV without a heck of a lot of messing around or some special connectors. My wife scoured the Korean Internet and couldn't find any TVs claiming to take PAL inputs - whereas in the UK NTSC capable TVs are quite common.

So as reluctant as I was to probably lose a hundred pounds in three weeks on a console that we would have to dump quickly, I saw little choice but to write it off as a transition cost and start again in Korea with a locally purchased Wii. Then my wife had her Peter Griffin moment - "You know what? I'm taking this. I'm taking this Wii to Korea". And because as traders neither of us like losing lots of money on a position we've just entered, I found myself seduced by the idea of going along with it.

It logically follows that if you're going to take a PAL Wii to NTSC country, maybe you have to have a PAL TV to use it with if all else fails, and that's how - along with a few other boxes of possessions we arranged to have shipped to Korea, we came to have a cheap 19-inch TV shipped along with them. But the Wii itself along with its accompanying software was not going to be shipped - instead my wife resolved to use about a significant part of her suitcase to bring them with us on the flight. I could only do what any husband would in this situation, which was to offer words of support such as "You're crazy", "Customs are bound to go through your cases", and "I'm really not sure this is going to work anyway". I think it's important to see a marriage as a real partnership.

Despite my disturbing lack of faith I made sure we brought all the connectors and two days after we arrived I'm finally crawling around the back of Korean Mother's 52-mile wide PAVV (i.e. upmarket Samsung) TV looking for a SCART connector, which is what we used to use to connect just about every piece of equipment in the living room to one another before HDMI came along. This exhibited a complete lack of research on my part, because despite having a couple of dozen different connectors in the back - including an Ethernet port of all things - a SCART socket was conspicuous by its absence. I checked the old TV we'd bought when we came to Korea the first time - it's so old it's actually a CRT rather than LCD, and that didn't have a SCART either, which is when it became obvious that Korea doesn't use SCARTs and probably never did. Well, the Wii cables running into the SCART convertor were a left and right audio, and a video cable, so I figured I'd just pull them out and see if I could stick them somewhere else directly - my trademark scientific approach to almost anything technical. There was some colour-coding but since half of the ports seemed to be red it wasn't as helpful as it might have been.

It didn't take long to figure out that the Mega TV set-top box was using the same type of cables to connect to the TV, and by replacing them with those from the Wii we might be in business. And then it just happened - the picture came on - the standard Nintendo warning that their consoles can be dangerous to use or some such thing - and what's more, it even had a splash of colour in the right place despite the cautionary Internet tales that in the unlikely event we had any success, the picture would probably end up being monochrome.

Later I got even more ambitious and succeeded in connecting the Wii to the Korean TV via a non-Nintendo Component Cable I'd bought in the UK, so now it can remain connected without the need to cut off the Mega TV box. And with that we were set up. Admittedly, we can't buy Korean Wii games because they will be NTSC format, so if we want to add any more software to it we'll have to try and find PAL titles from somewhere. But even if we don't, we feel like we really achieved something somewhat against the odds.

I'm not sure that 10.30pm on an uncomfortably humid evening is a good time to be reacquainting oneself with Wii Sports, but we were soon back into the swing of things, and the great thing about Korean Mother's apartment was that we actually had space to move around, unlike our home back in the UK.

Korean Mother came home to discover that we'd seized control of the strategically important lounge area, and her 52-mile wide TV with it, and rushed off to her room to watch the soap opera she'd come home for. But curiosity soon got the better of her, and she was back outside watching with fascination. In fact, she'd been out exercising at a local school, at 9pm, and was intrigued by the idea of exercising in her apartment using a console when we showed her EA Sports Active. After that, it wasn't long before she was playing Wii Sports Resort's table tennis, and unexpectedly discovering she was rather good at it.

But nothing prepared me for what was to follow. Korean Mother discovered Wii Boxing, and suffice to say while I have video of her playing this which I'm sure could be a YouTube sensation if there wasn't a going to be a very long statute of limitations applying to it, I will instead merely have to relate that nothing in life quite prepares you for the sight of an ajumma knocking the hell out of a Nintendo character while angrily suggesting with each punch to the character that his mother might have the characteristics of the son of a fornicating female dog who isn't familiar with the father. What's even more inexplicable, is that having played first and exhausted myself entirely having once again failed to beat my next level opponent, Korean Mother took over my character and beat it on her first attempt. It's clear from watching Korean TV - which run programmes that I always imagined being called When Ajummas Attack - that an angry ajumma is a dangerous animal - but seeing it up close is truly a sight to behold. I tell you this - if Wii Boxing ever catches on in the ajumma community, on the evidence I've seen the rest of us are really in trouble.

Cars

When I left civilisation and returned to England I used to spend a little time trying to increase my ranking in Kartrider, so I was glad to discover that it was still perfectly playable several thousand miles away despite the lag-time one might expect with this distance. Unfortunately, any plans I had to finally attain a coveted rainbow glove were nixed by the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, which left myself and probably most other traders rather preoccupied, if not fighting for survival.

Because of my foray into gaming in Korea, the first time I saw a Kartrider rainbow glove stuck to the back of a white Hyundai I couldn't help but be amused, although this was back in the days before I realised that it wasn't just rainbow gloves, but also driving styles, which had made their way from the online world to the crazy streets of Busan.

One of the first things which struck me - though remarkably not physically - about cars in Busan, was the wide range of colours they seemed to come in. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you could apparently have any colour you wanted as long as it was silver or white. Gradually I noticed a few black cars, and even the occasional red one, but mostly it was silver and white. What's worse, because of the cost of importing foreign cars into the country, there weren't very many of those at all, especially outside the richer areas of the city, which is where I was. So watching the traffic could quickly become a hypnotic display of white and silver Hyundai Accents, and white and blue Bongo trucks, and it serves to remind you that the homogeneous nature of Korea doesn't end on the road. I found it interesting to note though, that in the seventeen months I lived in the country, the roads gradually became slightly more colourful and varied places.

Despite the faceless - or should that be ubiquitous - Stalinesque apartment blocks many people live in, this is thankfully not a completely homogeneous society, and some car owners have clearly made the attempt to customise their cars, with I think you'd have to say, variable results. It can start subtly with some alloys, a new interior and some racing stripes, and accelerate from there.

It's evident that rear wings or spoilers are quite popular, and it seems that the bigger the better. You certainly should make sure it doesn't blend into your car, so it's important to try and make it a completely different colour wherever possible. You might even get a wing with built-in lights.

Making your vehicle multiple colours will certainly get you noticed, and extra points are awarded for the most oversized exhaust. While car graphics in various shapes and sizes are a regular feature of some cars, thinking outside the box and putting your name and blood group on a windscreen is not only different, but quite possibly an interesting anti-theft strategy.

Now so far these additions have been somewhat static. So how about adding a variety of LEDs to your vehicle, to add colour or to blink on and off as you drive through the night? I've seen a lot of these, but they've proven very difficult to photograph, so aside from this:



here are a couple of short videos to illustrate - showing blinking LEDs and blue underside LEDs:





While the streets may be littered with customised Hyundais, it's evident that people do aspire to something a little more exotic, if the discovery that Korean TV is showing British TV series Top Gear is anything to go by. Not being that much of a petrol-head it took me a little while to realise what was wrong with this picture - judging from the admittedly customised licence plate on the Ford Focus RS is six years old. Yes, this could be the oldest Top Gear repeat... in the world. It would still turn heads in Korea though, as would a nice red Audi TT.

Unlike the Ford Focus, the Audi actually was in Korea - I found it in a car showroom in Seoul. It was 69,500,000 won - $47,121 or £30,635 in what's left of my own currency. It's now been so long since I had a full Meniere's attack my own country has let me drive again, so if I'm ever allowed to drive in Korea, I should definitely have one of these shouldn't I? I know to go fully native I should really just drive a white Hyundai Accent, but I think I should really have the Audi to avoid being a sell out, don't you think? They are of course, never going to let me drive in Korea, and even if I could, it's actually too terrifying. So I had to leave my Audi in the Seoul showroom, and console myself with the thought of my Ford Focus stuck in a garage in England waiting for me. It's not quite the same thing.

Now this is one of the stranger things I've seen on the Korean streets, and believe me, there's a lot of competition for that. Is it a fancy vehicle for the elderly or disabled, or is it an exotic golf cart? I just don't know. In England, you see a lot of small vehicles being driven around on the pavements or at the sides of the road by elderly people, but I've never seen anything like them in Korea, and even in England, never anything this fancy. Perhaps it will remain a mystery.

Easy Rider

"Pics or it didn't happen!"

I've been reluctant to relate this story because it's probably ranks up there as the equivalent of a '외국인' (waegugin/foreigner) UFO sighting.

I'm in a car just outside Busan moving at a very slow speed through heavy traffic, and it's a given that while we are stuck on the road the motorcyclists are taking to the pavement/sidewalk and continuing on to their destinations at some speed. The usual assortment of mopeds and mid-range bikes passes us by, before something a little more noticeable comes along - I'm no motorcycle expert but it looks a lot like a Harley-Davidson.

But while I was busy looking at the machinery, it was who was on the bike that attracted the attention of my fellow prisoners - '외국인! 외국인!' (foreigners) they cried - and as the machine passed by, there was little question of the apparently Western features of the two riders in the fleeting glimpse I snatched before they were disappearing into the distance.

I admit to being so desperate to catch this sight on camera, I failed to properly confirm what I was seeing, and taking a picture of a fast-moving bike, in a moving car through traffic only resulted in blurs. Later I realised I should have just taken a video and screen-captured the results.

So no pics, and maybe it didn't happen. After all, what are the chances of there being waegugin riding around Busan on the back of a Harley? The next day, like all sensible UFO spotters, I told myself it was my imagination. Maybe they were just Koreans who looked like foreigners, having an Easy Rider theme afternoon? But then, by coincidence, I found this YouTube video channel from 'Pusanguy', and now I'm not so sure I should be so ready to doubt. The truth can be stranger than fiction, and maybe the truth really is out there.

The Hot Bed

When I originally moved into a one-room apartment with my girlfriend, in was a blank slate, to be furnished with what few possessions we deemed it necessary to buy. But moving into an apartment with Korean Mother has certainly taken my experience to a whole new level, as I find myself immersed in more Korean objects. This cylindrical wicker-looking affair is for sleeping with, but it is not, as I first thought, one of the many tortuous pillow-substitutes you can find the older generation resting their heads on at night.

This is in fact, a sleeping companion of sorts, called a '죽부인' ('jugbuin'). It's actually made from bamboo, and the idea is that when positioned next to you in bed at night and hugged, air can circulate within the enclosed space, which in combination with the bamboo, keeps you cooler. It's unclear however, whether there's a danger of waking up with a deeply imprinted diagonal pattern on your body...

Prompted by Cat's comment, I have to edit this to add that that it transpires '죽부인' literally means 'bamboo' (죽) 'wife' (부인). Interestingly, it also transpires that strictly speaking '부인' is the respectful form for somebody else's wife. Since committing adultery is actually illegal in South Korea, this might be the closest you can get without actually breaking the law.

The House on Telegraph Hill

You never know quite what to expect in Korea. When out in the countryside, it can often seem like you're just passing by one blue-roofed farmhouse after another. But if you let that lull you into a false sense of security you'll miss architecture like this which we photographed just outside Busan. We think it might be a café rather than a private residence, but we aren't really sure. It certainly makes for a rather strange site sitting by the road in isolation.

It also happens to be the brief cherry blossom season right now, and many of the mountains are turning green again after their bare winter. Mixed with bright pink patches, it can make for a particularly spectacular sight outside the cities. There is of course, no escape from the overhead wiring...

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

I've previously encountered the Korean t-shirt which read "'In your carears you will meet many peeple. All are signilleant. They deserve you allantion.'", and thought it an odd if isolated example of Konglish gone mad. But yesterday I happened to be in Migliore (pronounced without sounding the 'g' I'm told), where possibly a hundred or more small clothing stores are all crammed together in one building, and discovered more, except the wording is slightly different:

"in your carears you will meat many people. All are signillcant They deseave you allantion"

So 'meet' is now 'meat', 'people' is correct, and 'signilleant' has become 'signillcant' and 'derserve' is 'deseave'. Is one a bad copy of the other, and which was the original? Or is there, somewhere out there, an English language t-shirt that has a slogan that actually makes sense? Whatever the underlying truth, the sinister Hello!! Mouse Club seems to be behind this plot to see people (or peeple) everywhere 'allanted'.

If allanting people isn't your thing perhaps something more passive and spiritual is of more appeal:

Free your mind
Lives
Life Live Fever
Stand With
Friends Outstretched
To Heaven
Head Wet.





Although I think the apparent need to do this with your head wet (and presumably those of your outstretched friends) could be a deal breaker. Next, from mice to apes, and while I think I understand the sentiment behind the sinister Hello!!Mouse message, this one is a genuine mystery:

Baby Milo
Ape
Said...
Go
Bape!







More of what young Korean women will be wearing this season - from dogs to daddy to Ferris Bueller's Day Off (of course).

"Bueller...? Bueller...?"

Biohazard

The winter temperatures are well and truly upon us now, not least of all in our apartment's bathroom which somehow manages to simulate jungle conditions in summer and be colder than Pyongyang in winter. This is the one time of the year that our singular window remains shut most of the time, which means that I'm spared listening to most of the noise outside.

There's one particular everyday sound of Korea that I'm not sorry to miss. For a long time I thought it originated from just one particular person at the school near us, but this summer I came to realise that there are multiple culprits randomly passing by beneath us. It's the noise of Korean ajeossis clearing the phlegm from their throats - invariably it seems to start as a long rumbling noise from deep within rises to a coarse crescendo of bubbling mucus which can finally be heard being ejected from the mouth in a scene that if seen, must surely be reminiscent of a particularly grim science fiction movie featuring alien parasites. If you're really lucky, you can even hear the squelching noise of this mass of biohazard finally hitting the floor.

The current record for a full respiratory and possibly digestive system ejection stands at 10 seconds from start to finish - the latter being defined as the audible point of eruption. It's sufficient time for my wife and I to often exchange pained expressions as we sit at our desks wishing we didn't have to listen.

Korean tags: 아저씨, 소음

Lucky Break

This is from Naver, and a web address entitled "Baby Study" (the Korean reads 'baby world'). Well, there's nothing wrong with starting children off learning English at a very young age, but are they really this advanced? If you want to know the answer to "What's that smell?", visit the page - you may be surprised...



Korean tags: 언어, 영어, 아이, 공부

Haunted Harbor

Last weekend we went to the Jagalchi Festival which seems to be one of those fairly low-key local events which tend to be a bit off the tourist trail. If there is some greater point to it I'm afraid it was lost on me, though on the whole it looked like it was just an excuse for local vendors to serve copious amounts of freshly-captured seafood and for some people to get up onto the stage to indulge in some good old fashioned Korean dancing and singing (or lip-syncing at least) whilst wearing extremely short mini-skirts, which might not be so remarkable here had they not been men.

Seoul has a bit of a reputation for being more liberal and bohemian (by Korean standards - it's all relative), and they tend view the far South and the province which Busan is in as being quite conservative, a place where men are real men, and the women can also be quite loud and frightening. Yet it's hard to reconcile that supposed conservatism with the enthusiasm with which the cross-dressing dancers are greeted, although it must be said that men in women's clothes are a regular sight on comedy shows, which is certainly thought provoking, although I fear the day my Korean language ability is sufficiently advanced to realise that most TV shows really are the 1970s pastiche they appear to be.

Down by the harbour was an exhibition of model ships, a man chopping traditional Korean sweets in time to music, karaoke for drunk ajeoshis (older men) which was about as bad as you can possibly imagine, and of course, lots of eating, and drinking of soju.

Korean tags: 음악, 축제

Fanalysis

Perhaps the word is finally getting out about fan death, because KBS have a story, with video, on their website calling it into question. It seems that they took healthy male volunteers - well, one presumes they volunteered (pressure in Korean companies can be extreme) - and had them sleep in a closed room. One had an air conditioning unit on all night, another a standard electric fan, and the third nothing at all. The result, no deaths, one bleary-eyed volunteer who hadn't slept very well due to the stuffiness of his room, another volunteer who'd had a very comfortable night, and the last one who'd found the conditions reasonable (they actually measured sleep efficacy but I'm not certain how). No prizes for guessing which volunteer was which.

This is not very scientific of course but they also measured the subjects' body oxygen and temperature levels and found that the oxygen didn't go to a level where it was harmful, and body temperatures didn't drop to a level where hypothermia would set in and kill the sleeping victim. If these notions sound bizarre, that's the power of Korean urban legend for you. The results:

	body oxygen	sleep efficacy	body temperature
No-fan	90%	83%	37
Electric fan	94%	85%	37
Air conditioning	94%	95%	36.3

In other words, fans don't use up the oxygen in a closed room, the air isn't sucked away from under the nose causing suffocation(!), and body temperatures don't plummet to dangerous levels. Korean Mother says she's not yet convinced, but we're going to show her the video next time she comes round to see if the KBS report can change her mind.

Of course, three people is hardly a scientific sample size, and a fairer study would no doubt involve more people, more time, and certainly more soju to accurately reflect the realities of life in Korea.

Intriguingly, I read that the notion of 'fan death' really gained traction in public mind around the time of the energy crises in the 1970s. If true, one wonders if this didn't play into the hands of a government trying to manage supply, if indeed there wasn't deeper involvement in its creation.

Korean keywords: 선풍기, 죽음, 건강, 에어컨

Jungle Bike Riders

Question: if you buy a six-foot tall tree in Korea, what's the least sensible way of getting it home? But it may be a sign that I've been here long enough that when I saw said tree heading in my direction through the traffic at rapid speed I wasn't even particularly surprised. Personally - if only for sheer height - I think this tops the guy with a large quantity of plastic sheeting behind him, and for absurdity seems on a par with delivering LPG canisters by bike.

But for the ultimate in motorcycle delivery, you can always change from two wheels into three.

Fantastic Follies

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 1933-1945

As we were leaving the apartment yesterday my wife asked half-jokingly if I thought our hamsters would die if we forgot to turn the air conditioning off before going out. For a moment I thought she'd developed an overly high opinion of the machine's ability to freeze our one-room living space, but it turned out the perceived danger was 'fan death'. Fan death? Yes, it seems that leaving your aircon on, or even a simple fan, while you sleep in a sealed room can result in death from asphyxiation, poisoning, or... certainly something anyway.

I find there are times in Korea when I don't know whether to just laugh at the absurdity of some of the facts I am told, or just get angry and grind my teeth together as I dare to suggest that perhaps, just maybe, people here are not the arbiters of all that is true, and just because everyone believes something it doesn't make it right. I think in any country there's often a prevailing opinion, but in a more homogeneous society where the 'group' is more important than the individual, it becomes especially difficult to challenge established notions.

And what a notion it is, with the news media regularly updating the grim fan death statistics, and fan manufacturers careful to design auto shut-off timers into their products to avoid killing you. In fact, a forty-seven year old man died of fan death a couple of weeks ago - it's true - it was on KBS News. As Wikipedia's fan death page documents, some people go so far as to ensure they leave their car window slightly open when their vehicle's aircon is on to avoid the dreaded fan death (so why don't people die from the aircon in the sealed environment of aeroplanes?) The more you read, the funnier - or more infuriating - it gets.

So, and not for the first time, a lively debate between my wife and I followed as I attempted to find a diplomatic way of explaining that this apparent urban legend was possibly the silliest thing I'd heard all year, and the topic ended with me accepting the challenge to find evidence contrary to the accepted truth as propagated by the Korean media and society as a whole. Fortunately, this was not a task which proved particularly challenging.

But is my wife, a graduate from a fairly prestigious Korean university and the holder of a second degree from a British institution, really convinced? Naturally everything I found debunking the myth of fan death was from a non-Korean source, and herein lies another thing I've learnt while I've been here - if the rest of the world believes one thing, and Korea believes another, the people who are correct are...

V

Excuse me but you appear to have an iguana on your head. I didn't notice it at first while waiting near you at the crossing, and when I did I briefly thought it was a very realistic if somewhat odd hat, but then it moved removing any doubts I had. It was only when I snatched my camera out that the woman next to you looked at what I was taking, cried the Korean equivalent of "oh shit!" and leaped away as fast as she could. You remained nonplussed or just oblivious to the sudden space you'd created around you and as the lights changed and calmly walked across the road as though having a reptile sat on top of you is the most natural thing in the world. I have to say it's a new experience for me and evidently for the woman who leaped away because she was still talking to herself about it in shocked and largely unrepeatable language as we reached the other side.

Z-4

Night of the Living Dead

The night before our medical Korean Mother made one of her regular visits to our apartment, but thinking we were bored she persuaded us to come out and exercise with her. It was 9pm, and quite dark. Feeling the desperate and likely futile need to work off as much excess body weight as possible before the next day, we agreed, though I had little idea of what lay in store.

We made our way to a nearby school where, she assured us, people would be exercising in the grounds outside. My scepticism was confirmed when we reached the locked gates and the empty space beyond. Apparently they close at nine. Not to be deterred, she insisted on trying another school, which we reached via a rather interesting route. She had more luck with this school - it had no gates - and sure enough, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the all-weather pitch in front of the main building, I could make out shadowy figures moving in lines around its perimeter, in one of the more surreal sights I've seen in Korea which seemed straight out of a horror movie. I tried to take pictures, although most were blurred as there really wasn't a lot for the camera to focus on - although one clear shot on an appropriate ISO shows the scene - even if it is artificially light. The second photo here is a better depiction of the level of darkness, even if it is a little blurred.



It seems that in addition to people coming here in the morning before school starts, they come here afterwards, walking quickly around the playing pitch using its border lines as a track of sorts. There are also a few pieces of exercise equipment along one of the edges, which could also be utilised.

We did nine and a half fast laps of the pitch (we cheated towards the end to beat Korean Mother who'd embarrassingly pulled ahead of us), working up quite a sweat.

I couldn't imagine such a thing happening back home - it's just asking to be mugged or worse - but here it's fine on the whole, and by all accounts a fairly common sight if you know where to look. Most of the shadowy figures were elderly - though not all - and in a reminder of life back in England, and a suggestion that not all is as it sometimes seems in Korea, four obviously under-age youths passed by to lurk in a particularly dark corner of the school building - where shortly after four tell-tale red dots in the distant darkness told its own story of non-adrenalin based addictions in this society.

Love Hotel

There were about five buildings within site of the Funeral Centre, the remainder of the landscape being fields, mountains and sea. Aside from three hotels, there was a church and a 'funeral supplies department store', although in truth I think had it been merely called a shop it would have been suffering delusions of grandeur. Clearly though, this was an area very much geared up towards funerals, so we didn't think much more about the first hotel we came to.

In retrospect, architecturally it did appear somewhat eccentric with its Greco-Roman theme, and perhaps the statues of naked women at the entrance might have provided a further clue, if we hadn't been so tired. As it was, a brief conversation in a dimly lit reception corridor with the owner half-hidden behind a curtained window revealed that they had a room with an Internet-connected computer and that's all we needed to hear. At 40,000 won (about £21.64) for the night it was cheap by British standards but perhaps on the expensive side for Korea. The owner continued to sell us on the whirlpool bath, but little did he know we were sold at 'Internet connection' so he was wasting his breath.

In the elevator as we neared the sixth floor my wife said "you know, I think this is a love hotel", at which point all the clues suddenly clicked into place, I realised it was, and the doors opened to reveal a bookcase full of porn videos - the rooms had video players as well.



I had some trepidation as to what we might find when we entered the room - would it have some outlandish theme? But it was almost ordinary, save for coloured lighting which might have been employed to give the room a suggestive air. In fact, the only thing really out of the ordinary in the room was the TV that was clearly marked with the numbers of the adult channels. Putting down our bags, we also discovered that the small package handed to us at reception along with our key contained - hidden amongst the toothbrushes, razor and hair products - two condoms and a sachet of "Inner Clean - The Vaginal Wash - Cleans, Deodorizes, Refreshes". OK.



After admiring the view for a couple of minutes and checking the room for hidden cameras (which we didn't find) we changed into more comfortable clothes as discretely as we could, bearing in mind the possible existence of particularly well-hidden cameras in places like these. If we were being filmed then the owner was certainly in for a surprise - I set about the important business of getting the computer up and running, wiping 110 spyware files of the machine by running three different programs, installing Firefox, a firewall and other miscellaneous tools to provide me a semi-secure connection - I'd no intention of doing anything too sensitive such as trading from there but at least I could access my real-time data feeds.

We ordered pizza, which came quickly and was excellent - actually so good that we began to feel guilty about abandoning everyone else to their hardships, especially my wife's cousin, who turned out to be the only other grandchild (and therefore person of our age) there. Because the food being served was the kind that the older generation tend to like and the younger generation not, we decided to order pizza and take it to him as he had not eaten. Korean Mother had also told us that the funeral centre was now very busy so we thought we could go back to help out.



Because it was now dark, the selective lighting on the love hotel perhaps left even less to the imagination.