Playing Games

(your sun sets when mine starts to shine)

The Yellow Dust from China. Sounds sinister, doesn't it? Like it's some new kind of drug, or some sort of evil ninja cloud that consumes all in its path. Unfortunately, it's nothing as cool and deadly as either of those. It's this cloud of airborne dirt particles that blows over from China every year around early April. It started this week. Hasn't been bad yet, but I'm curious to see how things look when it does, since the natural consistency of the air in Seoul about that of a hot-boxed closet.

The kind of hot-box where all the inhalants are from several million cars and factories and gassy old women who stare at you on the subway, that is.

So what have I been up to in this perpetual cloud of dirt? Well, I finally broke down and bought a Nintendo Wii this weekend. Friday after work, I went to Yongsan, the biggest damn electronics district in the country - and boy, is it big. Imagine Futureshop if it exploded, and the debris covered several square kilometers. Then the debris turned Korean and carried a lot more stuff for like a quarter of the price - that's Yongsan. That's (part of) it in the banner image, by the way.

Well I started looking around there frantically for a Wii. See, they're not easy to get here, as the only ones here have been imported from Japan, and it's hard as nails to get there (signs everywhere in Akihabara said "Wii sold out!"). After getting laughed at by a number of booths for the impossibility of such a request, the dozenth or so shop I checked out said "No... oh wait a second..." and left to run to another shop. He came back and told me I could have one, it was Japanese (of course) but he could put a mod chip in it so it would play English games. Then he opened a binder of illegally copied, dirt cheap games that will also run with said chip.

Sold.

That's part of why I like Yongsan, and Korean shopping in general. There's something really unofficial about it all. This whole 'market' system, where you've got a big department-store space, but they're actually filled with dozens of little independent stores. Like a flea market.

That's Seoul in a nutshell - a city full of flea markets. this is one of those places where it's not only kosher, but even encouraged to barter with salespeople. It's a that shame I'm terrible at bargaining.

Then there's the cash. See, this place is still very big on cash. You can use credit cards and debit cards in a few places, but the preferred method is cold hard won. However, the largest bill in Korea is 10,000 won. That's about equivalent to 10 bucks, so if you're buying something that costs about a grand, you walk in with a fistfull of a hundred bills or so. While there's something very gangster-cool about having enough cash on you to do a Scrooge McDuck swan-dive into, there's something terribly inconvenient about not being able to close your wallet.

On the flip side of all that excessive cash and technology and consumerism, Yongsan is also a train station where a depressing bunch of homeless people sleep on a teeny slit of filthy dead grass next to the tracks. I felt compelled to photograph that, for some reason.

As I was stumbling around Youngsan. I saw this pedestrian tunnel. Tiled floors, walls, people, the works - clearly a walking tunnel, indoors save for the lack of doors. And at the entrance, they've got a warning that bikes aren't allowed. I figured that, only in Korea would you need to warn people not to drive their motorbikes indoors. See, the delivery guys on scooters here will take to the sidewalks, crosswalks and escalators to get where they're going.

Of course, moments after thinking how retarded someone would have to be to consider driving their bike through the tunnel, I had to hop out of the way of a delivery bike speeding through the very same tunnel.

So eventually, the Wii made it back to my home alive. Then I stayed home and played if until I developed mental bedsores and virtual injuries from sitting around and swinging around a white remote control for a couple of days. Between a few billion rounds of bizarre, remote-controlled nonsense, I'm practically enslaved by the goddamn thing.

Incidentally, the menus, and a number of my games are still in Japanese. That adds a whole new level of challenge, though. It's like an extra bonus game called "What the fuck is going on?" and you can get to play it at almost any time, whether you want to or not.

Surely my entire week can't have revolved around a video game, though. Well, I am still doing that 'teaching' thing. Or this 'speaking English around Korean kids and hoping they pick it up through osmosis' thing.

I got a few pictures of the kids this week, mostly 'cause I love little kid drawings. Particularly ones as tooth-rotteningly sweet as Dotothy's backwards-C "Oh so cute" drawing of her own clothes. And if you look closely at William's self portrait, you can see he's drawn himself as a horrific, fang-toothed monster. I've definitely taught kids like that, but he's not one of them.

But cute be damned, none of them did anything photographically hilarious this week. So, to close-out the week, I've got the (presumably unintentionally) hilarious and strange warning images that came with the Wii. Now, I understand that the North American Wii probably has about the same strange warnings, but it has been scientifically proven that anything bizarre becomes funnier when you put Japanese text next to it.


I figure if these diagrams prove anything, it's something I've personally believed for a long time - guys in pink shirts are really fucking stupid.