Misc. funny things around town

The "S holic" coffee shop near Seoul City Hall. Also "Ben & Beluca" cafe at the great Bandi & Luni's bookstore.


Another young Korean guy wearing a Black Rebel baseball cap. I wonder if it's going to be the new must have fashion item.


Saw my first Korean grundge girl. Not as grundgy as she would've been in Seattle, I'm sure, but she really stood out here in the land of high fashion.


Speaking of high fashion again, I saw a young woman fall off her shoes on a bitterly cold day recently. She was wearing spike heels and tripped on the brick sidewalk. At first I was afraid she'd broken her ankle, but I think she just hurt her pride. Her shoe came entirely off and she wasn't wearing any socks at all. This was on a day of below freezing temperatures! Maybe it's just a sign of my middle age, but part of me wanted to tell her it was her own fault for being a slave to fashion.


Speaking of shoes, when my friend Andrea and I went to the Macy's shoe department when I was back in NYC not long ago, we met a bizarre salesperson. We're still not sure if s/he was a transvestite or transexual. S/he spoke with a strong South Asian accent (India? Pakistan?) and was extremely chatty. When we told him/her about my living here in Korea, one of the his/her first questions was "Do the people there speak Spanish?"



On the plane from Atlanta back to Seoul I was sitting next to a Korean teenage girl. She was having trouble plugging in her headphones and I showed her how to do it (which I knew only because I had the same trouble on the previous flight). This will almost certainly be the only time in my life that I show a Korean teenager how to do something with technoogy.