about a boy at the beach baying

Okay, this started off about the beach but I broke off into a huge tangent. So that will come tomorrow, this is for now:

(Imagine some discourse about a beach in Korea here. Use your imagination, it will make it more fun)

Something else that stuck out at me was the preference vertical architecture at the beach and the city in general. In most of the cities I've been to if there is a rather tall building it is either an office building or a high-rise condo. Often the building has the ground level reserved for retail space. Even with smaller buildings (and I'm thinking NYC, SF, Barcelona, Paris here) might have a small business or two on the ground and then above that just offices or residential spaces. Here, it's different. This is the norm here and I guess in regards to the beach I'm criticizing that they let this practice encroach quite as close to the beach area as they did. But, you want to go to a bar? Fine there might be one on the ground floor, but more than likely if it's in one of the more happening parts of town, it could be on the 3rd (not too bad), 5th (slightly unusual), or 9th (wait a sec, there is only one elevator here) floor of a building. They look like the should be office buildings but they're all service spaces of some sort all the way up. And it doesn't stop with bars and restaurants. I've been to two shopping centers like this.

The first place I went to is typical Korea. It's like all the outdoor flea-markets that we're familiar with and you'd expect in a developing nation like this selling knock offs of everything you could imagine and a little of everything else too, but in the age of modernization this new 'mall' has been built UP. Not just two or three stories mind you, but six or seven stories and more. And these aren't real stores in this particular place, but booths where I think you can haggle the price and sometimes have to swat off the competitor across the aisle if you're looking at something. That is this one place (I don't remember the name), now the other is the Lotte department store.

Now this is not a department store in an American sense I just can't think of another word for it. I guess you could call it a shopping/movie/theater fire hazard. That is probably the best way to describe it. We were there two weeks ago to go see Big Fish. You have to jump on the foreign films while they're here quick because unless there the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter they're gone within a week or two. Anyway, you walk in and it looks like this sort of chic Neiman Marcus type of place if you stuffed it about 5 times the capacity limit and increased the sales staff to something like one person for every five products. That is the first floor. The movie theater was on the 10th floor. There are two elevators to the place and one escalator. J- and I often try to take the stairs when there is a long line for an elevator and this one looked like it took some experience as a linebacker to get into so we said screw it and told our friends we'd meet them on the top, betting on who would get there first. The firs three floors went fine. We're both in decent shape, no concerns. Then the ceilings started to get lower, then about the 5th floor an assortment of costumes started to appear on the staircase. ok. So we figure out there is a theater in the place, fine good information to know. Luckily there were no wandering cast members coming through the stairwell and we figure we're half way there so we'll just walk past the guy with his door open who is watching tv. He might be security and we definitely passed a sign that said "somekindofperson ONLY" but it was in Korean and we figured we could play stupid if anyone asked. On we went. The costumes disappeared and while we did find it a little disconcerting that there were no doors that we could spot that led back into the department store part of the building we were the slightest bit shocked when we finally got to a door that was about 4ft by 4ft and locked. That was the end. We had discovered the rabbit hole but he'd gone home for the night and wasn't allowing any more guests. 30 minutes later when went back down the stairs and then had to fight our way onto the elevators we finally met our friends. The showtime we wanted had sold out and we had to wait till one almost two hours away.

We decided to browse a bit at some of the lower floors and play it by ear. Wait, did I mention that we never did successfully locate an actual staircase that went down? Remember that the frigging movie theater is on the 10th floor. Each floor below us had something between 500-1000 people on it. I swear. I cannot estimate crowds for shit but it was a big weekend shopping day and we were getting claustrophobic after about 15 minutes. We paused to eat on the eleventh floor where I noticed that there were signs for an emergency exit. Evidently if things get crazy you're supposed to open the window and shimmy down the wall by a cable. That is nice. I'm glad I've taken all those classes on mountain climbing and I'm sure the other six thousand people in the building were equally trained. We snacked and went downstairs to "browse".

Me and the other foreigners couldn't even really think of browsing through the stuff, beside the fact that I didn't have any money to be spending on clothes there was no way I could casually browse. This was full contact shopping. If you were brave enough to fight your way to an item you would then be jumped upon by a sales person, or two or three. This wasn't even foreigner special treatment, this was just reality. The line to the elevator moved fast but still wrapped around the center of the building like a them park ride. By the time we descended the three of us foreigners must have traded a dozen looks of astonishment and they still carried the same weight on the 9th floor as the did when we finally made it out of the building to breather the not so fresh air. We hadn't even seen the movie but were seriously re-considering even though we had our tickets in our pockets. All we could think of were images of some fire breaking out and the disaster being immense with us in the middle of it. We went and got coffee. I had my laptop on it and it has Tony Hawk's Pro Skater version who knows what on it. I don't play video games. But I had opened out of curiosity on the subway down there and was having fun "designing a skater". You can pick the shape, ethnicity, build, clothes even how big their hands are and what tattoos you would like them to have. So, we chatted and designed our Korean friends virtual boyfriends. We never could figure out how to make them skate. That's romance in the digital age for you. We made it to the movie and by the time it let out the most of the place had cleared out and the intimidation factor dropped to null. Nor a perfect movie but the last 30 minutes make it worth it. That's all for now.