Technogasm

So. Again we went to the fascinating city that is the capital of South Korea, Seoul. Everytime we go there, the city amazes me, blows my mind and shows me something new and exciting. It really is a special place. Anyone who visits South Korea has to make an effort to visit Seoul. The only issue is that Seoul is so incredibly huge that it would literally take weeks to see the whole city. Unless you have previously visited places like New York or Tokyo, it's difficult to fully comprehend the scale of Seoul. As a South African for example, what we consider a big city, Johannesburg, absolutely pales in the shadow of Seoul, in terms of sheer size. It is a definite must see.

The purpose of our visit this time was to go to the 13th annual Seoul Fringe Festival, which is a somewhat youth oriented, contemporary art and performance festival, held in the young and vibey areas surrounding the Hongik University. The festival runs over a period of 2 weeks and caters to all sorts of performance and art lovers, with all sorts of things happening. On a daily basis, there are exhibitions, bands playing, dramas, performance arts, etc. etc. etc.

It is a very cool place to go and visit.

However, before we went off to enjoy ourselves at the festival, we needed to make a stop somewhere. On a previous occasion we had stumbled upon a place called Technomart. We figured, OK, a large store where we can buy all sorts of electronic goods and gadgetry. Boy, were we right! But wow, were we wrong about the size of the place. This is a electronic goods store you can lose yourself in, spiritually, and quite literally. It is MASSIVE! There are 8 floors, each one housing all sorts of goods. The floors are broken down into sub categories, with X-amount of floors being dedicated to digital cameras and domestic appliances, and X-amount to computers and gaming, etc. The place has everything.

We went to Technomart to buy an electric razor for me, and to buy a hard drive, that we can store our electronic treasures on. The razor was first on the list. We found a store selling razors almost immediately, but figured we'd keep looking around to see if we can find some better deals. The issue is that, as mentioned, this place is so massive, that often you will find a store or vendor, and later on decide that you want to go back to him/her, and will struggle to find the store again. Often you will then settle for doing business with someone else. We found that most of the vendors all hover around very similar prices for similar items. Another problem is that of being side tracked by the sheer amount of awesomeness. There really is just so much to see and look at that you find yourself just browsing everywhere, with no real goal in mind. Just staring.

Items number 2 was the harddrive, which we managed to organise with relative ease and in decent time. A lot of (I would say most) of the vendors/store clerks don't speak much English, but if you go there with a pre existing idea of what you want to buy, it's easy enough to find out what the item is in Korean, and write it down and just show it to them. Plus, a huge amount of electronics and gadgets share their English name with Konglish, so it's basically the same word anyway.

The great thing is that Technomart is linked to the subway system, so you can jump out of the tube, walk a few metres and you're in fornt of the entrance to Technomart. The station you would get out at is Gangbyeon station, on line 2. Really easy and convenient.

Technomart is really just a joyfest for anyone with a slight inkling towards the electronic persuasion, be it cameras, PCs, game consoles, games, etc. etc. They even cater for the select few people with a fetish for house hold electronics! Technomart is an awesome place that I want to go back to over and over, simply getting lost in the mazes of electronic wonders!

post by Oliver