“I use a glass box and protecting gloves,” he said.
“Like Homer Simpson?”
“Exactly like Home Simpson.”
This is not an uncommon conversation for me. Most Korean men I meet (who aren’t students) in Daejeon seem to work in Techno Valley, a district in the northern part of the city where I can only assume scientists are hard at work on several variations of Doomsday Machines.
Korea will soon unveil its “XXL Hadron Collider”.
Nothing is quite so humbling as asking someone what they do for a living and having it go like this:
“I do research for nanotechnology.”
“Like, microscopic robots?”
“Yes. What did you study?”
“Um… English and Theatre.”
It’s not just the super-science that South Korea is into, though. The country is also home to two of the largest electronics brands in the world in Samsung and LG. In America you’d probably think of flat-screen TV’s and maybe cell phones when you read those brands, but in Korea they make everything. And I do mean everything. If you live in a high-rise apartment in Korea, chances are that it’s either a Samsung or LG apartment building (or maybe a Hyundai). And they export their architectural skills, too. Samsung is responsible for the Burj Dubai, AKA the New Tower of Babel, which forced our angry God into causing two hundred extra languages to spontaneously appear.
Gorzanese 101 will be available at your local community college for the Fall semester.All this is to say that when any new technology becomes available to the masses here, chances are it will be exploited as hard anyone can exploit anything. Case in point, the whole 3D craze in movies right now. Yes, they have massive 3D screens on which they show all the latest movies, but Korea does America one D better: they have 4D. I’m not kidding. I thought at first that watching a 4D movie would allow me to travel in time.
This misconception was exacerbated when Doc Brown was there to personally sell me my ticket.
What 4D does is essentially turn your movie-going experience into an extended theme park ride. My friend Brian and I made the wise decision to shell out the few extra Won to see Piranha 3D in 4D. While watching most movies like this would probably just be annoying, watching a movie about killer fish eating naked girls while your seat gently sways with the motion of the onscreen boat, or something punches you in the ass when the fish bite the girl floating in the inflatable tube, is pretty stellar. The theatre blasted air in my face, sprayed water at me, and, during a party scene, put a laser light show on the ceiling. The first one of these theatres popped up in Seoul a few weeks after Avatar was released. Now, there are tons of them. Things like that change very rapidly in Korea.
Case in point: Korean Monopoly. I played this on my very first night in Daejeon with Sookhee and her two sons. It’s just like regular Monopoly, except that you don’t have to own all the properties of one color to build on them. You also don’t have to build four houses before you build a hotel, and you can build as many hotels as you can squeeze onto the square. In other words, buy a scrap of land, and build as much as you can as quickly as you can. That’s how it goes here. Most times you just look out the window of the bus and think, “Hey, those giant apartment buildings weren’t here last time I was here.” Sometimes, though, they take a jackhammer to the side of your apartment building at 8AM on a Sunday.
That’s all for this update, folks. Next time I’ll have the results of this Saturday’s English drama competition! Til then, dear readers.
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