Korea: Shopping in Seoul

Shopping in Seoul, Korea is a unique experience that has something for everyone. Electronics are cheap, you can find great brand name clothing, you can find great fake brand name clothing, and almost everything you can bargain for. This is far different from shopping in Japan, where almost everything is set price, nothing is fake, and strictly speaking, electronics are expensive.

Korea has a very nice shopping scene. My favourite part of Seoul shopping is a nice little place called Dongdaemun, which is open until 5 am every day. This allows street shop owners to stay out all night in their shanties or near their tables and allows stores to pump up music both outside and inside as if they were some sort of club. It is fun walking around at 11 pm and start to see more people than there was at say 9 pm. There’s frequent stage performances near the more popular stores that draw large crowds and are fun to watch. Check out this video, it’s funny. You might need to let it load for a minute or two because that giant white spot below is for the video, not for “style”.

[VIDEO]/img/gallery/2007/08/korea/videos/01.flv[/VIDEO]

As for shopping malls, many of these stores are really just giant clothing stores of hundreds of small shops. It is very crowded because of the 6ft aisles and with hundreds of shops, there is a large selection of clothes to choose from. All shop owners will and successfully rip you off because they know you do not speak Korean and they know you do not know the real price of any of the clothes. I got suckered into buying a $30 100% Korean shirt by trading in a 500 yen coin and 20 000 Korean wan. I think I got a good deal in that trade by negotiating to pay in Japanese yen but perhaps not because he was too entertaining that I felt he deserved more just for the big commotion he made about Chiaki and I coming from Japan. A little weird, but it was a lot of fun. Everyone competes for your business in the shopping malls by screaming at you and yelling at you if you make eye contact with them or any of their clothes. Example: “HEY, THIS WOULD LOOK GOOD ON YOU!”. No photos of that deal, sorry -> gomenasai! We also got Chiaki’s brother a nice 500 yen Nike shirt that looked seriously good.

Electronics in Korea can range from normal price to dirt cheap. My friend Nadia told me that if she wanted to, she could go over to Yongsan Electronics Market, a popular electronics area, and get me a cellphone for $40 Canadian dollars. I have no idea how good it would be, but that’s a risk that I should have taken if I had more time. Needless to say, there is a large amount of fake electronics in Korea outside and even inside the stores. I got myself a nice pair of fake Sennheiser Open Dynamic Headphones (CX300) ($100 CDN) for just under $20 CDN. I find it difficult to tell if they are fake or not because the quality is so high. I’m guessing LCD TVS must be cheap too because at the train station in the photo below, there’s an unsed LCD TV that was just hanging on the wall. It wasn’t even in a popular area. Damn I wish Samsung was Canadian.

Finally, the weirdest thing about Korea is the weird dancing traffic guards infront of the parking lots of malls. I only saw them when we were travelling in our tour bus around the city, but these weirdos were moving their hands around like butterflies and waving people into the parking lot. They seemt more like mimes, unaware of their surroundings, and just dancing weirdly in the street rather than actually doing any job at all. Perhaps you can find something about it and post up a comment. I briefly tried with google them but found no media on the subject. This is the most interesting thing I have seen since Shaolin Soccer.

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