So I’m in South Korea for 10 days, partly to present a paper at the Mobile Communications & Social Change conference being held here in Seoul and partly just to soak up all the high speed broadband, craziness and kimchi (pickled cabbage) that I can.
I’m sitting inside one of the PC baangs that are found on nearly every block, surrounded by kids playing Starcraft, free coffee and some tastefully positioned blue neon lights. It’s glorious. The internet access is blindingly fast… how fast exactly, I can’t really say, Speedguide reckons it’s about 2.5Mbps – but since the average speed of home access is 8Mbps – I reckon it’s a bit more than that. Tonight we’re going to a restaurant called Sanchon which is “speciallized in the dishes cooked in buddhist-temple style. It offers urban people the dishes in temples which are located in deep forests.” Just as long as they don’t pump Deep Forest into the temple – I’ll be happy. Tomorrow I think we’ll be checking out some temples and the electronics shopping district called TechnoMart.