Author: michael

Ok, so I’ve bowed to popular demand and am finally updating my blog. Because clearly, I cannot have been sitting in a PC Baang in Korea for 2 months (although I imagine that these things are possible).

I’m going to be to off to the UK on Saturday 18 December to visit a couple of friends that I haven’t seen in ages, then flying down to Joburg on the 24 – which means I’ll land on Christmas Day. After that we’re heading off to Mozambique on the 26 or 27 I think and then we return sometime in the first or second week of January. Hopefully on the 10th of January we’ll be flying off to Cape Town for a week there with Dan and some serious get back to nature things. Then it’s back to Joburg on the 18th and back to NYC on the 20-something of Jan.. heh.. I’ll actually try to post pictures this time…

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.