Food and Money and Drones

Have you ever played a video game where you have to go collect food. And then you have to collect wood, and then stone, and then gold, and so on? Naturally, there are other objectives of the game as well. But you have to collect resources to make everything else happen.

Yesterday was our resource collecting day. We went grocery shopping. But there was a lot more to it than that. Because we also had to collect money.

When we arrived, we got cash at an ATM at the airport. That should have lasted us quite some time. But things don't always go as planned. We also purchased Climate Cards, one for each of us. The name, Climate Card, might imply it will give us some sort of mastery over weather. It's like Elmer Fudd's magic helmet in What's Opera, Doc. "North winds blow! South winds blow! Typhoons! Hurricanes! Earthquakes!... SMOG!" If you have no idea to what I am referring, immediately start watching cartoons and don't stop until you do understand.

Alas, that is not what a Climate Card does. It's the card you use to scan in and out of all the public transportation in Seoul. We scan on to the bus and scan again when we leave the bus. It's what you use to get through the turnstiles at the metro stations. So first you buy the cards. They aren't too expensive, maybe two dollars each. But then you have to charge them, put money on them so you can actually ride things. This is where we ran into the unexpected. All our research says you can do this using a foreign credit card, but you have to use an app. So we downloaded the app, expecting to be able to choose our language. Uh, no! It's all in Korean. And first you have to register and it asks you question after question. It's a lot to keep translating and the translations aren't very good. Needless to say, we decided maybe this app wasn't the way to go.

Instead we headed to a metro station to see if we could charge it there on one of the kiosks. Yes is the answer. Or maybe, yes but. Because the whole answer is that you can charge it using a kiosk, but you can't use a foreign credit card to do it. You can, however, use cash. So a big chunk of the cash that I got at the airport, expecting it to last quite some time, was used up at the kiosk. Not a big deal, we still had some cash left. Plus, there are lots of ATMs around.

Or are there? (dramatic music sting)

For food collection, we decided to ride on a bus (which we can now scan into and out of) to Seoul Station. This is the main train station in the city. Attached to the station is a bunch of outlet stores and a huge Lotte Mart grocery store.

I knew that I was running low on cash, but we were going to Seoul Station and a big major supermarket. Surely, they would have an ATM there, right? If not in the grocery store, surely they will in the train station.

No. And here's what's wild: They had these machines that look like ATMs, but they are automated currency exchange machines. If I had US Dollars, I could have put them in the machine and gotten South Korean Won out. But I don't have US Dollars. I haven't had US Dollars since the last time I was in the United States.

We ended up walking several blocks away to a bank. There we found an ATM and successfully completed one of the game quests, collect money. And along the way, we saw Super Bull.

By day, mild mannered source of beef. But in times of trouble...

The very large Lotte Mart is quite something. It's not just a grocery store. On the lower level it has groceries and pharmacy items. But on the floor above you can get clothing, camping gear, toys, and electronics. It's basically like a Walmart Superstore, but one two floors instead of one sprawling floor. They also have a food court area.

Selling decorative keyboards. In Korean, of course.

Alrica and I got noodle dishes. Mine was noodles in beef broth with bulgogi. Alrica's was more interesting. Her noodles were topped with jjajangmyeon. This is a black bean sauce. You can see the black beans. It's also cooked with pork and a fermented soybean paste. It was very savory and delicious. I liked my noodles, but Alrica's noodles were the winners.

Alrica also got a beverage and she used a kiosk to select it. She assumed, since it was a kiosk, it would give her choices of languages. Turns out, no, not at this kiosk. So Alrica selected her beverage by picture alone. She thought she was getting a boba milk tea with caramel. That's not quite what she ended up with. It was a milky drink and it did have boba. But instead of caramel, it was molasses. And there was no tea in it. It was good, though not as good as much of the milk tea Alrica has learned to love in Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

At the ends of many aisles (in the grocery section) there were women giving out samples of things. We got convinced to buy sausages, yogurt, and apricot jam chocopies by some of these women. We successfully resisted kimchi and a few other things that I'm not quite sure what they were. We did pretty well as the game quest of collect food. But what we did not find was drinks that Alrica was interested in. I'll come back to that.

On the way home from the grocery store, we bought one more thing, strawberries, from a vendor who is basically across the alley from the entrance to our building. Wow, these strawberries are good! I have bad news for Americans. Our fruit just isn't as tasty as the fruit pretty much anywhere else in the world. I suppose when you think that you can have fruit in any season and it shipped from who knows where, that's not surprising. But when you are eating fruit in season and it is local, it is delicious. (Well, if you've ever gone to an orchard in the US and gotten fruit there, then you know what I mean.)

Seoul is celebrating spring this month. They are hosting what they call the Seoul Spring Festival. Last night, there was a drone show at Yeouido Hangang Park. Hangang is the name of the river in Seoul. We often call it the Han River in English, but the Koreans say Hangang, which means the same thing. Gang means river. So we were alongside the river, sitting in the park, waiting for the show and wondering if we would get to see a drone show or not.

Why did we wonder? Well, this was our third attempt to see a drone show. We tried twice in Thailand. One of the drone shows was canceled due to a fashion show. At the other, we got fireworks instead. I blogged about that.

But the saying goes "Third time's a charm." And it was. We got to see the drone show. That was quite a spectacle. I am so impressed at what they can do with the drones. And imagine the team behind it. There must be a drone choreographer (a droneographer?) and a lighting designer, and the engineers to design the drones, and programmers to get the drones to do the moves that the choreographer and lighting designer have designed. For example, at one point there was a riverside scene, and there were waves in the water. You have to program the drones to light up and go dark in the right sequence while they are hovering in the right positions.

A dome? Maybe a flying saucer? But since it isn't opaque, they don't fill in the back half.

Other highlights included a person eating dumplings using chopsticks, hot air balloons (the image of them, no actual balloons or hot air), and a recreation of the one of the famous bridges in Seoul which has water fountain shows. (We haven't visited that bridge yet, we've only seen the drone simulation so far.)

Not sure what animal that is

Drone shows are staggering, when I think about the sheer amount of planning and coordination involved. It's like a marching band moving in three dimensions, except they don't have to worry about breath control or playing the right notes, whereas they do have to worry about windspeeds and flashing the right colors.

After the drone show, we were hungry. Instead of going to a restaurant, we went to a convenience store called GS25. GS25 is to Korea what 7-11 is to Japan and Thailand. The GS25 we visited is one of the super convenience stores where there are a ton of options, tables and chairs where you can eat your purchases, a microwave to heat your purchases, and, (ironically given our earlier adventure at the huge grocery store,) a Citibank ATM. They also have a selection of drinks that were to Alrica's liking. So we bought some kimbap for dinner, a drink for me, and several drinks for Alrica so we could bring the extras home.

We successfully completed all our quests for the day and had a drone show as a reward. I think we're winning the game!