Wardriving at Starbucks!

The curious and often great thing about living in a foreign country, particularly one that doesn't really speak your native tongue and which is further afield than most people travel, is that everything old is new again. My own neighborhood has finally been tamed, its heathen natives civilized, by the addition of a Starbucks (tm). It opened on Friday and apparently they were offering free slices of cheesecake and samples of beverages. I'm not sure if this is revealing or dull but it replaced a KFC. It is so new, in fact, that it still smells like sawdust.

I am now tempted to employ the rhetorical device of asking myself questions because I want to impart a joke but, lack the Laurel to my Hardy as I am alone here. One of the first questions to come up in the chatter at work about the new Starbucks, whispered in the excited tones one might expect from something like "the Johnsons got a new cow and they're gettin' a phone put in!", was whether or not there was a crowd. I, as an American who watched communism and the Berlin wall fall in my youth, expected a crush of Koreans dressed as babushkas waiting outside in lines all along the block. This is not the case now and was not on opening day. Of course, Koreans believe lines to be a kind of formality that is only adhered to in dire circumstances so even if there was some kind of rush to taste Starbucks brand coffee the moment it was locally available, they wouldn't be lining up.

Today I went to Namdaemun market and realized that living here is good training for when I end up in an old folks home. Assuming that social security and related programs to help the aged will have collapsed by the time I am old, it seems that, like retirement accounts, one should be prepared to do battle for limited resources. I am quickly becoming inured to hip-checking old ladies and mowing down anyone under 50 who isn't carrying sharp objects or open containers of food. In my final years on this earth I will have no qualms about using my walker to take down my senile comrades as I rush for the last available bottle of Lipitor in whatever senior citizen facility I end up corralled in.

I went to Namdaemun when I came here in 2000 and it feels as though a lot has changed. Primarily what I noticed is that there are far fewer shops selling traditional Korean garb. I bought a hanbok at Namdaemun eight years ago but the area where I bought it now sells Western-style clothes. It's all old lady Western-style clothes, though. I guess approximately a decade ago women who were middle aged and above still wore traditional clothes and now they all wear hideous pants with elastic waistbands instead. I've actually dubbed a particular type of pants Ajima-pants as they are only found on women of a certain age.

Almost live from Starbucks!