I'm completely ensconsed in the Coatel Chereville in Kangnam, working on deadline pieces, leaving Korean TV off and the fabulous broadband on on on baby!

At the nearby Woosung martet in Kangnam, I managed yesterday to go grocery shopping - a gesture of responsibility. When I'm computing hard, I tend not to travel further than ten paces to eat or drink. So I wanted food goods within easy reach for my two week stay.

From left to right: Packages of Korean "nori" dried pounded seaweed. Let's hope it's as salty as Korean seaweed usually is! Yum snack. Cafri beer The Hite Stout beer OB beer Hite Prime beer Fanta Lemon Charming Vitamin Shampoo Shower Mate - "Makes you soft, makes you smooth, makes you happy." "Barley Hardtack" - this luxurious sounding snack has been most frequently in my mouth since purchasing. A nice non-sweet starch treat! Einstein brand milk Organic Koala Crisp - aside from the beer, Fanta and Hershey's milk, it was the one product/brand here I'd seen before in the states. Butter corn snack - in a resealable bag, for brief but fresh guilty snacking power! Chilsung Cider - I thought it was Ginseng cider from the script on the can, but I got it home and discovered I had bought Korean Sprite. Pepero - looks enough like Pocky to me! With big long chocolate head guy. Bring it on! Aloe Farm aloe-flavored drink, I presume. Hershey's chocolate milk. Natuur brand Green Tea ice cream Solar wash powder, for the washing machine conveniently located in this hotel room. Sansachun - "Sansa is a fruit bearing, broad leafed, plant belonging to the rose species. Red and a pleasant scent. Good for treating weak stomachs, backaches and cut." And presumedly good for treating a lack of alcohol. Apples and bananas - I like to eat eat. (click for grocery 281k super zoom! ) Total: 51800 won

The Coatel has a hotplate and fridge; I was a bit overwhelmed by the meat and cooking options at Woosung and opted instead for mostly snacks and easy-prep foods. It's a lot of food and drink; fortunately I'll be joined in just a few days by Brian of Blue and Orange, who decided to combine a week off of game programming and a cheap internet plane ticket to make some spontaneous Seoulling. All this should serve to distract me from a personal crossroads. Increasingly the context of foreign travel and revolving co-conspirators seems less like a sideshow and more like the main attraction.

The title of today's post comes from The Small Hours, blasting moody swagger through my small speakers.

As an added bonus, there's a short video I shot amidst the basement food vendors in the basement of a Yokohama department store, just before I left Japan. I had my Mom in mind, because she loves markets. My innocent purpose was lost on one of the old ladies saleswomen; listen closely and you can see her saying, "Yamete, kudasai, yamete. Yamete! Sacho, Shacho -" Which roughly translates to, "Stop filming me. Stop filming my fish. Stop filming! Boss - boss, deal with this pesky guy!" Her boss responded, I don't think you can hear it on the video - "Don't worry about him." In spite of the boss's vindication, it seems like another failure of culture ambassadorship. For all the drama that went into making it, the video itself is a rather tame 3.6 megabyte AVI.