EPTNote: You need a South Korean citizen number or an I-Pin (needs foreigner card, long term visas only) to get a Korean account.
I arrived in Seoul Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, checked in, quickly realized that I lacked a power adaptor, and went to look for one. I checked a few electronics stores and came close but nothing. It was cool, I could do it tomorrow.
So yeah. Sunday morning, Seoul was a ghost town and all those friendly electronics stores were shut, along with everything else but the cafes. (I didn't actualy realize it was Easter Sunday).
The logical answer to this was to give up and do something else. I kept walking inwards towards Seoul Station until I found something that was open. Eventually I came across the temple of Lotte Mart, a Walmart clone where I found my adaptor, and something else ...
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2W3gY.jpg)
At first sight it seemed a bit ... small. Shouldn't it be a row of shining screens blaring out both SC1 and SC2, a gaggle of fangirls and a great podium with a single boxed collectors edition standing on top of a pile of standard editions waiting for the person brave enough to claim it? I guess this was just a big supermarket afterall. Maybe elsewhere.
I thought about buying it, but I hadn't worked out if I needed it to play at PC bangs. Plenty of time to buy a box once I knew what was going on.
So I did tourist stuff, went to watch GSL, and worked out that I did need a Korean account if I didn't want to have to keep asking PC bang staff to lend me theirs.
I then went out to a smaller city which some of my friends had recommended. While I was there I decided I should go sort it out. So I went looking for a shop which would sell it. There would be heaps, obviously, this was South Korea.
This search followed a familiar pattern over a few days. First I looked casually at things downtown, but didn't see anything like a PC game shop. Then I travelled to different parts of the city looking a bit more seriously for game shops and using Google Maps and asking people, no luck, the one actual PC game shop in town was being rebuilt, and the 100 randomly named PC bangs were not much help. Then I did some research to try to find a department store, went back to a hidden corner of town I'd gone past twice and hadn't noticed, and found that they had 3 PC games, Portal 2, random racing game 5, and The Sims. Which was about 3 more than I'd seen previously.
OK. This was getting silly. Soon I was going to Daegu (a big Korean city) with a Korean friend. It was cheating a bit to take help, but I would settle this there once and for all.
So today in Daegu we went looking for SC2. Many elevator rides, phone a friend calls, green tea lattes, wifi searches, underpass crossings, and questions to random Koreans later we made it to the right part of town and asked at a likely games store.
There we were told you could only buy it at Lotte stores (chain, there are various kinds), but not the one that was actually right there. (Perhaps this is just wrong ,it seems odd.)
So yeah, worth a check in the one that was right there to make sure. Nope, up-market junk. Worth a few stops on the subway to the other store that shows up on Google maps. Same shit. Enough for today.
Obviously I could buy it online. But that's not the point. This is a quest to the Holy Land, uncovering hidden knowledge and buried secrets along the way. The glimpsed vision of boxes in Seoul was proof that it was not an impossible dream. Taking the easy route now would be an insult to the mysteries of the universe.
So, it turns out there is a Lotte Mart in Daegu, as opposed to a Lotte Department Store which as I now know is bigger but filled with useless stuff like clothes (but has Wii games). Tomorrow I will go there and learn the truth behind things!
TLDR, a couple of things I've learned:
- You do need a Korean account for PC bangs, but the staff will often lend you one.
- You can only buy Starcraft 2 online or at Lotte Mart (Mart only!), which can be hard to find.
- I should just play BW
- Koreans don't buy game boxes much.
- Looking for things can teach you a lot.
- Milkis is a brand of soda.
- 모라요 (= Dunno).
edit
I went there, found the Toysrus (it's associated/owned by Lotte in Korea, seems they use it as a games department in some stores), and found these:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/N8msf.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Akvkr.jpg)
Great, right?
Just display copies, no actual stock.
TT
