One of my accomplishments during my day in Seoul was the purchase of a Casio EW-K3000 electronic dictionary at “Techno Mart” at Gangbyeon station (I guess this is the Korean equivalent to Tokyo’s “Electric Town” at 秋葉原). The dictionary, which I would like to think I got at a reasonable bargain price, will be great for my future studies in Korean language. It has Korean-English, English-Korean, Japanese-Korean, Korean-Japanese, and Korean-Korean dictionaries, along with half a dozen other dictionaries I have absolutely no use for.
I don’t know how common this is in Korea, and I have seen something similar in at least one department store in Beijing, but Techno Mart has separate floors for domestic Korean electronics (for example, computers made by Samsung) which are conveniently located on the 2nd floor, labeled 국내 (domestic, the characters are 國內 and sounds very similar to the Japanese pronunciation K: kuknae J: kokunai) and foreign “imported” electronics located higher up in the building (for example computers made by Sony) on the 수입 floors (imported, the characters are 輸入, used in both Chinese and Japanese but pronunciation is not that similar in either, so I could have never guessed K: suip J: yunyû C: shuru). I guess that is one easy way to remind customers to “buy Korean”. I have another idea, we could turn off all the escalators above the 2nd floor and make anyone wanting to buy imported goods walk up the stairs!