walk far enough, and you can find everything

I was on the hunt for more household items:

clothes hangers
tennis balls (to put on my metal chair's feet so as to reduce the scraping noise)
a bamboo back-scratcher
a bathroom mat
abrasive cleaner (for tile and toilet)
a bathroom squeegee
Chicken Farm Spam (I'm becoming addicted to this)
stapler, staples
tape and dispenser
A4 paper
2 electric fans (home + office)
one more head pillow (I need at least two for my enormous head)
2 ass pillows (home + office—the kind that won't show a sweaty ass-print)
a "down" transformer (220V to 110V)
iron, ironing board
nightstand and reading lamp
extension cords (220V)

My first stop was the much-ballyhooed Daiso, one of which sits on the main street just beyond the alley that leads out from my neighborhood. Daiso is, as commenters and colleagues have said, a Japanese discount chain—basically a dollar store where everyday home, office, and even automotive products are sold for cheap. Prices aren't literally W1000, however; some items in the store run as much as W5000 (a bit less than $5, US). If I'm not mistaken, daiso is Japanese for "big-small." In Korean, the Chinese characters for "big-small" (大 小) would be pronounced dae-so,* but because the chain is Japanese, the Japanese pronunciation and romanized spelling have been retained in Korea.**

Daiso had a surprising variety of articles. I was able to polish off almost half my shopping list right there:

clothes hangers
tennis balls (to put on my metal chair's feet so as to reduce the scraping noise)
(Daiso actually sells "socks" for chairs; I bought those instead of tennis balls—much cheaper)
a bamboo back-scratcher
a bathroom mat
abrasive cleaner (for tile and toilet)
a bathroom squeegee
Chicken Farm Spam
stapler, staples
tape and dispenser
A4 paper
2 electric fans (home + office)
one more head pillow (I need at least two for my enormous head)
2 ass pillows (home + office—the kind that won't show a sweaty ass-print)
a "down" transformer (220V to 110V)
iron, ironing board
nightstand and reading lamp
extension cords (220V)

Very satisfying. I also bought some extra items, such as a cheap chef's knife (W2000), cutting boards (W4000), and a reusable shopping bag (W3000). The total cost of this trip was W34,000. Not bad; I would have paid three times as much at a big chain store.

I had slightly, but still embarrassingly, ripped the crotch of my jeans the other day, when I was on my way home from E-Mart.*** Having washed and dried the jeans, I took them out, rolled them up, and toted them with me to my next stop: the local open market. Among other shops, I hoped to find an ot-suseon-jip (clothing repair shop) there. I'd heard about the market from my building-mate Mark, whose girlfriend had discovered it during her explorations of Hayang. So, having put away all the items I'd bought at Daiso, I started out again, walking east along the main drag.

The first thing I encountered was a bedding store; it was filled with blankets and pillows. I went inside and asked about the price for a more or less standard-sized pillow; the lady said that would set me back about W12,000 or W13,000. I asked how long the shop would be open; she said I had until 8:30PM. I left and kept on walking. As I walked, I scanned the street for the ot-suseon sign, and not far down from the bedding store, I found one: Computer Clothes Repair. Strange name for a seamstress's store, but that didn't matter. I went inside; a dignified 50-something lady appeared and I explained the problem with my jeans. "When do you need them? Right away? In the next hour or so?" she asked briskly. I was taken aback. I had thought she might tell me to come back in three days. I blinked rapidly and told her that I wasn't in any hurry; she told me to come back tomorrow afternoon, then she charged me a mere W2000 for the work. How cool is that?

I walked on, wondering when I would stumble upon the market, which Mark had said vaguely was "that way" down the street. A few minutes later, I did find it: a series of back streets with various emporia ranging from seafood to kitchen items. Most of the shops were closed, their metal garage-style doors pulled down tight, but some were still open. One was a rather humble-looking bedding shop run by an older ajeossi with a friendly smile. He saw me enter and walked up to me. I told him I was looking for just a standard pillow; he showed me his stock, which ran from W8,000 to W10,000—somewhat cheaper than the pillows from the place run by the lady. I bought a W10,000 pillow from him because it looked nicer, and tougher, than the W8,000 pillows, and I asked him where I could find a place that sold electric fans and "down" transformers. He pointed me to the end of the market street and told me that, at the end of the street, I could go in either direction to find such a store. I thanked the ajeossi and walked to the end of the street, then broke right.

Within half a block, I found a tiny, dilapidated jeonja (electronics) shop. It didn't seem to have much in the way of electronics, but one oscillating fan, wrapped in plastic, caught my eye. I asked the old ajeossi how much it was; he said it was W55,000. I asked him whether he could cut the price a bit, and he said he could go down to W52,000. I knew I was being fucked in the ass; I should have switched to vicious haggling mode and pled poverty to get him down to a more reasonable W30,000. Instead, I shrugged and paid. Ajeossi 1, Kevin 0. To add insult to injury, he said he didn't have a "down" transformer. "Come back next time," the ajeossi rasped. Yeah. Right. I walked out and up the same street, going in the opposite direction this time in the hopes of finding another store that might sell a transformer.

I found one. The shop looked ready to close, but I barged in, anyway. Two men and a woman were gathered around a TV, watching some show. The woman asked me what I needed; I described the transformer to her. She started going into a spiel about how different types of equipment require different wattages of transformer, but I told her I needed only the simplest, smallest type of transformer, because all I had was a computer, and computers don't use much power. She pulled out a shoebox-sized transformer from her stock and showed it to me. "Perfect!" I said. "How much?" "20,000 won," she said. I winced: back in the early 2000s, in downtown Seoul, I could have bought the same transformer for W15,000. But this one had a sticker that said "W20,000" on it, so there would be no negotiating the price. (You generally don't haggle if the price of an item is visible. There are exceptions, of course, such as when you're buying a lot of stuff in one place. In that case, it's fine to ask for a discount.)

Loaded down with a bulky pillow, an electric fan, and now a transformer, I headed back home. It was slowly, tentatively, starting to rain. There were other items I needed to buy, but I resolved to hit the market during the daytime tomorrow.

All in all, it was a good shopping trip. My studio is starting to feel a bit more like home.

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*Don't over-pronounce! Dae should be pronounced closer to "deh," not "day." To pronounce the Korean ae as "ay" is a classic Yankee mistake.

**UPDATE: I just saw the Wikipedia entry on Daiso. The Chinese characters representing the phonemes "dai-so" aren't the characters for "big-small" at all. At least, the second character (so) isn't the character for "small." Daiso actually comes from 大創, i.e., "big comprehensive." The "創" character, pronounced "so" in Japanese and "chang" in Korean, means something along the lines of "include" or "inclusive." So anything daiso is big and all-inclusive. Daiso is a store with a little bit of everything.

***No, no, this wasn't an "ass too big" thing. It was more of a "jeans hanging too low, knees spreading too wide" thing.


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