PC방 time

For the first time in maybe 25 years, I stepped into a PC방 (PC-bang, i.e., PC room or Net cafe) Wednesday night to use some of that sweet, sweet torrentially flowing WiFi. It was a basement place called E-Sports PC방, which had five stars from a whopping 26 reviews. It's located almost 800 meters from where I live, so I walked over to it.

The WiFi in my apartment, channeled through my desktop Mac, is abysmally slow (and working only intermittently when I try to upload images from my phone), so I had little choice but to go somewhere where the WiFi signal was robust. I've heard that regular cafés, where a person could until recently buy a drink and sit for hours using the local WiFi, have begun restricting the amount of time a person can spend there, but PC방s, by contrast, charge a low hourly fee and let you stay as long as you want. Many such places run 24 hours a day, and people have been known to "rent" the plush chair they're in in order to sleep a few hours cheaply. (In Japan, maybe in Fukuoka, I remember passing by a quiet room filled with La-Z-Boys, each of which could be rented for several hours so that tired people could sleep there. Sleep is at a premium in workaholic countries.)

I brought along my phone, in which were stored thousands of photos from my walk (i.e., several gigabytes' worth), and my barely used laptop, which I'd had to recharge before bringing it along. Embarrassed, I had to ask the man and woman at the PC방's front desk what the procedure was to get a seat, especially for someone just using WiFi and not the PC방's own computers (normally used for gaming and/or online gambling). The guy ended up leading me by the nose through both the initial registration procedure and, after two hours, the procedure for extending my time another two hours. I think I ought to know better how to do things when I go back there: I didn't finish uploading pics at all.

But half of my photos have been uploaded. I've uploaded photo essays through Day 9 and partway through Day 10. And Day 11 is already done, so I really am about halfway through the upload. That's as far as I got after four hours of doing nothing but uploading. I'm going to need another day.

After everything gets uploaded, the next steps will be to (1) enlarge all of the pics, (2) proofread and edit the blog posts, (3) add captions to the pics, and (4) add commentary to each post. So do stick around: there's a lot more to come.

UPDATE: I've successfully uploaded the rest of Day 10's pics while in my apartment. Maybe the WiFi is stronger at 2 a.m., when most normal humans are asleep.