The Quest for Jang Gi

The next day, I set out to see if I could find a Jang Gi board for myself.

I asked my host about the game, and June nodded and said, "Ah, it's Jang Gi, yeah? Like Chess." he has a charming way of mirroring each sentence with a polite request for affirmation, a sort of constant re-establishment of clear communication.

I asked him where I'd find a Jang Gi board if I wanted to buy a set to take home, and he thought for a moment. "I think maybe you'd look in a grocery store or a big shop, yeah? I'm not so sure. I think I could find it if I went out to find it, yeah? but I don't know where, exactly?"

I nodded. Despite the zen like content and delivery, I got the idea, that it was the sort of thing that was going to be widely available, but not where I expected. So, I shouldered my bag, grabbed my T-money card, and headed out into the Busan morning.

I grabbed lunch at a local Lotteria, ordering that unique meal I'd described to you earlier in the week, when Mac ordered it. It's quite unique, I must say.

Seomyeon market, near where I was staying, was fairly extensive, so I wandered its streets for an hour or so, looking at cheap watches and cameras, trying to spy a place that looked like a likely candidate for a Jang Gi board.

This didn't work, but I did see a couple of signs for Game Shops, with giant images of Fantasy characters wielding swords or casting spells worked into the shops signs. I thought perhaps one of these shops might carry role playing games, and if so, it would have a dedicated gamer or two inside, and that guy would know exactly where to buy a Jang Gi board, even if I couldn't buy it there.

So, I found one of the larger signs and ducked inside. The posters on the walls in the stairwell leading to the shop were all for PC games, and as soon as I rounded the corner I confirmed my suspicion: I was unlikely to find a pen and paper gamer here. This place amounted to an internet cafe with a direct focus on games. The fantasy characters I had been seeing were from one of Korea's incredibly popular MMOs, but inside I saw everything from Counterstrike to rhythm games, where it seemed that you if you correctly caused your character to dance along with a song, you earned money with which you could buy your character new outfits.

There were perhaps 70 computers arranged in long dark lines, with almost no overhead lighting and each face only lit by the soft radiating glow of the monitors. I started to turn away, then saw the kid working at the desk, ringing up people for their time in total hours spent. I walked over to him, and into the only pool of light in the place. "Hi. You want internet?" He said.

I shook my head. "No, I am looking for a Jang Gi board."

He stared at me blankly for a moment. I knew what was coming. "You want play Jang Gi?" he started to reach for a card so that he could give me access to one of the computers. I was sure they came installed with a basic Jang Gi game, and probably an online league play system besides.

I put up my hands to stop him and shook my head. "No, no. A real board." I mimicked playing chess, and gestured to create a physical space where I could play it. "I want to buy a real board."

He looked at me blankly. His thoughts were obvious. If you want to buy a physical board, why are you in a PC game shop where no physical items are ever sold?

Still, the Koreans who work in the service and retail industries are trained to be relentlessly helpful, so he nodded and shook his head in turns, then looked up some words in an online dictionary and made a suggestion. "You try Lotte." He said, and paused to type in a couple more words. "Department Store!"

I nodded. It was as good a guess as any. I didn't want to pay Lotte's high prices for mall brand generic stuff, but if it was the only way, it is what I would try next.

I walked the couple of blocks to Lotte's store and headed upstairs until I found the children's section. Lotte deals primarily in clothes and fashion accessories--there's a whole floor for women's fashion, and another for women's casual--but it also does a brisk business in the basement in Grocery goods, and I was hoping it would have a decent selection of toys and games.

No luck. The children's game section had the total square footage of a small hotel room, and only a handful of games and toys. For no reason I could discern, there were three women assigned to the section.

I approached one. "I'm looking for a Jang Gi set." I said.

She paused for a moment, then went to one of the shelves and pulled out a western chess board. Jang Gi is the Korean word for Chess, and since I was a westerner, I must want a western set. I shook my head. "No. Korean Jang Gi." She stared at me blankly, and her friends came over to help, so I asked for paper and a pen and drew a rough sketch of the iconic board, with its clear intersecting palace lines at each end.

"Ahh." They said. "You want Han Gul Jang Gi"

"Yes!" Now I had something to go on.

"We don't have." They said.

"Oh. Where should I go then?"

They conferred among themselves, and among all the Korean I heard, in English, "a pencil shop, maybe?" There was a pause as they realized this expression probably didn't translate. "A youth stationary store." One of them suggested.

I nodded. "Ahh. Where is that?"

They looked at each other, blankly. I later figured out that Pencil shops are generic little corner stores for children, like candy shops in the pre-1950s US. They're a neighbourhood thing, so you wouldn't know where the one is near where you work, you'd know where the one is near where you reside.

I'd presented them with a terrible dilemma--they wanted to help me, and they were fairly confident that there was a Pencil shop just a block or two from where we were standing, but none of them had any idea in what direction that shop would be.

They held another huddle and made a different suggestion. "GaeGum Home Plus!" A Home Plus is a sort of Tesco version of a super Wal-mart, a generic big-box store that sells everything from Food to Frying Pans to Guitars. It was likely that a Home Plus would have what I needed.

I nodded. "How do I get there?"

Now it became clear why they'd suggested the Home Plus. The directions were incredibly easy. I was to board the number 33 bus across the street from the Lotte store and ride it down to GaeGum, a section of town. The bus driver should be able to tell me which stop to take.

I followed their directions and boarded the number 33 bus, but in the hustle to get onboard I didn't screw up my courage to bother the busy bus driver with my need to be notified of what bus stop to take for the Home Plus.

I sat, instead, near the very front and peered out the windows, knowing the sign would be in English, and fairly giant, and hoping I would spy it and know to climb out there.

After about 15 minutes had passed, I became convinced that I had missed my stop, but now I had a dilemma. The bus was less busy, and I could ask the driver, but at the risk of looking like an idiot who should have bothered him earlier, when he could have told me in plenty of time. Alternatively, I could debark, cross the street, and take the 33 back in the direction I'd come, in the hopes that I'd see it from the other side. But these weren't good odds. What if it were just a lot further than I thought? What if I missed it a second time and wound up back at my starting point?

I decided to do neither. As the song goes, if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice, so I decided to ride the bus for a while, and see where I wound up. All buses have to stop sooner or later, and maybe I'd wind up somewhere interesting.

This turned out to be the best possible choice.

The bus wound its way through Busan, up, up, up into the hills of the residential part of the city. I could tell as we climbed that the view behind us was getting more and more pretty as we rumbled higher and higher up the small mountain.

When the bus finally stopped it was in a small parking lot in a section of town that looked like any typical Korean neighbourhood, where a single white kid was about as likely as a whole Mardi Gras parade.

My plans to fing a Jang Gi set may have been foiled, but now I was 9/10s of the way up a really magnificent hill with a view down towards the heart of Busan. I shrugged, hiked my day bag up on my shoulder and began climbing the steep and narrow streets towards what appeared to be an elementary or middle school where the streets ended near the top of the mountain.

After about a block of walking, I noticed a small shop across the street from me on the opposite corner. The shop name and description were all in Han Gul, but there was a simple icon of a Pencil alongside all that writing. My mind flickered back to the suggestion at Lotte Department store, "Maybe a pencil shop."

I hustled across the street and into the small store. The three women inside, chatting and obviously expecting no customers of any kind in early afternoon, stared at me, wide eyed. There was a giant white boy with a military haircut and strange clothing standing in the middle of their selection of school supplies, toddler's toys and collections of candy.

"Hi." I said. "Do you have a Jang Gi board?"

They looked at me for a moment and finally the one who apparently ran the shop nodded and walked across the shop, climbing onto a chair to reach a high shelf. She said something in Korean, then offered me a cheap western chess set with plastic pieces, the same kind that is tucked away somewhere in every family game cabinet in America.

I shook my head and thought back to something I had learned earlier in the day. "No, no. Do you have Hang Gul Jang Gi?"

"Oooohh. Han Gul Jang Gi!" She said, nodding, and went across the shop and moved around boxes until she dug out a beautiful large board and a separate box of pieces from under pile of magazines and other boxes. The sets of pieces are sold independently. I considered briefly not buying the board, then I wouldn't have to ship it home, and I could always make a nice one myself. Still, it would be nice to have both together, and the opposite face of the board was a go board, a significant investment of effort if I decided to make it on my own.

I asked if there was a discount for buying them together (almost every Korean, even the ones who speak no conversational English, knows the word "discount"), and she cut 1,000 won off the price. I wound up paying about $5 US for the whole set.

I paid her, cheerfully took my packages and, bolstered by my success, hiked the remaining two blocks to the school at the top of the neighbourhood. There I found a way out onto a stone retaining wall that gave me a fantastic view of the city, and I took a few pictures.

Busan has a sort of clever, lingering beauty for a big city. It's not really a tourist hot spot, but it has its own charm. I think the charm for me is the practicality of it. Korea needed a strong port for its shipping industries and for its fishermen, so this city was scored onto the surface of the hills near the harbour one street at a time. It winds and bends its way through the valleys surrounding Busan harbour now, making allowances for the punishing geography of Korea as gracefully as it can.

I made my way back down to a Subway station I'd seen near the bus stop. I'd read online that there was a soccer game that night, and Busan was playing. I love soccer, so I decided to try to find the game. The subway station necessitated a 9 story elevator ride, since we were still so far up the hill. The feeling of plunging deep into the earth when you're already underground is always a little surreal to me, and it was interesting to think of the incredible amount of digging that had to be performed to make the station in which I stood.

I wandered Busan that evening, and figured out (when I found the stadium to be giant, empty and dark) that they were playing an Away game. Too bad I couldn't read that in all the Korean on the teams website. Oh well. Busan is pretty at night, and the area around the soccer stadium, baseball stadium, and gymansium/pool (cleverly called the Sports Complex)features raised walkways that let you see far across the city's shorter buildings.

The Koreans use neon in everything, and that includes their Churches. Each Church steeple generally has a bright red neon cross that glows through the night, a constant reminder of the huge number of Koreans who have accepted Christ. At one point on that walkway, I could make out 12 neon crosses from where I stood, spread out in all directions through the city. I wish I could have taken an effective 360 degree panorama, because the effect was really remarkable.

When I got back to the area where my hostel was located, I grabbed dinner at Chicken restaurant in the basement of a building full of shops and restaurants. I'd heard that you really should try chicken in Busan, because it's very very crispy and kindof a specialty of Korea. I also couldn't resist stopping because their name was "Kenturkey Chi Ken."

I have several female friends who have commented to me about how much it sucks going out to eat on your own. One is a young professional who travels on business often, another's husband is overseas, a third has a boyfriend who is often on the road and a hunger for sushi occasionally drives her to a restaurant alone.

All of them agree on one thing: Being a woman eating out by yourself sucks. It feels as if all eyes are on you, and since you wish you were sharing your meal with someone, it feels as if everyone in the restaurant (even, to be objective, people who probably haven't noticed you are there) is wondering what is wrong with you that you'd have to go out by yourself.

I've been lucky on this count, because I have a penis. Men, it is usually assumed, are traveling on business. I can tell myself this and even if half the restaurant is really wondering why I'm eating alone, I'll never know it.

Last night, however, I got a taste of that experience.

See, the thing is, there are two kinds of Korean restaurants. There are normal restaurants, that serve food on a per-person bases, with prices generally ranging from 3,000 to 8,000 won for a reasonably priced meal. And there are group restaurants. These are especially common in shopping and nightlife districts (like the one where I was last night) and they don't have anything on the menu for less than about 15,000 won. That's because the thing you order is at least a huge pile of food, plus three to five kimchi appetizers that come standard. If you order something larger, it's a stupendous, terrifying pile of food. It's as if there was a sports bar that only served wings, and the smallest wing order on the menu was fifty.

The idea is, you and a half a dozen of your friends are out carousing, and you decide you're hungry, so you hit a group restaurant, split two orders betweeen the 7 of you, and everybody eats for as cheap (or cheaper) than they would have at a restaurant with individual servings. The places tend to be casual, with open flooring, beer and soju options, and a relaxed atmosphere that encourages people to use them as a place to meet up and eat before going out for a night on the town.

No Korean in his right mind would ever, ever dine in a group restaurant alone.

So I head down the stairs into Kenturky Chi Ken, and I become suspicious when the restaurant looks somewhat different than the places I've been eating. I'm already downstairs though, and the incredibly polite host is offering me a table (It felt like the smallest table in the place sat six, though I think there were four tops against the opposite wall). Several people give me sidelong curious glances. Less "He doesn't belong" than just the innocent "what's he doing here?" So I take my seat. I can't very well back out now, and I'm starving and chicken sounds great.

My suspicions are confirmed when I am given a menu and the lowest cost item is 13,000 won. I know, I know, that's only about $10.50, but for Korea that is a ridiculous price to pay for a meal of anything except a delicacy in a typical restaurant. I never paid more than 10,000, including any drink I ordered, in anyplace I went.

But the manager is so nice, and helpful and asks what I would like that I couldn't refuse him, so I ordered the smallest, cheapest chicken dish they had.

Sure enough, I'm brought three bowls of appetizers (a sort of bread, a delicious savory pancake with vegetables in it, and a sort of cabbage salad with dressing somewhat similar to thousand island, but tastier and less fattening feeling), and about ten minutes later, one hellacious mountain of food.

I began to feel self concious, then silly. Not only am I eating alone in a group restaurant, but I hadn't had a real meal all day. So I am really hungry, so much so that I'm probably going to consume all of this chicken, at which point the Koreans really will have a reason to stare, as there are at least two full meals worth of chicken on the oversized plate I've been brought.

I keep my head down and watch the door instead of my fellow diners throughout the meal, trying not to laugh at my social predicament or worse yet, become so self concious I fake a phone call and scurry from the restaurant with my cell phone to my ear, throwing payment for my untouched meal at the host along with an apology that I have to go meet friends somewhere else.

Instead, I consider the fact that none of these Koreans will ever see me again, and I'll probably be the talk of the restaurant when I leave after demolishing all this chicken. I get through the meal and pay as quickly and as quietly as possible. My host is gracious and kind throughout, and acts as if it is totally normal for single patrons to come in and dine alone in his restaurant.

I head back to the Hostel around 10PM, and after sitting and chatting with Chris and some other guests before they head out to see Busan at night, I start up the movie Old Boy. One of the other guests has to meet a friend at the train station the next day, so he sticks around and watches it with me. It's a dark, deeply methodical thriller with a gut wrenching ending and really remarkable writing and actinng. I can see why it is known as the Korean film to watch.

When I'm done, I chat with one of the newcomers who had arrived late the night before, a charming young Brit named Andrew who works as a video game developer for cell phones. He met his Korean Girlfriend in London while she was studying there, when she told him that "All of you black guys look exactly alike to me." He has a love for life that reflects in everything he does, and an enthusiasm for the east that is charming. He laughs at everything, and describes each and every bizarre little Korean trait that we don't understand as "awesome."

Tomorrow: Lunch with the Boys, The "Fish" Market, Adoption in the Airport, then off to Hong Kong.