It's the end of an era, folks. Today, my beloved computer of almost five years died. Right in the middle of a skype date. What a load.
Naturally, I was not pleased, though I have seen this day coming for a while now. My computer has been giving me various fits for quite a while and I almost bought a new one before I left for Korea, but I thought I had better ride it out and I'm glad I did... Since my life in Korea is unimaginable without a fully functioning computer, Desiree and I set out on an adventure to secure a new one...
Before I left, I texted Chan Yang to ask if he had any useful advice to offer since I don't speak Korean and buying an expensive machine without being able to speak the same language as the person selling it sounded pretty daunting to me. (It seems to me that the folks in Best Buy speak another language when they're speaking techno-English, so how the heck was I going to get along buying a computer over the counter in Korea?!) When Chan Yang told me the same thing I had already planned on doing unless he gave me better advice, I felt fairly confident in my plan. Desiree (she came with me for moral support - what a peach!) and I walked for what seemed like forever toward an area of town to which I had never before ventured.
The first stop was the LG Best Shop. Its purple exterior looked nice and happy to me so walking into the store, I had high hopes. Looking at the computers killed those hopes. They all looked crappy to me, which was surprising because I've seen some pretty swanky LG computers on teachers' desks at school... And, the man who approached us had a certain sleazy used car salesmen vibe to him, plus a definite lack of English, which made me nervous. We quickly found our way out of that store and made our way to the Samsung store across the street. I quickly settled on a beautiful white computer with a pink cover (sounds like a match made in heaven, right?). The man who was helping me seemed pleased with the easy sale, that is, until he couldn't find the computer in stock. He asked if I was willing to buy the display computer, whose price he reduced by quite a bit. That sounded fine to me, until he came back, saying there was no English operation system available. That sounded weird to us, since we were pretty sure you could just change the language setting on the computer, but if he didn't know that, I wasn't about to try to do sign language-like moves to figure it out. We left and walked back to our neck of the woods where there is another Samsung store.
We walked in and marched right up to the computers. A very nice man started showing me around, asking me (in pretty good English!) what I wanted in a computer. To Koreans, my list must have sounded like a joke. "Uh, word processing, internet surfing, listening to music. No games." Astonished, he asked, "No game?" - like, are you for real? No games - you're a weirdo. He started asking me to lift the computers to find the most light-weight machine. I have no problem carrying around a heavy-ish computer (take a look at my purse sometime - it's like a no-frills weight workout when I go anywhere...), but I humored him because I thought it was funny. There was a beautiful MacBookAir-esque model that was awesome...until I looked at the price - he agreed that it was too expensive. That's when I knew we were going to get along. We finally landed on a sleek looking computer to which he said " this best one for you!" Dude didn't have to tell me twice - I was ready to make this purchase. He quickly changed the language to English and made me pick out one free thing (he tried to push a mouse on me, but my apartment is a rodent-free zone :) - he was so surprised to hear that I prefer to use the touch-pad on the laptop - unheard of in Korea! ). I inquired about speakers instead. He rummaged around in a cupboard that contained several sets of desktop speakers. He pulled out blue, green and pink versions of metallic bagpipe speakers, asking me which color I preferred. Without thinking, I pointed to the pink (duh.) and he said, "Yes. You a girl." HA. Love it.
After I paid for my merch, he installed Microsoft Office, the Korean language writing program and Adobe Photoshop on my computer. He kept offering different applications that sounded good to me so I took him up on his offers. To this, he said, "You not make my job easy!" Oops. He made us go sit down and "watch t.v." while he installed all of my biz. Ten minutes later, he walked us down the stairs to the main floor of the shop, handed me a 4 GB flash drive - one that I had been eyeing in E-Mart but had been too cheap to buy myself and said, "My gift for you." Wow. I was a happy camper.
I have spent the last several hours getting things set up on my new computer and I am still marveling at how fast it moves! I can't believe how patient I had been on my old, weathered companion! Windows 7 will take some getting used to, but I am loving this machine (and the speakers and flash drive!) already! Huzzah!
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