business

for a country that pays disappointingly little attention to a holiday as intriguing as halloween, there are an awful lot of random mask attacks here in korea. frequently i have just been minding my own business when BAM! theres someone in a mask that you have never expected to see in your entire life.

take this blatant advertising move, for instance:


who knew that an umbro-head was even possible? that isnt even remotely like a normal head. furthermore, who, aside from racho, knew that umbro was still popular? didnt it fall from grace, even in the soccer world, sometime in the early 90s? regardless, there we were minding our own shopping business and surprise! umbro head.

next, we have the not so clever "unrelated marketing" ploy:

this guy was loitering close to a popular nighttime hangout. me, wandering down the street, minding my own business, had to do a double take. pig! but person! all at the same time. koreans are tricky. im not quite sure how a pig head is related to his sale of street meat, but if he was trying to get me to purchase something that included pork(which im pretty sure he didnt even sell), this mask definitely did not work.

and then we have this phenomenon:

lego people! im not quite sure what they were promoting, but i guarantee it wasnt legos. wait, didnt quite catch that one? here it is again:

this second one is a terrible shot, but i wanted to be sure to include my personal favorite, the unhappy camouflage lego person (proof that even lego people are anti-war). it is amazing what one bumps into while wandering the streets of seoul. you know, minding your own business and all. i never quite imagined, however, that these sights would include nine lego people walking down the street.

the best part of this experience was when, as my four american friends and i were taking photos, all of the koreans also taking shots of the lego people stopped and began to take pictures of us. have i mentioned before that we were MINDING OUR OWN BUSINESS? because we were. we werent even looking for lego people or anything like that. (in my experience, lego people prefer to come to you, they dont really like to be hunted) the fact that every korean in a 20 foot radius was taking pictures of us really threw me for a bigger loop than the lego people themselves. im sure that if the lego people actually had opposable thumbs, they would have taken some also. strange that we were such a novelty. i mean, this was seoul, foreigners are everywhere. must have been that my unshowered-sunday-looking-for-breakfast-and-needing-coffee-at-2(3?) pm face was so incredibly breathtaking that they had to preserve the moment for all time. im sure i will turn up in a "trendwatch" section of some korean magazine or another within a month or so. keep your eyes peeled.

on a side note, i was asked if the lego people were korean or foreign. i must say, its pretty hard to tell given THE HUGE YELLOW LEGO HEADS. arent they all made in china anyway?