Trip to Oz

So I went to Oz yesterday.  It was pretty awesome.  For those of you who don’t know Oz is the name of LG’s 3G phone network so most of their phone shops are labeled Oz.

The guy at the store was super helpful, even if he didn’t speak much English and my Korean is coming along slowly.  I looked at a few unmarked phones and asked the ever useful Korean phrase Eolmayeyo how much?   And he looked up the prices.

I found a pretty nice Samsung phone, pretty basic model with a camera and Mp3 player…though it needs a micro-SD card.  They also through in a nice hard plastic carrying case which turned out to be a plus as i accidentally dropped it in the cross walk today on the way to dinner.

There was a fair amount of pointing  to numbers and them writing things out for me on a calculator, then they even were nice enough to call up their friend who spoke english with a bit of a south African accent and she made sure I understood everything i had agreed to ( i did actually either explicitly or implicitly in the case of if i go over my minutes I pay more than the base rate)

As an aside my green card says LG on it because one of my bosses offices is in an LG building.  So the guys at the LG store thought I worked for LG and were incredulous at me buying a Samsung phone.   I’m sure somewhere in America there is a corporate rivalry like this.  But I’ve never experienced anything like that.

They asked me twice and then called someone who was fluent in English and while she was asking me other things about the price she asked me if I was sure I wanted to buy a Samsung.

All in all I think i ended up with a pretty nice model.  I’ve got a few of my friends numbers in the phone.  What really strikes me is how much easier the cell phone makes life.  Last night I went to see Avatar with several people from all over Seoul.  We only had two forms of communication, the cell phone and facebook messages.  And it all went off without a hitch.