So. After more than five years in Korea, I did something new today: I used an entirely Korean website to purchase something using my cellphone account. I suspect I'm a bit behind the curve on this. The reason I'm behind the curve has to do with my being one of those personalities that actually reads the fine print on online purchase agreements, combined infelicitously with the fact that there's a hell of a lot of fine print associated with making purchases online in Korea – in Korean, of course, about which I have some degree of perfectionistic anxiety.
So to do this online commerce thing, I have to break through some barriers. First, I have to just relax and keep hitting the "확인" [hwagin = continue] and "동의" [dongui = agree] buttons obliviously. Second, I have to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (Korean e-commerce is still hogtied by some very old regulations that keep it stuck in an unhappy marriage with ActiveX – 15 years ago they were very forward-looking and progressive and enabled Korea to bootstrap its current internet success story, but now they are quite annoying). Third, I have to have something I really want to buy.
This last barrier was surmounted because I've been listening to more and more Korean music and feeling less and less comforatble with my piratical ways. For my non-Korean music, I've been using Amazon's mp3 store, which now works from Korea (it didn't used to) – my account is tied to my US credit card. But for Korean music, Amazon is ill-stocked. And I've been put off by the lack of finding a comfortable English-option website whereat to download music legally, for pay. They simply don't exist, in my experience. You've got to break down and pretend to be a Korean. Download it using IE, using "phone cash" from your cellphone account.
So that's what I did. And now I'm the proud owner of an mp3 track that cost me… lemme see… about 138 won, including taxes. That's 13 cents. 대박 [daebak ~= kewl].
What I'm listening to right now.
케이윌 [keiwil] (K.will), "이러지마 제발"[ireojima jebal] (Please don't…).
The video, by the way, is… interesting. It all goes along swimmingly, entirely compliant to K-pop cultural norms, until the last moment, when… er… what's going on there? Any thoughts, anyone? Is Korean pop taking a first step out of the closet? Or would that be an overdetermined reading for what is, essentially, intended to be a bromance?