Today is Friday. It is the fourth morning here in Korea. I woke up at 4:30am feeling quite well. This is what happens when you have jet lag. You wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why no one else is up. Because we are leaving Daegu this morning at 9am, I spent some time packing my bag and then read through the itinerary. Then at 6am I left the hotel in search of an Internet cafe.
I found one on the 2nd floor of a nearby office building. Even at 6am there are young people hunched over computers. Let me describe the room to you. It is a large, dark room. There are about 60 computers, and several electric fans blowing cool air conditioned air around the room. All the computers are very powerful, have huge LCD panel monitors and are connected to super fast Internet bandwidth. There is coffee and potato chips and cup noodles for sale. There is no music playing and the only sounds are the sounds of the electric fans rotating and the occasional footsteps of the attendant, a young college student who appears to be very bored.
There are some young men playing what appears to be Warcraft. This is a popular multiplayer fantasy game and it is supposed to be quite addictive.
When I first came here two nights ago with one of the Korean guides, the room was filled mainly with young women. They were mostly playing a hip hop video game in which they controlled avatars who were competing against each other with elaborate dance routines. It was fascinating to watch the fingers of the girls as they flew over the keyboard creating new combinations of moves for their avatars to dance. In between sets, the girls were chatting with other players, possibly around the room or in other locations. They barely looked up when the guide and I stood nearby to watch them play.
