Tasom's Blog: Shopping at the East Entrance

I took the day to go shopping around the East Entrance of Seoul. There are 4 entrances, East, West, South, and North, and each distinctive by their historic building to mark the spot. Like MyongDong, this place was crowded by independent stores selling similar goods to one another at low, low prices. I found myself a cool fedora for 10 dollars and sunglasses for 7.

Then my positive experience changed when I went into the shopping mall. As soon as I took the escalator up to the male clothing floor, I was bombarded with store watchers (there's only one person watching the store - each store probably the size of your closet) asking me to look at their products, trying to coerce me to stay and talk to them so they can make one more sale. Before I went into the mall, I really wanted to buy clothes. But the sales tactic didn't want me to buy from any of them. So we left and went to the next mall. Same thing. But this time, I learned my lesson. I started joking with them in a very negative way - I started to either start saying complicated stuff in English to intimidate them or say my thoughts out loud by saying "damn, if i wasn't attacked by all these people, maybe I'd buy something." To no surprise, I wasn't bugged anymore.

A mall called Doota, was quite good however. There were a lot of better laid out stores with brand name clothing. My heart wasn't set on buying medium priced clothes when I could buy the same things in Canada. I loved my cheap sunglasses and fedora, those seem to be the ones I remember purchasing, not clothing I would normally buy.