The Confusual

Clothing markets Women's fashion Sporting goods Antique markets and cultural stuff Electronics and computers Pet shops Tourist crap

Seoul is an old city, over a a thousand years since its beginning. And like most old cities, urban planning is a joke. Everything built is made big enough to fill available spaces and no more.

Road widening? You're kidding, right?

Anyway, if you remember your history class and medieval cities of Europe (or if you spent your teen years playing RPGs) you know the old way that shops were built: everybody with the same type of shop was found on one street. One street for bakers, one street for shoemakers, etc.

Well, it's the same in Seoul, but it's not one street of the same type of shops, it's whole neigborhoods of them. Some are almost a square kilometre in size.

Below are most of the major ones where you can spend hours in each looking at the same array of products in store

A note on shopping in Seoul:
In department stores, you can forget about haggling the prices. You wouldn't try it in Canada, and you won't do it here. In the markets, you might be able to haggle in some places, but some take the view that if you compare the prices of competitors, they will both raise the price.

(Koreans do many things that are counterintuitive to western business sense, like flooding the market with shops and letting the strong survive instead of finding out if there is a market. And they wonder why they have so many small business failures....)