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Down into the subway; one of our masklike beauties in white shorts and cowboy boots volunteers to help me interpret the ticket machine and then clacks off across the concourse embarrassed. Taking the escalator I sink to platform level, a Chopin mazurka floating discreetly from invisible vents. I surface at Tangdaemun market.

Here are odd sights to decode. On one stall there were: a tank full of dead toads; a hedgehog wriggling upturned in a pot; some jars of a dark boot-polish like substance for sale.

At another stall a man is selling live giant snails, a baboon chained to his wrist. And yes, it has to be said, crates of live dogs piled in, pell mell, waiting to be eaten. A sheepish crowd of men jostle round a stall selling seventies type "sex position" books. (Was there ever anything direr, less to do with sex, than the sex "position"?)

As at Porta Portese in Rome, Portobello Road in London, the Marche aux Puces, the market dwindles bathetically to heaps of junk on trestle tables, and from then onto the kerb. And there I found my Seoul souvenir; there beneath the giant stanchions of an expressway, amidst old tools, computer keyboards, betamax videos, amidst all this ignominy dangled from a hook a silver evening bag glittering and clinking in the breeze, so beautiful, so cool to the touch. I buy it and bear it away. In the subway a girl starts talking to me; I tell her I have been to the market and haul my silver bag out from the inside pocket of my leather jacket to show her. Dubious but polite she says that I need frock and shoes to match.

Back downtown by subway. I start up the broad glossy steps that rise to street level to find myself flanked by two immobile lines of black clad riot police. One man per step, like Masai tribesmen leaning nonchalantly on their long black batons, and at their belts, undonned, those beautiful grilled Vader-esque helmets. And yet beneath all this accoutrement merely youths on call up who might, the year before, or the next year be the very students they are preparing to battle in the ritualised spring manoevres of Korean student protest. Menacing the look for sure, but this menace is relieved by touches of Korean oddness; (the oddness of the smokemask and the Daewoo Prince Ace and the lipstick and the hedgehog): their equipment is supported on the shoulders by two straps. On the left hand strap the word POLICE is written in candy pink, in a font one might have found in an early Star Trek episode. On the right hand strap the same word is written in lime green. As they move through the streets each carefully numbered platoon rallies behind a violet pennant.

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