Shady bussiness in Daejeon

I hate buying new things. I love repairing stuff, especially electronics or clothes. But I am horrible at repairing electronics, so I always ask my brothers and sister for help which is a little bit more difficult now, since I live in Korea and they live in the Czech Republic. Still, we try.

In August this year, my phone's earphone suddenly stopped working properly. I ordered some new parts from Aliexpress and the same week I replaced it (which didn't help, it was probably a software problem) I crashed the display. Like how stupid you have to be, to just put your phone in a bicycle's basket, and then you're very surprised when your phone literally flies away? Well, I am exactly that stupid 😂

So, I ordered a new display from Aliexpress, but it came kind of broken - one chip was not connected and I didn't manage to connect it successfully. I mean, very delicate precise handwork was never my forte. There's a reason why I didn't become a dentist or surgeon, but I switch to nuclear physics. 😅 Well, I still tried, I connected the display, and half of the display works, which was super annoying for me. 

As a result of all this, I just decided to buy a new phone. My only conditions were: cheap and small. Therefore, I started to search on Carrot/당근. It is a Korean app for selling and buying second-hand things. I love it. I have already bought my amazing bicycle there, so what could go wrong?

I found a nice phone for a reasonable price and I texted the person. He texted back that he has a time that day, but only really late. Like at 0:30. The thing is that people in Korea don't go to sleep early, so I thought this should be ok. We were supposed to meet in a very remote area (back entrance to some supermarket), around 10 km from the KAIST campus. I wanted to go on a bike and when I started to get ready the person wrote to me if I can bring all the money in cash. I started to get suspicious. The time, place, and cash. I started to have very crazy ideas like that this is some gang and they guessed from my "Korean writing" that I am a foreigner and they will just kill me, or something like that. I have a wild fantasy.

Anyway, I left the dormitory around 23:40. I got to the place and to my big surprise three high school boys were waiting for me. 👀 They could be like 14 or 15 years old. "Are you the person who wants to buy the phone?" they asked me. They were not expecting a foreigner, so apparently, they were shocked too. I gave them the money in an envelope, they recalculated it like two or three times - I guess calculations were not their forte. Meanwhile, I tried the phone, and then we successfully finished our weird business.

I have no idea what they did with the money, why they needed it in cash, why we met so late and in such a weird place, I just hope that we didn't commit any crime. But probably they just wanted some extra money for PC bang.