There is a place in downtown Seoul, where all the old laborers gather. Past the gold shops on the left, with the thick legged ladies and the Chinese immigrants doing what they do world round. Past the lines of street stalls selling blood sausage, silkworm pupa, kimchee pancakes with shiso, deep fried everything, fish meal cakes, tripe, pig intestine, pine needle drink in small cans. Past the coffee shops with European names filled with the girls with high-heeled shoes, past the endless neon shopfronts and blinking banners in the gracefully regular Korean script.

The laborers all meet there, in their 50s and 60s - the hunched and squat remains of an old Korea where meat was hard to find, where rice was a luxury. They sit around small street stalls at feed - holdovers from the time before - from the time when Korea was a poor and dusty place, a place where peace-corps Americans didn't drink the water, a place where Japanese industrialists held court in black cars and in the back of hotels. They seem content with their luxury goods from 20 years ago, as all of the aging do - except that 20 years ago in this country, the country was an entirely different place, and luxury items from that era are things like orange flip-flops. Their rubber shoes, their baggy cheap clothing, their odd plastic caps all speak of a low quality manufacturing - the kind of work that has now moved to rural China and ASEAN countries like Vietnam.

I sit in the shadows by a temple door with the occasional flickering of a broken neon sign offering buckwheat noodles in the Japanese style flashing across my face - watching the old ones trudge around and fill their faces with fried things. An old man falls off of his plastic chair, a green bottle of soju bounces down with him. Everyone laughs at his table. It seems he could have broken something because it takes him over 30 seconds to even start standing up, but happily he is stuffing long brown and red snakes of noodles into his face again in under 2 minutes with dull metal chopsticks.

They might as well be a different race altogether these ones, so different are they from the younger Koreans. Few of them stand much higher than 5 foot 2, while the young here are impressively tall for Asians - more in the 5 foot 10 range. Their wrinkled faces are so much wider and flatter. I'm told this "moon face" was a sign of beauty in the old days, and women girls were encouraged to sleep face down to encourage the wide shape.

These days, plastic surgery is simply everywhere, and chin-shaving is one of the most common surgical enhancements after creating western style eyes and high & sharp noses. Sitting in a Chinese tea shop trying to ignore the confusing English of the talkative owner I read his English language learner's magazine with a trite article about Korean plastic surgery that offered the interesting statistic: 20% of Korean girls get plastic surgery for their highschool graduation gifts.

A popular technique is to sever the nerves in the lower calve at the back of the knee to prevent the thick "melon calves" that girls today want to avoid, and that are so prevalent among the squat "ajumma" or "married ladies" that mill about the laborers park and feed the aged. Another is skin bleaching, and of course very popular is breast enhancement. As a man, I cannot with full honesty speak ill of the latter of course, but it is a bit interesting.

The result is stark - and evident - when university girls occasionally walk by the park - two races, two countries all together. One poor, one rich; one short, brownish, and wide - one tall, pale, and thin; one developing, one rich.

The aged, with their silver teeth and garlic breath - sitting and smoking in the Asian squat and oversided baseball caps, pour their soju - basically cheap and flavored single distillation ethanol - into small cups in this small downtown park, just like they have always done, just like they did through the tough years and the good years working in the factories.

Across town, in a brightly lit office in Gangnam, sit hundreds of files about Toyota's success with flex-fuel ethanol engines in Sao Paolo - including, no doubt, original plans from Toyota.

Soju, the old ones know, is an unbeatable fuel.

The old man falls out of his seat again, and the thick fingered ajumma helps him back up.

The park chatters on behind me as I walk back down into the brightly lit streets.