magnetonic

Are there only 10,000 cars in Korea? With 4 digit licence plates, it would seem they might run out of numbers pretty quickly...

Anyway, what kind of Car is it?

Fred, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading your entries (and viewing your photographs) and those of your loyal fans out there. Is your car the red wine one on the left side? ;-)

Would you be so kind to tell me where one would find "vast" lush rice paddy fields? I heard there is no such thing as "vast" farm land in S. Korea. However, is this true?? xoxo, NYC Woman

if you look very closely, you can see that i've blurred out some digits at the top of the plates, for privacy reasons. acutally, every korean license plate is made up of three parts: a two-digit number, a simple korean character (i.e. a consonant and a vowel), and a four-digit number. the first number is assigned depending on where you live, like your province or major metropolitan city. there are 14 simple consonants and 10 simple vowels in korean, so you can do the math on the number of permutations. (it's 140, for the math-averse.) then there is a seemingly random four-digit number to top it off. so rather than 10,000 possible cars, there are 100*140*10000=140,000,000 possible license plates. and these are for regular automobiles; trucks, scooter, and motorcycles have different plates. as an aside, if you see a car that's got a very easy number, something like 5000 or 7777, it's most likely a gangster's car, as they like to "buy" the numbers for their cars.

NYC Woman,

i don't know who you are, but there is farmland in korea. the problem seems to be that korea is made up mostly of mountains. so yes, you probably heard right, that there are no "vast" expanses of farmland. but i guess that depends on your opinion of vast.