Let's talk about sex (in South Korea)

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking home after seeing a movie when I noticed a new bar that had just opened up. "It's only 9:30 on a Friday night, why not pop in for a drink and check the place out?" I thought to myself.

I walk into the bar and am immediately greeted by an attractive girl (or at least she was attractive now that she had purchased the standard #4 Korean face offered by the local plastic surgeon), wearing a short skirt. Nothing too surprising about that; attractive girls in short skirts are fairly common at bars in Korea (and pretty much anywhere else in the world, for that matter). She leads me to a booth and asks what I would like. For some reason, Hoegaarden can be found nearly everywhere in South Korea and it's by far the best option you'll find, so I go with that.

She comes back with three bottles. I'm confused and explain (in Kindergarten level Korean) that I just wanted one. She tells me that I can't just order one; I have to order three at a time - two for me and one for her... This is the moment that I begin to realize what kind of establishment I've wandered into. In hindsight, the amount of velvet in the bar probably should have tipped me off sooner.

So I begin to form my exit strategy. How do you leave a situation like that politely? Should I even be concerned with politeness at this point? These were questions to which I had no good answer. After a few minutes of awkwardness momentarily relieved by sips of beer, I finally decide that I have to get out of there. The best that my Korean can muster is "I'm sorry. I want beer. I don't want you." Charming.

Me with my Hoegaarden

She nods as if she understands and walks away. "Thank god" I say to myself. But then she comes back with a tray of fruits and nuts. She tries feeding said fruits and nuts to me. I turn my head away (are some men really willing to eat grapes out of a prostitute's hand?!). This is the final straw. "Okay okay... can I have the bill?" I say. I pay and leave my remaining beer and a half behind. That's how you know I was really uncomfortable; it was enough to override how much I like beer and how much I hate wasting money.

What I had unknowingly stumbled into is known as a 'business bar' and it turns out that they're all over South Korea. I learned that the 'real action' doesn't usually occur at business bars; rather, they're places where men can go to flirt with girls, maybe get a little grabby, and possibly get one of the girls' numbers for later on. If you're a man who works in an office in Korea, outings to business bars are a part of everyday life and most bosses will expect you to attend as often as possible, regardless of marital status. Most wives are aware that this goes on and look the other way because they believe it will help their husband to move up in the company.

Despite being illegal, prostitution is everywhere in South Korea. Here are some shocking statistics for you: (1) the prostitution industry makes over $13 billion per year, 2% of South Korea's GDP, (2) about 8% of Korean women will work in some form of prostitution at some point in their life, and (3) 20% of Korean men in their twenties visit a prostitute at least once a week and 5% visit them DAILY. Forget the morality for a second; how do they even afford that?

The number of different forms of prostitution that exist here is almost equally shocking. There are places where it's basically out in the open - pink (not red!) light districts - places that appear to be one type of business but are really just a front - karaoke rooms, massage parlors, barber shops - services that come to you - coffee delivery girls - and places that blur the line between what is and isn't prostitution - kiss rooms, cuddle rooms, and (sorry, there's no delicate way to put this) masturbation-by-proxy rooms.

A pink light district in Seoul

You're probably saying to yourself, "but I thought Korean culture was really conservative." That's the crazy thing - it is. The average Korean has sex for the first time at age 22, 4 years later than the average American. And premarital sex is rare; only 30% of unmarried women between ages 19 and 30 have had sex. Furthermore, Koreans don't like to talk about sex. There's no sex education in the schools and adults very rarely discuss it. Even mentioning the medical terms in conversation is enough to make most Koreans squirm. And, finally, pornography is illegal here and, unlike prostitution, heavily monitored. Interestingly, the majority of the monitoring is actually done by religious groups, not by the government. These religious groups scour the internet looking for porn and report it to the Orwellian-sounding Korean Communications Standards Commission, who then block it from all servers in the country.

If you try to access a porn site in South Korea, you get redirected to this warning.

I discovered this while... um... conducting research.

So how do you reconcile Korea's ultra-conservative culture with the ubiquity of prostitution here? I think it's a pretty simple truth that has applied to every society that has ever existed: repression of sexuality doesn't make it go away; it just forces people to find an acceptable outlet, the path of least resistance if you will. And in Korea, as strange as it may sound, prostitution is the path of least resistance. It has a long history in the country and is generally accepted. 

Need further proof that repression of one sexual outlet just increases the demand for another outlet? Check out this study into which US states watch the most pornography. 5 out of the top 8 states are in the sexually repressed bible belt. And the winner? Utah.

A note: Of course there's an elephant in the room that I didn't address in this post: what do the 70% of single 19-30 year old women who aren't having sex do? Truth be told, there's a limit to the information that I, as a foreign man, am able to acquire and, alas, that information is beyond my reach. And if I'm not knowledgeable about an area, I don't think it's my place to comment upon it.

Education Fever

I was recently chosen by my regional office of education to be a judge in determining which middle school students would be accepted to an "elite" English camp and which ones would be denied and bring unbearable shame to their families.

That's right, I'm starting early with the memes today

I wasn't given much information about what the process entailed so on the bus ride there I was envisioning an American Idol type setup. The students come into a room with myself and the other 3 judges, we listen to them speak English for a bit, then critique them while taking carefully timed sips of our Coca-Colas and squabbling with each other while the student awkwardly stands there.

I was disappointed. It turned out that there was only one other judge, we wouldn't even be in the same room, and, worst of all, there was no Coca-Cola. We each had to choose 3 or 4 questions to ask the students during our interviews. I went with future plans: what do you want to be, where do you want to travel to, do you think English will help you in your life, etc. I'm sure you're all thinking, "oh okay, he's strategically asking these questions to see if they can use the future tense." You're giving me way too much credit. In reality, I had been reading a lot about the Korean education system and I selfishly wanted to use this opportunity to get some insight into how these top-of-their-class students felt about their future. This would turn out to be a good decision.

First of all, their English levels were incredible. So incredible in fact, that one of the students I interviewed had actually lived in LA for half of her life and I didn't figure it out until she told me at the very end. That is to say, their English levels were so high that the essentially native speaker didn't even stick out. Out of 16 students, I had to choose the top 8. The 8 that got in all spoke basically perfect English. The 8 that didn't get in were eliminated because of one or two mistakes where they mispronounced a word (I let aurora borealis slide), worded a sentence unnaturally, or made a mistake because of some obscure English grammatical rule that I couldn't even explain if I tried. The feeling of eliminating them for such petty reasons, knowing how disappointed they would be, made me feel like the biggest asshole south of the demilitarized zone.

How the students who got denied probably viewed me

What was more impressive than their English level, however, was how well-planned their lives were and how knowledgeable they were of the fields they wanted to go into. They knew what they wanted to do, where they wanted to study, where they wanted to work, and were already reading up on their chosen field. These were 7th and 8th graders! When I was in middle school, I hardly thought past whatever sporting event was coming up or what kind of mischief my friends and I were going to get into that weekend. These kids were already preparing to be diplomats, astrophysicists, and behavioral economists. And could speak to me, at length in their second language, about those fields. While I was supposed to be listening to them for any slight mistake, I was, instead, having an out of body experience where all I could think was "Am I really discussing quantitative behavioral finance with a Korean 8th grader right now?"

It's fairly common knowledge that Korean schools, parents, and society put an enormous amount of pressure on children to succeed academically. In addition to regular school hours, hagwons, private academies that students go to after regular school hours, have become increasingly popular. A majority of elementary and middle school students go to hagwons and almost all high school students do. The average high school student's academic day is about 18 hours long, often starting at 6 in the morning and not ending until after midnight. A common rule of thumb for high school students in Korea is that "if you're getting more than 4 hours of sleep per night, you won't get into one of the top universities."

So what are the results of this pressure-cooker, hyper-competitive education system? 

Well, from a purely academic standpoint, the system is very effective. Three-quarters of students go on to attend college and the latest OECD rankings put Korea as the 5th best education system in the world, and the four ranked above them are either small city-states or are currently under investigation for manipulating their results. But it would be extremely naive to just look at this purely in terms of academic performance while ignoring the social aspects of it. For the parents, this system has led to crippling debt, as they spend, on average, over half of their salaries on their child's education. For the students themselves, it's pretty well documented how bad Korea's suicide problem is. Thirty years ago, Korea's suicide rate was at a normal level, 7 per 100,000 people, but it has now risen to 29 per 100,000 people, more than double the average for the 30 OECD countries. Suicide is the number one cause of death for Koreans under age 40.

Is there anything that can be done to fix the destructive education fever?

It seems like this is a case where society is just going to have to wait for this fever to subside. We tend to forget that the price of education is supposed to correspond to a real, tangible value: the increased earnings that that education will gain you over the course of your lifetime. In Korea, people have stopped viewing education as an investing decision and have started viewing it as something that a good parent just has to unquestioningly do for their children, even if the return on investment doesn't make sense. A recent study showed that Korea is graduating approximately 40% more students from university than its economy has use for. Eventually, people will realize that the equation just isn't adding up and that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a child's education so that they can get into a good university and then only have a 60-40 chance of using that degree just isn't worth it. It's surprising, isn't it? In a country whose students rank fifth in the world in mathematics, so many social ills could be solved if people would just do the math.

15 Weirdest Things About South Korea (to an American)

First of all, I should say that I fully recognize that there's something inherently a little bit racist, or at least ethnocentrist, about saying that something is 'weird' about a culture. The word 'weird' has so many negative connotations, but my intentions are not to use it in that way. I'm using the word basically as shorthand for "different from the way that my own culture does things but not necessarily better or worse." But when I tried that in the title, it didn't have quite the same ring to it.

1. SPAM gift sets

Koreans love not only eating SPAM, but giving it as a gift set as well. Every grocery store in Korea has at least half of an aisle dedicated solely to SPAM. Going to a dinner party? Forget the bottle of wine and pick up a nice SPAM gift set, complete with a handy carrying case.


2. Surgical masks EVERYWHERE

This is usually portrayed in the US media as a bunch of hypochondriacs freaking out about the latest Chinese Bird-Monkey-Walrus flu but, in reality, there are a number of reasons why people wear them. EVERYONE should wear one if they have a cold, some people wear them because of pollution in population centers, and some women wear them, combined with a hat, to maintain a lighter face complexion.


3. Couples wearing matching outfits

Or, if you want to be a little more discreet about it, matching underwear.

4. Korean age is different

Koreans measure age by how many distinct years in which you have been alive. So when you're born, you're already one and then on the following January 1st, you turn two and so on. It's kind of like high school graduating classes; you're basically telling people "I was part of the birth class of '87." This is the cause of some of the confusion surrounding Kim Jong-un's age. And yes I'm mentioning his name just so that I can share this picture.

5. Speaking of age, Korean society revolves around it

Inevitably, the second question that a new person will be asked, following "what's your name?", is "how old are you?" This is because so much of Korean society is based on whether a person is your senior or junior: the way they speak to you, how low they bow to you, and which tasks you will be expected to do. If you're the youngest person at the dinner table, you're expected to do all of the menial tasks: passing out the plates, chopping up the salad and serving it, refilling water glasses, etc. If you're the youngest person in the office, guess whose turn it ALWAYS is to take out the trash. Better find an office, and social circle, with some people younger than you.


6. Everyone uses Internet Explorer

Okay, not everyone; the exact number is 92%. I find this really strange for a country as technologically advanced as Korea. When I downloaded Chrome on my work computer, my coworkers thought it was weird that I would want to use something other than IE.

7. Dong chim or, as we call it in the US, rape

Dong chim (translation: poop needle) is a children's prank where the pranker sneaks up on the victim, puts their hands in the shape of a gun, and then tries to quickly insert their fingers into the victim's anus.

As a foreigner, it's really difficult to see this as anything other than sexual molestation. Then again, when I was in middle school, I hardly went an entire school day without seeing a fellow male student get slapped in the testicles.


8. The ubiquity of rock-paper-scissors

Koreans play rock-paper-scissors for EVERYTHING. To determine the order for games, to decide who has to do a chore, and even to decide who has to pick up the bill at a restaurant.

9. They put corn on their pizza and it's effin delicious.

That is all.


10. The plastic surgery obsession

See my post You So Handsome. Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world. Nearly half of all women living in Seoul have had at least one operation. They're not alone though; men have started getting in on the action as well.

11. What's your blood type?

Koreans treat blood type much like (some) Americans treat astrological signs. They believe that it determines your personality and can determine the compatibility of two people. When I was asked what my blood type was by my coteachers, they were puzzled when I told them that I wasn't really sure. They then all agreed that I was definitely type AB.

My ex-girlfriends would probably agree.

12. Koreans brush their teeth like 8 times per day

Wake up, brush. Eat breakfast, brush. Have a cup of coffee, brush. Eat lunch, brush. Smell a fart, brush. Another cup of coffee, brush. Dinner, brush. Kiss your spouse, brush. The toothpaste industry must be making a killing.

13. Wandering hospital patients

Korean hospitals encourage the patients to get out of the hospital and wander around for a little while each day. It's common to see people in hospital gowns wandering down the street, sitting on a park bench, or even eating some fast food.

Thing is, this is kind of brilliant. There's actually been a lot of evidence in the past couple of years showing that hospital patients recover more quickly when they're allowed to go outside, look out a window, or even just look at a nature painting in their room.


14. Fan death

There's an urban legend in Korea that if you sleep in a closed room with a fan blowing, you will die. As far as I can tell, this is believed by a healthy majority of Koreans. People have different theories as to how it happens, but most believe that it somehow causes the person to asphyxiate. In 1972, there was a newspaper article in a Korean newspaper stating that a healthy man had suddenly died while a fan was left running in his room. The public then made the extraordinary leap that the fan was the cause of the death. In a classic case of confirmation bias, every sudden death thereafter of a person with a fan in the room came to be attributed to fan death. Interestingly, and depressingly, one of the reasons for the sustained belief in fan death is that Korea is the suicide capital of the world, but parents are too ashamed to tell their friends that their child committed suicide, so they blame it on fan death.

15. English t-shirts that are either inappropriate or don't make sense

Because of our movies and music, English has become associated with being cool. And because the education system here focuses so strongly on English, it has also become associated with being intelligent. This gives English the rare designation of being smart and cool at the same time and, as a result, has made English t-shirts extremely popular. The problem is that most people don't actually know or care what the words say, they just want a shirt with English on it.

The $3 doctor visit

I spent all last weekend cooped up in my apartment, sucking down medicine and running through boxes of Kleenexes, trying to recover from a cold before Monday arrived. I was unsuccessful. So Monday morning, I went into work (I don't have a phone and the school is only two blocks away) to tell my coteacher that I probably shouldn't be around 100+ third graders while I have a cold. That was fine and everything, "just make sure to go see a doctor" she casually mentioned as I was about to leave. "Umm... do I have to? I'd really rather not spend that kind of money" I responded. She looked really confused. "Don't be silly, it's not that expensive" she says before walking into the classroom to begin the first class. So I head back home, not really sure what her definition of 'not that expensive' is, but slightly annoyed that I'm going to have to drop, I assume, at least 40 bucks on a doctor's visit.

But I'm letting you know now so I guess I kind of ruined it

I go to the doctor's office nearest my apartment and check in with the receptionist. I'm not really sure how the Korean healthcare system works and am wondering if there's going to be a bunch of papers to fill out and phone calls to be made before I'm actually able to see the doctor. Nope, just my Korean ID and she tells me to have a seat. The facility is nice and even has a flat screen television in the waiting room with a Korean soap opera showing. I can't make out what they're saying, but do you really need to understand the dialogue of a soap opera to be able to figure out what's going on? After just a few minutes of waiting, the doctor calls me in. It's a quick visit but he makes his diagnosis, writes a prescription for me, and has me sit in a room and breath this vapor in through my nose and out through my mouth. I go back out the receptionist, feeling that anxiousness that you get when you have no idea how much you're about to pay for something. 3,000 won she tells me. Wait... that must be missing a zero. 3,000 won is about $3USD. I ask her if she's certain. "Yes" she tells me, "3,000 won." I then go down to the pharmacy to get my prescription filled. "Okay, this must be where they get you. Cheap doctor's visit but then they charge a ton for the medicine. Like printers and ink." Wrong again. Six bucks for a bottle of Nasonex that normally runs $30-40 in the US.

"What in the world is going on?!" I ask myself. How was I able to go to a nice doctor's office, with English speaking staff, get treated quickly, and have a prescription filled all for less than ten dollars? I'm confused, skeptical, and extremely curious about how this works so I go into research mode when I get home. I discover that Korea has a single-payer healthcare system. A single-payer system which spends less than a quarter of what the US does per capita and produces better results (higher longevity and lower infant mortality rates).

Okay, so citizens must pay a ton of taxes for this super-nice, uber-cheap system, right?

Nope, employees pay 2.5% of their salary to the National Health Institute Corporation and the employer contributes another 2.5%. That means that an average Korean making $35K a year will pay $73 a month to the NHIC. Then, depending on the type of visit, the patient will pay somewhere between 10 and 30% of the treatment costs to the doctor, with a $2,000 cap on annual individual expenses (ie. the patient will never have to pay more than $2,000 in one year for treatment costs).

So doctors must not make very much money then, right?

This is actually kind of true. Doctors in Korea make about half of what a doctor in Europe or the US would make, but, by all accounts, they're still doing okay. In fact, the doctor's union has openly stated that they do not push very hard for price increases when negotiating with the NHIC because it would be "shameful for doctors to ask for more money when our profession is already one of the highest-earning in the country."

How about quality? Surely they have to sacrifice on quality, right? 

The fact is that, yes, there are many expensive treatments that the NHIC does not pay for. As much as people hate to hear the words 'rationing' and 'healthcare' in the same sentence, the truth is that every healthcare system, including privatized ones, must figure out a way to ration treatment. Even if there were enough doctors, nurses, medicine, etc. to treat everyone, a healthcare system which did so would immediately go bankrupt. So the NHIC has spent a lot of time studying different methods and have determined that there are many tests, treatments, and operations which are extraordinarily expensive and don't produce impressive enough results to justify the price tag. And they seem to be doing a great job; the Korean healthcare system has been ranked 8th most efficient in the world.

None of this in Korea

Doctors don't earn as much and the NHIC doesn't cover many expensive operations, but surely that's not enough to account for all of the savings, right? 

You are right indeed, my italicized friend; the vast majority of the healthcare savings can be attributed to the fact that it's a single-payer system. This cuts down enormously on administrative costs and, most importantly, it makes the healthcare system nonprofit, eliminating billions of dollars of profits which would be made in a privatized system.

One of the great things about the US is that we're usually open to importing good ideas from abroad. We may not come up with all of the great ideas, but we have historically been quick to adopt them and make them our own. "Hey, these French Enlightenment guys know what's up, we should use some of their ideas in our constitution." "Those Brits with all of their factories seem to be making a lot of money, maybe we should try that." And, most importantly: "That pizza stuff they got over in Italy is pret-tee delicious. We should try to make some of that here." But, for political reasons (or to take it one step closer to the root, monetary reasons) a lot of money has been pumped into fear-mongering about universal healthcare systems and the truth has been obscured from the American people. All you really have to do is look at the data, and in this case, the data is extremely clear: of the top 50 healthcare systems in the world, 49 of them have universal coverage. We are the only country that doesn't and we're ranked 38th, while spending way more than any other country. Hopefully one day, Americans will realize that universal health coverage is just as good of an idea as pepperoni pizza and that maybe we should think about importing it as well.

The Cheonan World Dance Festival

First off, I want to explain why this post is going to be a little different than my normal ones. In an effort to promote their event, the Cheonan World Dance Festival paid several foreign bloggers to attend the event and then write about their experience. That's why this post is going to be a little bit longer and a little bit heavier on the details than my normal ones. I want everyone to know, however, that the dance festival made no demand that my post portray the event in a positive light. I'm not selling out, this is not an advertisement for the event, and I'm going to be honest about everything. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's do this.

Cheonan World Dance Festival

As my taxi pulls up to Samgeori Park, the location of the Cheonan World Dance Festival 2013, the driver, who somehow still didn't quite understand that I don't speak Korean even after I dropped 5 hanguko motaeyos ("I don't speak Korean") on him, says something that I assume is along the lines of "enjoy the festival!" Or maybe it was, "thanks for letting me rip you off by driving 10 blocks out of the way before I finally went to the park." I prefer to believe it was the former though.

I walk into the park and my first impression is how beautiful the setting is. Samgeori Park also appears to be a botanical garden with thousands of flowers, sculpted bushes, and a couple of little ponds. As I walk through an area of pink and yellow flowers, I can hear rock music blaring in the distance and am struck by the contrast. But the good kind of contrast, like finding out that that cute girl in the sundress likes to put Led Zeppelin on while she does her makeup. As the sun beams down on me, I walk over a hill and see the main stage. I'm so relieved to see that it's covered, as it's going to be my home for the next 6 hours and I forgot to bring sunblock. No sunburned gringo, er, waygook today!

Flower sculpture!

The main stage

I have about 40 minutes until the Traditional Folk Dance Competition begins so I decide to get a lay of the land. There's a football-field-sized tent located near the main stage so I decide to go inside and check it out. Holy cow, jack pot. The first thing I see are two enormous screens showing a soccer game with about 100 people seated below them watching. "Oh cool," I think, "people can come check up on their team." But wait a second, those soccer players aren't real... It's a video game! All of these people are watching two people battle it out on FIFA 2013. And there are even announcers commentating too! I look to my right and see a computer pit with about 50 teenagers and 20-somethings sitting in front of computers, all playing FIFA. There's another pit with people playing League of Legends. And 2 other pits with people playing other games. It turns out that Cheonan Dance Festival doubles as a qualifier for the National Electronic Games. An interesting coupling of the physical and the furthest-from-physical-as-possible. I was fascinated, to say the least, about the whole thing and was only able to pull myself away when I realized that the Folk Dance Competition was about to begin.

Koreans take their electronic gaming seriously

Complete with commentators

I go back to the main stage and take my seat just in time for the competition to begin. The Folk Dance Competition took place over 4 days and featured 24 teams from 20 different countries, including powerhouses like France, India, Mexico, Turkey and Indonesia, regional-hometown favorites like Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan, and even a couple from completely unknown-to-me places like Bashkortostan and Buryatia (turns out they're both republics within Russia, however that works). On Saturday, the day that I attended, the 8 teams performing were: Poland, Korea, Malaysia, India, Buryatia, Japan, Taiwan, and Turkey. I'll save you a lengthy description of each performance, but suffice it to say that the whole thing was really cool. The dancers were great and it was interesting to see how the aspects of each culture came through in their style of dance. Korea and Japan were very disciplined with every dancer performing every movement perfectly in unison. Poland was pretty bland and boring. India was weird yet mesmerizing. Buryatia (in Russia, near Mongolia) appeared pissed off at their own existence. And Taiwan, I thought was China until I looked back at the program.

The Korean group moving in perfect unison

My personal favorite - The group from India

Buryatia, looking like they're about to invade and enslave the audience

Next on the program was the Talent Competition, but it didn't come on for another hour so I decided to meander around some more. In my meandering, I found what might have been my favorite part of the whole thing: a world culture section. It had museum-like exhibits from different regions of the world (which, by the way, featured Costa Rica reppin Latin America) as well as a food court with food and beverage from Russia, Turkey, Mexico, Kenya, India, France, and Ecuador. I was thrilled. I got myself a gyro from the Turkey stand and a bratwurst and a beer from the Germany stand and wandered around chowing down on my delicious multicultural meal.

When the lady working the exhibit saw me taking this picture she 

asked me, "Would you like to know a little about Costa Rica?"

In the US, 'talent show' usually means some singers, some dancers, a couple of magicians, and maybe a guy who can make his stomach look like Danny DeVito. In Korea, 'talent show' apparently means "let's all go up there and sing nothing but ballads like the love of our lives are in the audience and we have this one song to convince them to come back to us." This might have been enjoyable were I a 15 year old on a date with his 14 year old girlfriend, but, alas, I am not and I was not. The only real noteworthy part of the talent competition was the rapper who I got to watch warm-up, but, unfortunately, didn't get to see perform because I had to catch my train. During warm-up, he performed an English song but felt that it was sufficient to just spit random English words instead of actually learning the lyrics. One of his sequences went as follows: "now pick up the bush man, putting sugar on the leg, take it to the dog, and close the bus down." Now that I'm looking at the lyrics, maybe he's just really poetic, like a Korean Bob Dylan. Another thing I found interesting about the rapper was that, when he performed his Korean song, he used the honorific verb tense, used when speaking to an elder or superior. I didn't actually understand the lyrics but picked up on the 'nida', 'sida' 'nim' and 'seyo' of the honorific tense. In my mind, I imagined his lyrics went something like, "yo respectable girl, come over here and back that honorable booty up on this humble playa."

Looking past the terrible talent show that ended the night, the Cheonan World Dance Festival was, all in all, a really enjoyable event. By far the best thing it has going for it is its embrace of multiculturalism. In a country that has traditionally prided itself on being one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world and has a reputation of hostility towards diversity, it's really cool to see a multicultural event thriving. As an RPCV, it's probably no surprise to you that I believe cultural exchange is important. In an increasingly globalized world, it's important that we understand cultural differences while also recognizing that behind the different clothes, food, and dancing styles, we're all still humans who have the same basic needs and desires. The Cheonan World Dance Festival is doing its part to facilitate that understanding and, for that, it should be given a standing ovation.

Getting Passed

Last night I made a run to my nearest grocery store. Right in front of that grocery store is a pretty ordinary children's park. What is not ordinary about it is that the slides and jungle-gym and seesaws are surrounded by adult workout equipment - ellipticals and stationary bikes. "What a great idea." I thought to myself, "Instead of just sitting on a bench, bored out of their minds, the parents can get a quick workout in while watching the kids play."

I walk home from the grocery store on a sidewalk made out of that rubbery track material, which is exponentially better for your knees if you run on those streets like I do. I walk past my bus stop and admire the digital display that gives real-time updates telling you how long it will be until your bus arrives. Not sure if bus 73 goes the way you need? No biggie, just click on the display to see the route. Oh and don't worry about walking or cycling to be eco-friendly; these buses run on electricity which is magnetically pulled from wiring in the road when the bus passes over.

One of the most glaring differences that I've noticed between Korea and the US thus far has been the disparity in the level of infrastructure and "smart city design." It's unbelievable. Coming back from Costa Rica to the US, I felt like I had time-traveled forward 50 years. Now going from the US to Korea, I feel like I've gone another 50. The roads, the bridges, the airport, the trains, and, most of all, the little "smart" things like I mentioned from my trip to the grocery store, are all so much better than anything I've experienced in the US.

This is what we too could have if we had a government that actually functioned properly and spent money in the right places. We could have mother-effin buses that pull electricity from the road! But instead we want to give tax breaks to oil companies and maintain a military budget larger than the next 12 countries combined (and yes, conservative friends, I think we spend too much money on inefficient Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security programs as well). While our government is busy managing one artificial crisis after another, other countries are getting shit done. While our two political parties are fighting over the wheel, jerking the car left and right all over the road (or slamming on the brakes), other countries are speeding past us in their eco-friendly buses, staring out the window in disbelief.




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*This foundation in no way helps orphans, kittens, pandas, or rainbows. All proceeds will be used to buy Austin good beer from the American grocery store.

You So Handsome!

Immediately after arriving in my new hometown of Gumi, two of my coteachers picked me up in a car and took me to my new school to meet the principal, my predecessor, and a few other teachers and students. We arrive and go to the principal's office first. I take off my shoes, walk in, shake his hand and sit down. Almost immediately, he tells me, through my translating coteacher, that I'm very handsome. I thank him, thinking that it's a little weird but just chalking it up to cultural differences, something being lost in translation, or just him being an open guy that likes to flatter people. He then goes on to give me a full face reading: my smile conveys that I'm a bright, optimistic person, my well-manicured hair tells him that I'm very disciplined, and my glasses tell him that I keep up with the latest trends. My first reaction: this is uncomfortable. My second reaction: he's pretty bad at this.

I then go upstairs to my new classroom to meet some of the students. It's a Tuesday so the fourth graders are there. Fourth graders who were so excited about having a new teacher that they decided to ambush him as soon as he walked in the door. I'm greeted with a chorus of "Hello!" "What's your name?" "Nice to meet you!" and "You so handsome!" There it is again! I think to myself, "Okay, there are only three possible explanations for this: I'm looking really good today, it's a cultural thing to tell people you've just met that they're handsome, or these fourth graders are drunk."

Turns out that it's a cultural thing (the kids only had a buzz). Koreans put a lot of emphasis on appearances. Telling a person that they're handsome doesn't seem to be so much of a comment on their attractiveness as it is an approval that they've passed the initial appearances test. They're saying, "You're not fat, you don't have a neckbeard, you don't smell funny, and you're not wearing jorts. You seem like a decent human being and we can now proceed to the next step of talking and possibly becoming friends." I think that a lot of it comes down to the Korean people's focus on efficiency. They have very little free time and they're not interested in wasting it on a person who might not be worth it. Harsh, but understandable.

I'm tempted to leave this post here on a not-necessarily-high-note-but-not-a-low-note-either; however, it would be wrong and deceptive of me to only mention positive and neutral aspects of the culture while leaving out, what I perceive to be, the negative ones. The truth is, unfortunately, this strong cultural emphasis on appearances has made South Korea the plastic surgery capital of the world. One in five women from Seoul have had plastic surgery and the number for women 18-30 is believed to be above 50%. The general tendency is towards a western appearance: round face, straight nose, eyes that open wider, and, most shockingly, double eyelids. Plastic surgery in South Korea has turned into a nuclear arms race. People get plastic surgery so that they'll be more confident. But, in doing so, they make others less confident, making them feel the need to get (more) plastic surgery. This vicious cycle continues to spin out of control. Hopefully, it will stop one day but it certainly doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon.



If you enjoyed this and want to read more about my time in Korea, go ahead and enter your email address in the top right corner so that you don't have to keep an eye out for my Facebook links to the blog. For every person that subscribes, I will donate $5 to the Orphans, Kittens, Pandas, and Rainbows Foundation.*

*This foundation in no way helps orphans, kittens, pandas, or rainbows. All proceeds will be used to buy Austin good beer from the American grocery store.