South Korean Tourism – Korea is SAFE!

Over the past month concerned friends and family have asked me about my safety here in korea. One even asked if it’s safe to come here for vacation. I am fully aware of the ship sinking incident and the tensions between the two Koreas, but I never feel unsafe here in korea. I listen to CNN in the mornings while im getting ready for work and they make it seem like korea is a dangerous place where a bomb could go off any second and war will start tomorrow. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the current events, but rather let you in on my perspective. Korea is safe. If you were planning on visiting this summer, swing by. You wont get hurt  by a stampeding demonstration. 

you wont see this:

[link]
this doesnt happen everyday:

[link]

People don’t steal here, people dont rip you off as much, the streets are relatively clean, many people fear speaking English but will do so if you are in dire need, and things are pretty easy and convenient – don’t forget about everything being extra cutesy.

It may not be the most English-friendly place but people understand enough English to help you, they just might not respond correctly. For example, if you get lost, people are willing to help you. One time my American friend was lost didn’t have my phone number on him. This Korean guy let him use his laptop so my friend could get my number through an old email, then the Korean guy called me with his phone and directed my friend to me. Another time my other friend was lost and this cute Korean dude called me with his phone, I told him where I lived and then walked her all way to my front door while carrying her bags for her. This was probably 30 minutes out of his way. These acts are extremely nice but not totally uncommon.  

Why the seemingly sudden change of heart toward korea? It’s not korea that I hate. Also, because I went to a family function yesterday and they were trying to convince me that korea was safe but I already knew that.  

Btw thank you korea for all of these random holidays. Wedsneday is the national voting day and everyone gets the day off to make sure they vote… or to make sure everyone goes to Everland. 

Korean dating flow chart

I saw this in a Maxim Magazine link and automtaically thought that the korean dating flowchart would look a little different.

it should be "how koreans decide to go on a date"

I'M BACK!!

i am going to admit i was in really, really bad shape yesterday. extreme reverse culture shock. yesterday i was staring at the walls, my coworkers said i had no life in my eyes (it also might have been because i forgot to put on eye makeup haha). I would sigh a lot (btw if you let out a sigh apparently you're letting out your luck), not be mentally present when people would talk to me, everything i thought about always somehow trailed back to hong kong.  i was just flat out depressed . i experienced this once before many years ago after i got back from paris. i think i had withdrawals for two weeks! so i guess two days of moping aint so bad. 

Thank god i'm back to normal... or at least what i think normal is. 

Macau

Dimsum in Causeway Bay

koreans clubbing in hk

i love you hong kong

Psychedelic fiction always calms me down.

The sky is clear

The air is cool

The office has a stale stench

I miss going outside.

When am I going to stop singin the blues?

Once upon a time there was a little girl. She didn’t fit in on earth and would wait around all day on the top of high buildings waiting to float away. 

During an unexpected tornado, she found herself in the middle of a whirlwind. It flung her into the air and shot her to the moon. “Yes, finally! So long earth!”

The moon was boring so she swam to Uranus but found it dirty and smelly. She liked mars.

Mars - have you been there before? Lilies flutter in the air like butterflies and the soil is warm like a sauna. The air, cold like her heart.

One day while minding her own business, she saw him. The love of her life. She called him Martin the Martian.

They couldn’t communicate but instead stared into each other’s eyes. 100 years passed and she decomposed into the soil. he sat by her side. He was a microwave. 

HONG KONG - I LOVE YOU.

HK was exactly the escape from korea that I desperately needed. The weekend went by too fast and I made so many funny noob mistakes with skippy.

i want to live there. i miss it already. does everyone love hk? or did i just happen to have an abnormally wonderful time there?

Why Hong Kong is wonderful

1.     It’s a good melting pot. It shows that an Asian country can integrate, and do it well.

2.     People speak English.

3.     The shopping is awesome

4.     Regardless of weight, dress, make-up, style or whatnot, you don’t walk around feeling self conscious.

5.     HK is small. The subway system is simple and transfers are short.

6.     Good food

Things that suck in Hong Kong

1.     The weather. But hey, I grew up in California. I’m warped and spoiled.

Memorable things that happened this weekend:

1.     Macau

2.     On Sunday skippy woke up still drunk. She remained this way until around 3 pm. Her fumes and particularly her vodka-bottle breath made me nauseous.

3.     I clogged our hotel bathroom once (but it went down after 3 flushes). Later I went down to the lobby to used the lobby toilet and clogged one toilet. After multiple flushes I freaked out and left. Around 20 minutes later I go back to finish off my poopage in the next stall over and I clog that toilet as well. I started to freak out and contemplated whether or not to cut up my poo with the bathroom key, but it’s just not worth it. That hotel needs to invest in a stronger suction system.

4.     Clubbing in hk is awesome. However, apparently you need a membership to get a table, or even to get into a club – otherwise you end up waiting in line for a long time or some-somein. 

5.     Wonderful dim sum

6.     Such good food there. Now everything in korea seems incomparable. Sigh.

Pics later

-For personal records-

Updated destination list: 

Tier 1 priority: Singapore, Malaysia, Japan

Tier 2 priority: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia

Tier 3 priority: NYC, South America, India

Planned trips: 

Japan (July 2010, tentative)

Singapore/Malaysia OR Thailand (September 2010?)

Philippines (October 2010)

NYC (whenever i go to the states next)

Places i've been (in Asia)
Korea
China (Shanghai, Dalian, Cheungdu, Suzhou)
Taiwan
Hong Kong
Macau


The plan: leave korea every 2 months
maybe i'll work in korea a bit longer just so i can travel...

wow im going to be broke. 

Travel. it's good for you. 

whenever i'm in a rut, traveling always seems to wake me up... and then put me in a rut again. the traveling bug does strange things to you.

Hong Kong

I am off to Hong Kong for the weekend. Happy long weekend! & thanks buddah for the holiday.

happy 2,631st [?] birthday dude. 

Liquid Courage - Korean Workshop Style

Liquid courage really does wonders for this world. If alcohol and drugs weren’t invented, what would be the substitute? Actual conversations?? Or suppressed thoughts and feelings? Think about how many relationships, funny times and confessions have derived from intoxication. Maybe this world would be worse off without intoxicants. 

Our office is split roughly:

1/3 in the HQ [i work here]

1/3 in the next city over

1/3 offsite in projects

So when we have the opportunity to get together, we tend to go over the top.

I’m going to toot my own horn here but when I go to company workshop drinking parties (we have all-company workshops 2-3x per year) we drink. A lot. And I’m usually high in demand because 1. I’m a girl and 2. People get liquid courage and finally talk to me and practice their English on me. A typical interaction is as follows:

1.     We start at zero. Sober, they think i cant understand them, i think they cant understand me. They are pleasantly surprised that I can have and carry a conversation in Korean. They instantly overestimate my skills. I crack a joke. They are thrilled. They think that my level of Korean is much higher than it really is. They do not know that I have said the same joke to everyone else during the night and for the past month.  

2.     We talk, pour each other drinks. I yell out “ONE SHOT!!” they get excited. And think that I can drink a LOT. I act like soju is God’s piss and pretend I can drink 7x more than I actually can. They ask me to give them an English name. I name them after twilight/scifi characters. They ask me to teach them English and we make plans that end up with no actual follow up. We are new best friends.

3.      After conversing for hours i run out of material to repeat. they realize that i am a quack and that they had overestimated my skills. I call the ceo by his first name and pour him a full cup of beer and tell him to chug. People are impressed. Few can get away with this. I belch  "Hello" and people applaud. I’m fighting the urge to yell out obscenities. We all go to bed in our separate rooms feeling as if we just made 100 new best friends. I go to bed in a haze. 

The next morning we wake up and attend the first round of meetings. We are all miserable, hungover and some people are still drunk. We act as if last night did not happen. I cry on the inside. 

repeat every few months. 

ps i saw pirate at the workshop and he called me his best friend at the company! AWWW... i wonder if he means it. 

Korean Workshops

Friday 5pm – Saturday 4 pm my company hosted a workshop. A general breakdown of a typical workshop for my company is as follows [note: most other Korean workshops are more play-oriented, ours are work oriented]

5-7: people arrive, eat dinner, socialize

7: meetings commence. Presentations about some BS

8 – 11: inter department meetings, individual department meetings

11-3am and beyond: drink

7:30 – 9am breakfast,

9-12: meeting

12-12:30: lunch

12:30 – 3 meeting

3-4 prepare to leave

4-6 drive back to seoul

Sounds like a lot of meetings huh? Imagine it without using your laptop or other gadgets and listening to a language you don’t understand very well. The pain.

Our workshop was in a remote location 2 hours outside of seoul in the midst of farm land.

you cant quite tell based on this picture but if you drive drunk on this little 7 foot wide road, your car will topple into a small lake or a rice pond. 

you can see a little farmer on the bottom right side. those are rice fields.

Next i will analyze the workshop drinking atmosphere. stay tuned. 

MONDAY MORNING ANGER!!!!!!!! RAGE!!!!!!! VIOLENCE!!!!!!!!

Its one of those mornings.

I’m filled with violent rage. If another manager comes to me with another cliché line to help me get through this, I will use all restraint to punch him square in the face, poke into his socket and pull out his eyeballs with my pinkies and step on them. Kill Bill style. The ruptured eyeball ooze will sliver through my toes and then I'll thump that slush back in his face. As he is rolling on the floor in agony, a crowd will form around my partition. Frightened eyes don’t know whether to look at me or the manager on the floor.

I get on top of a table and start screaming like a deaf dinosaur while flaring my arms like a newborn on crack. The only logical next step is to start ripping off my clothes, but not in a sexy stripper kind of way but in an eerie feral child type of way. Then start rapping obscenities in my deaf dinosaur tone throwing out every swear word I can think of and then every private body part I think of… PENIS VAGINA ASSHOLE LABIAS… uhmm… RUPTURED SPLEEN!!!!! With no transition I start doing voodoo magic as if I actually know what im talking about and yell out harry potter spells. I curse my desk. Whoever sits at this very spot from now on will grow rainbow colored pubes and turn into a Gollum-esque gargoyle. “AND YOU’LL ALWAYS HAVE TO WORK THE NIGHT SHIFT WHILE BRAIDING YOUR RAINBOW AFRO PUBES!!!!!!”

I throw a chair at the window shattering it just enough for me to jump out. I jump. Coworkers gasp as they watch me transform. I am a Pegasus. I fly to bali and marry a monkey.  

Whew. I actually feel better after writing this. 

Awkward office moment

A few months ago, upon arriving back from a trip in china, my friend and I were chatting online while I was at work. I was explaining to my friend about how cheungdu, china incorporates a lot of peppers in their dishes. The only problem was, the word “pepper” had slipped my mind – instead I could only think of the Korean word for pepper which is “go-chu”

Right away, I turned to my coworker and asked him (in English), “how do you say ‘go-chu’ in English?” there was a long pause and then an awkward turtle floated by. I had just asked a potentially inappropriate question. 

**YAY new vocab word of the day for the non koreans. “go-chu” is slang, but everyone uses the term and knows what it entails.  

"Go-chu" = pepper 

"Go-chu" = penis

Therefore,

Pepper = penis...?

Resume Sorting - hypercritial

[Repost from September 2009]

The hiring process is very interesting. I am reviewing this application from this girl in the states. She’s from salt lake city and my ceo nearly automatically asked me to investigate whether or not she is a Mormon. why that has any relevance, im not sure.

It’s really strange being on this end of the interview process. I am particularly picky because

1. This girl will be working for me for the first 6 or so months and then with me thereafter.
2. She will sit next to me and work with me… I want to make sure to choose someone I can get along with and not have to babysit.
3. if we hire another american we have to deal with a lot of logistics

Judging her resume
1. Her resume is bare. (-10)
2. Not professional looking at all. Looks like she spent 30 minutes writing it up. (-15)
3. She uses “etc.” in her job description, which is one of my pet peeves. (-25)
4. Template not professional also, no professional experience. She is a recent grad so I cant expect professional experience, but maybe an internship or two during her 5 year college career would have been nice. (-15)
5. Two of her experiences have to do with English/Korean translating (+10 points)
6. Incorrect grammar (-20)
7. No sense of personality or hard work ethic in her resume (-10)
8. She went to an unknown university (-5)
9. I looked her up on facebook. She has 190 friends and a vague profile picture (im a stalker)
10. Google street viewed her home, looks nice (im a super stalker)
11. Her only actives were the Korean club and church, which is wonderful but again, doesnt show me anything about her.. I need someone with spunk, attitude and personality to strive in sales. i'm being hypercritical and judgmental - by hey, a resume is meant for selling yourself. (-10)


Grand total: -100

Some of the things on the list are incredibly nitpicky and unreasonable, but these are just thoughts I keep to myself.. and this blog haha. Phone interview tomorrow, let’s see if she can revive her score.

Basically if you want a job, do the opposite of everything this girl has done.

On a separate but related note:
Koreans are really good at speaking. Every Korean I have interviewed over the phone has performed well. Sometimes when Koreans speak it sounds poetic,. My ceo insists we hire a native English speaker who is also fluent in Korean. Very tough criteria. Im getting desperate but still picky.

ITS MY BDAY

When I was in kindergarten I invited all of the girls from my class to my 5^th birthday party. To be honest, I don’t remember much except for the trauma of my bunny dying after my party.

There are no real facts and unfortunately no cold evidence…. maybe it was a fluke but all these years I blamed the death of my albino bunny on this one girl, let’s call her molly (because that is her real name) for feeding it actual poisoned leaves from a tree. For years I was mean to hear and blamed her for my misery of killing my bunny and throughout high school I always felt guilty for smothering her with the blame.

My sophomore year of high school, a friend of mine was driving across a busy street while the sun was beaming in her eyes and she hit a girl. I wasn’t there to witness it but my friend was in shock and sat outside for a bit, the girl on the other hand was fine and roller-bladed home. Turns out it was Molly! NO JOKE! Maybe it was karma? Maybe it was just pure bad luck.   

Point #1: Sorry molly if I made the rest of kindergarten awkward for you

Point#2 : At such a young age, i swore off birthday parties for life. 

After the passing of BunBunny (actual name) I swore off birthday parties and never had a birthday party with friends until I was 20… and then I had my third birthday party last Friday. So that makes it a total of three birthdays! It helps that throughout elem, middle and high school, my bff was a jehova’s witness, and that my birthday was smack dab in the middle of AP testing.. and any other excuse I could come up with… I just don’t feel comfortable hosting my own bday party.

Instead I go to other birthday parties and pretend that it is my own. HAHA. OR i host random "birthday parties" strategically placed months before or after my actual birthday. 


This is me attention whoring with friends. 

Saturday morning I found a partially melted ice cream on the floor in my apt, and today (Monday) I found a partially eaten kebab in my purse! I think it’s safe to say I had a good time. 

Friday funday

Wednesday was Children’s Day, a national holiday, which is an odd day to have a day off work, but made me realize that having a day off work smack dab in the middle of the week is the best idea ever!

I watched a play called “뮤지컬 결혼” which means “musical wedding”. It was a dark musical comedy with only 4 cast members. The place was very cute with a capacity of maybe 50. The cast members made the play interactive and had audience members participate. I spent most of the play trying to understand the content based on context, but overall it was really cool.

At the end of the play, after the cast did their final bow, the lead guy took out a letter from his coat pocket and read 1/2 of it. It was a love letter from an audience member and he had written the letter for his gf. The guy went on stage with his girlfriend and read the rest of the letter. Then he got on one knee and proposed to his gf! She said yes. It was soooo cute. I always wanted to see someone propose! SCREAM! 

everything in korea is cute. even their donuts. 

Notes and things

• Thanks to Kyu for helping me with the template change. I have the second half of the transformation and then some coming up shortly

• Special shout out to oldest sister for sending me a very unexpected gift in the mail

• Sloppy update in store for monday. but until then, have a nice weekend

• I made a "steven's top pick" section on the right hand side. Steven, one of my first and most loyal readers has picked some of his fave entries.

• Finally made a blogroll. sorry im a blogging noob.

OPPA OPPA I'll be I'll be down down down down

Now that I have more native Korean friends I call them “언니” (unni/older sister) or “오빠” (oppa/older brother). Calling someone “unni” is nothing new to me since I grew up with biological sisters, only making it natural. Oppa on the other hand is not natural for me. Even in the states I always refrained from calling someone oppa, but because here in korea it’s normal, and Korean names don’t roll off the tongue for me (and I cant memorize Korean names) I have resorted to calling people oppa. It makes me feel like a girl from SNSD

The thing is… I have a bad habit of calling them  “엄마” (umma/mom) or “아빠” (appa/dad). It’s really strange and embarrassing. Please tell me that im not the only retarded person out there.  

Happy early Parents Day

In Korea, Wednesday is children’s day (we get the day off tomorrow WOOHOO), and Saturday is parent’s day. Today, my 400^th post, is dedicated to parents...and their funny emails. 

To follow up on my previous post, this is the gchat convo (with translations) that propelled the entry:

4:34 PM Umma: hi, Jihae what are you doing?

 me: wow your english is so good!

  일하고 있어요. (i'm working)

 Umma: hahaha did you have lunch?

4:35 PM me: 네. (yes.)

  .... 누구세요? (.... who is this?)

4:36 PM Umma: Jihae, this is your mother baboya (baboya = stupid)

me: is this jiyoung

  transcribing?

 Umma: your real mother

4:37 PM me: really?

 Umma: Jihae, i want to go sleeping

------

This intermorning my cousins sent me this hilarious email my aunt had sent a few years back:


I am the centry 21 Emailer,

of course I will take you lunch at MOON,
When you come in Palo Alto?
When you getting Marry?  I want be Granma.
I want to be HIPTY HAP Grandma.
Buy Buy Love
Hong Ki Bong Ki

LOL

How to have fun

On Saturday I was thinking to myself that I might have a partying addiction. Or maybe I have an alcohol addiction OR maybe im addicted to having fun. im not sure what I’m addicted to, the fine lines have been blurred. So on Saturday night I got home around 10, took a nap til midnight, drank a bottle of vodka with Dionne, Ed and Ann and pranced over to club answer.

By the time we actually got into the club it was already 2:30. We just walked passed the cashier, didn’t pay cover (cover is around 30 bucks each), and started dancing. Around 3 am we take a bathroom break and I realized that I couldn't see properly… I was seeing spots… lots of them. instantly I felt very sick. I threw up spicy Indian food three times and then got back on the dance floor and played til daylight.

during the cab ride home i turned to Dionne and Ann and asked, "do you want to come over and drink more?" with a quickness Dionne said "i'm down."  but we ended up going out separate ways. next time though.

And that. Is an example of how to have fun.

I can already imagine the reverse culture shock I’ll go through when I return back to the states. I’ll show up at the club at 2:30 and everyone will already be eating danger dogs outside while talking about how pooped they are. Then I’ll throw a belligerent fit along the lines of “WTF THE CLUB IS ALREADY CLOSED!!! GAHHHHHHHH” *grumble grumble...throw things... get arrested* 

Funniest email from my mother.

Now that my mom's english has improved, i think i can repost this email my mom sent a while back. be prepared for the most classic fob email ever. in all fairness, an email written in korean by me would be incomprehensible. 

ps i submitted this email to www.mymomisafob.com but they didnt approve it. maybe because it was too awesome... but check out their site for a fobtastic time!


In response to what we will do for our father's 60th birthday:
---------


hallow, daugther

My plen is that early intermoring i will give him to some good blackfirst (miyoukgook )everning, we will going to lions meeting

in korea, someone who sixty years old birthday will big ceramomy
but, my children get the no good momey, no marrey, no grandchildren
so poor situation now

i hope seventy birthday will celavration maybe. (defens on how you guys doing that time )

anyway you guys do best for him that day
pregent, singing, talking
what ever you want

mother.
-------


FYI - by "pregent" she means "presents" NOT "pregnant" haha