Kyle in Korea

An issue with moving to Korea, and then living here for an extended period of time is that lots of people ask you (or you can tell they are thinking it) Why Korea? What’s in Korea?

There are, of course, lots of great reasons to live in Korea. Friendly people, beautiful country, excellent food, tremendous job opportunities, travel, and so on.

The second question is more problematic. There’s lots of things in Korea. I think what people really are thinking is: What do I know about Korea?

If you are anything like me before I came here, your knowledge of Korea is pretty limited. There’s like 200 countries in the world and you only have so much room for international trivia.

Anyways, when you bring up Korea there’s about seven general responses, about seven preexisting pieces of information about Korea that your average American citizen has at their disposal. Here they are, in order of frequency:

1. North Korea is very scary. Kim jong-il is crazy. I’m concerned for your safety.

2. The Korean war. I have a family member/friend/neighbor/person I know who was involved in the Korea war.

3. The 1988 Seoul Olympics. The Olympics, at the very least, installed in Americans that Seoul is a very big city, and it is located in South Korea.

4. My friend/family member/person I know teaches English there.

5. South Korea is a technologically advanced country. My cell phone/ TV is from Korea! I think it gets lumped in with Japan here a little bit.

6. Something about sports. The soccer team, Kim Yu-na, or Shin Soo-choo.

7. Korean food is delicious and/or trendy. Kimchi!

I’m going to add an eighth PG-13 category here:

8. Like many peninsulas it vaguely resembles a part of the male anatomy, if you want it to. (I’m looking at you Florida!)

And maybe a ninth category containing insensitive and culturally inappropriate remarks.

That’s it, I think? Can any of my American friends/family think of any other things you knew about Korea before you knew someone there?

I just want to reiterate that I don’t think this is bad, if you fell into one of these categories. Korea is but one of many countries in the world, and after Canada, Mexico, Russia, China, Japan, and a few European countries, your average person is probably doing really well to be able to locate it on a map without help. That’s certainly the case for me.

Anyways, as an American living in Korea, people sometimes ask me about what it’s like. I have a feeling that most people kind of envision seizure inducing flashing neon lights in the cities and acres of rice paddies out in the country. Also, at a dinner party someone once asked me if Korea was like 20 years behind America (Bonus answer: it’s not). After being here for a year plus some time, I see Korea everywhere now, even in Western media. I see it in the news. I see Korean products and influences.

Because I’ve grown to love the country, and also because I function to many of my family and friends as a source of information about it, and possibly a stand-in for the entire place, I’d like to share some links on the internet where you can learn more about Korea. These are all places I myself have used to learn about Korea.There’s tons more to the country besides the above bullet points. I can’t really figure out how to add live links to my blog, so I guess you’ll have to copy and paste if you’re interested.

Here we go:

Like just about every topic in the world, it’s a great idea to start with Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea

The New York Times has a “Times Topic” section about Korea. It’s got a brief introduction followed by archived articles. I especially like the restaurant reviews. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/southkorea/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=south%20korea&st=cse

The Korea Society, located in New York City, hosts lectures about Korea and later puts them on iTunes. This is a great resource, especially for podcast listeners. Organization website at http://www.koreasociety.org/, and just do a “Korea Society” search in iTunes for the podcasts.

Korea4expats is a website lots of people use once they’re in Korea, but it also has a lot of good general information. Go to http://korea4expats.com/ and then click on “About Korea” on the top blue bar, and after that check out “Working & Business”.

I also really like Slate.com’s archived stories about Korea. Try this: “http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=3944&qt=south+korea” and then do your best to wade past the North Korea stuff, if you’re like me and don’t want to think about it too much.

This is another site that people mostly use after they’ve arrived to search for jobs and use the community message boards, but Dave’s ESL Cafe has a cool Korea Q & A section of saved discussion topics and so on. It’s located at http://forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewforum.php?f=7

Finally, they say a picture says a thousand words, and I haven’t broken 900 yet, so you probably should have just skipped to the bottom, and checked out “http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/South_Korea/” where you can see thousands of pictures of Korea and its people.