Well, I promised an update when I finally managed to make an online grocery order all on my own, and today, that was my biggest achievement. The lucky site was…. Emart. As I related a while back (first here, then here), Homeplus rapidly fixed one text field on its website when Lime ranted about how I wasn’t able to register, and then was told, “Oh, sorry, nothing can be done!” and then emailed the Korean Head Office. (Suddenly a software change was possible… but it was sloppy, and while foreigners now can register at Homeplus/Tesco, they can’t actually buy anything, …
Category: KOREA
Worthwhile Stuff For Your Ears and Eyes
Here is some worthwhile stuff to check out, while it’s at the front of my mind: Ears First, a couple of excellent stories in podcast form, by my pals from Clarion West: Pesudopod‘s rendition of the very dark story “The Greatest Adventure of All” by Ian McHugh Beneath Ceaseless Skies‘ rendition of Tina Connolly’s fantasy “The God-Death of Halla” (and other excellent stories are available on the same page) Eyes A short article giving even more context to the context I provided for my story “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” has been posted over at his excellent blog Gusts …
Dealing with Scammers: Memes and Means
There’s a new meme on Facebook, the Name Game. Well, I don’t know how new it really is, but I hadn’t seen it until this morning. It goes like this: you follow the instructions and generate a bunch of “names” for yourself: Replace my answers with yours and tag as many people as you want (but don’t forget to tag me!) 1. Agent-name (the second one of your fist names and the street you live in) – 2. Moviestar-name (grandparent from your father’s side and your favourite candy) – 3. Rapstar-name (first letter of your first name and 3-5 first …
Got a Call from Starbucks Korea… :)
Right, so after my message the other day to Starbucks Seattle, I got a very courteous, polite, apologetic, and professional call this afternoon from someone at Starbucks Korea, who works in marketing and who gave me the lowdown on this story, after getting a call from Seattle sometime today. She told me that the Alien Registration Numbers weren’t usable for Starbucks wifi access at first, but that this was fixed in early February. (I think she said the 6th, but I’m not 100% sure of it.) She said that it should be working now. I told her that it had …
Starbucks Nespot No Movement? Help!
UPDATE (Friday, 20 February, 2009): Starbucks called me the day after I posted this, and it looks like the problem may have been fixed since I last tried. (Or partially fixed, with more fixing to come?) Read the followup-post here. ORIGINAL POST: I personally find it annoying that Starbucks Korea offers (with partner NESPOT) free wifi in all its branches throughout Korea… but only to Korean citizens. I find it even more ridiculous because when they launched it, it was advertised in English, all proudly and happily, until it was discovered that foreigners couldn’t register with their alien registration numbers …
Define “Big,” and Define “Butts” (Plus a Barrage of Amusing Youtube Videos)
The other day, while I was searching for the video “Soju Mama” in a recent post, I ran across this commercial: The fact they used this song, and this celebrity, in this commercial, suggests one of these two possibilities: They figured most people don’t know what “I like big butts” means. Which is maybe plausible, since I find most Koreans who aren’t really high-level in English translate whichever Korean word indicates both (is it 엉덩이? That’s the one I learned first and remembered because I heard it so often, so I assume it’s the most common) as “hip” to indicate …
Expatriates and Creative Bitching
I’ve often got this song on a loop in my MP3 these days when I ride the subways: Before you read the following, seriously, listen to this song, check out the lyrics, of which the following passage grabbbed me (hard, by wrist) when I first heard it: I understand the culture’s Of a different kind, But here [the] word celebration Just doesn’t come to mind! This resonates with me in the context of the story the song tells: a band that describes itself, in its early days, as “a bunch of immigrants jamming” who met at “a Russian wedding in …
I’m in a Meeting
I didn’t write that last post at 9:00am today, but rather last night. Scheduling posts to be published at a later date is cool. Neat, and it’s new to me — I couldn’t do cron jobs before in WordPress on my webhost’s space. I love it! And yes, by the time this gets published, I’ll really be in some kind of orientation meeting. I don’t know whether any of it is going to be in English, or how much point there is to me being there. (Most of the other new profs are bound to be Korean, and those who …
Miss Yum and Mr. Bum Suck
Okay, okay, I know, it’s a cheap joke, and one all too common on cynical expat blogs. But please, wait, wait, hear me out! Sometimes you really do end up with students in your class, or friends you meet in other ways, who have these names that are just, well… they’re things you can’t help but grin at, because you’re an Anglophone and because people should just not be named that sort of thing. Like Miss Yum. Okay, really, it was Miss Yeom, but it was pronounced yum, as in, what people say when they see food they want to …
Old Foreign TV Shows in Korea
Last week, I was coming home from Seoul by taxi, because I’d missed the last train, and I happened to hear a series of old TV show themes. From the commentary — what little of it I could understand — it was a kind of late-night retrospective on (American) TV shows that had aired back in the old days of Korean broadcasting, before Korean-made media had expanded to the point where it could dominate the Korean airwaves. It was pretty interesting, and the cabbie and I chatted a little about the shows, as each theme played. Some of the ones …