Recently, I posted about the fact that someone needn’t come to Korea to experience being held at arm’s length in a group, regardless of what one does to assimilate or join. Working in a family business is a great way to experience this. Also, sometimes people ask me what I did before I came to Korea. If it seems like an idle question, then I just say, I went to grad school, and taught at Concordia University while I was studying there. Also, some tech writing. And I leave it at that. The fact of the matter is, whatever I …
Tag: expat
Angst and Rant No(t much) More
Yesterday I had one of those days that is inevitable for everyone who lives abroad. No matter how happy you are in general, there are those days, those cursed days, when everything you don’t like about your chosen place of residence just comes up and slaps you in sequence, one by one. It’s one of those days when the place you’ve decided to live, and the place you care about or even love, decides to drive you crazy. Sometimes, people have those days when it’s just really one jerk who annoys them. Sometimes they have those days because of the …
Project Online Grocery Ordering: Success! (#1?)
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, …
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 …