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 …
Tag: KOREA
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 …
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 …
No Tokyo For You! (Er, Meaning Me…)
A couple of factors combined to make the potential trip to Tokyo that I mentioned here unworkable. (Not the least, a great deal of uncertainty until, well, this morning about whether I’d need this or that or the other thing to get the code number I’m supposed to get in order to do my visa run.) Now I have stuff going on this week, stuff to get done, people to see and places to be — heh, even an orientation tomorrow, which will probably be several hours of incomprehensibility to whatever foreign profs actually make it there — so the …
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 …
Swiss Cheese News and the Un-Mediagenic Reportage Barrier
Boing Boing has updated — with very little new information — about the case of Dymond Milburn in Galveston, Texas. “Hey, look, a little black girl in her yard! She must be one of those hookers we’re looking for!” “But the hookers we’re looking for are white. And she’s in her yard, with her doggie, fiddling with the circuit breaker.” “SO?!?!? She’s totally a whore. I mean, look at how she’s dressed. What, are you scared? There’s four of us and one of her, bro. Come on, let’s go enforce the law.” [Car door slams.] “Hey, little black hooker girl. …
Hiking Boots?
I’ll be going to a mountain on Wednesday, as part of a very interesting workshop involving Korean SF writers and astronomers — oh, yes, a listening comprehension test three days long, which I’m already failing, but more about that afterwards — and I’ve been told it would be a good idea to have some hiking boots. I’ll be in Seoul tomorrow, and would be able to pick some up, except I have no idea where such things could be gotten — that is, winter boots, in “large size” (ie. 300, 305, 310, or bigger, depending on the brand). Apparently the …
Gnome!
Usually you’d expect any mention of Gnome here to be related to the version of Ubuntu Linux I use, but this is a Gnome of a different color. Today an enthusiast of the Gnome Press — the company that published a ton of formative SF, like Asimov’s most famous books — discovered my blog and linked me from his own, which is called The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey. He’s got a pretty interesting blog there with personal stuff and stuff about the Gnome Press books that he collects. Yet another SF fan in Korea bubbles up out of …