Sometimes foreigners complain about life in Korea. Sometimes their complaints are valid, and sometimes their complaints are ridiculous. Let me give you an example. I just had a ridiculous conversation on the phone with a woman who told me, “No there’s no problem! No problem!” when I know from recent phone calls that there is indeed a problem. I had gotten a month behind on my internet/landline bill, and die to misunderstandings with the text-messages that the telecom company sent (and my own carelessness reading the bills) I had been perpetually one month behind for a long time. Finally, I …

Been working on a list of recommendations for foreigners new to South Korea. They’re available in the extended entry of this post. Comments and refinements welcome. Thanks!

Jeff, over at Ruminations in Korea, has a very interesting and informative (and saddening) post about the pressures on kids writing the Uni entrance exams in Korea, and the suicides related to it. All I have to add to it is that not only does the nature of this form of University admission create a ton of unnecessary pressure, it also atomizes students and forces them to reject the idea of cooperative learning, a pattern that stays with them for a long time (I see it in my Uni classes all the time). Not only that, but it (along with …

Yesterday I was taking a taxi downtown when I encountered a big chip on a cab driver’s shoulder. We were passing a group of cops who’d formed a Sunday afternoon traffic trap near the bridge downtown. Well, someone woman had just been stopped by a cop (for speeding in a busy downtown area, a rare example of enforcing laws which save lives) and was calling someone for aid—perhaps her father or uncle or something, I don’t know. Anyway, the cop tried to get her to cut off her phone call, and she simply turned her back on him and kept …

Well, I learned a couple of very strange little bits of Koreana today from Lime, and thought they were interesting enough to post about: 삼신 할머니 (SamShin Halmeoni, or SamShin Grandmother) is some kind of midwife-deity to whom old grannies would pray in the early morning, beseeching that their grandchildren would be born healthy. The SamShin Grandmother is the spiritual midwife of Korean babies, and it’s her job to whack little kids on the bottom when it’s their turn to pop out into the material world. This, they say, is why Korean babies have a Mongolian spot on their backsides. …