One Month Anniversary

So, it's been one month as of "Today" meaning, July 8th.  While not much has happened since the last time I wrote (except for some nice research) I feel compelled to inscribe some general things about Korea that I feel like I can comment on after a month of living in the country.

Generally; if you want to imagine Korea, take America, get rid of all of the diverse micro-cultures and compress it to the size of Virginia.  Next, make all the people Korean (with a shake or two of foreigners -- they have less foreigners here than we have in Newark by far...) and throw the whole thin on top of a blanket of beautiful mountains.  Make the climate almost exactly like Delaware -- a little less hot and a little less humid, but with a monsoon season.

Nows the fun part -- Amplify EVERYTHING and then add a bunch of advertisements for plastic surgery, some traditional customs, and some weird foods.

Now you have Korea.  So let me go into a bit more detail about what I mean.  When in Korea: they party harder, they work harder and more efficiently, they relax harder, they play harder... Everything is more intense.  Now you know about the food because I've been blogging about it for months so I won't go into that; as well as the customs.

Also, people here put a lot of importance on appearance, and I'm not just talking about the prevalence of plastic surgery (they like the double-eyelids, nose jobs, jaw reconstruction, and removing muscle from their legs to make them thinner), but all around people pay a lot more attention to how they dress themselves in the morning and the fashion is a lot nicer for it -- you don't see people walking around in stained white T shirts with holes in them, or beaters, or any of that stuff.  The women tend to wear dresses a lot more (and have really cute umbrellas) and dudes always try to either look cool or sharp. 

That said, grad student attire is identical.  Jeans, t-shirts (relatively clean) or button ups.  There's a little bit less of an emphasis on formal safety and I haven't come to a conclusion on whether or not that's good.  It's not that people aren't safe, it's just that they have the option not to be -- their safety is in their hands, rather than some "officially appointed safety person".  Graduate student life is pretty much the same as it is back home for me as well; get into the office around 10/10:30pm, work for an hour or two then go to lunch, work till dinner and then stay ridiculously late.  The whole 12-14 hour day thing seems to be a staple of my field and position.

Now some of the cultural things about the lab group are pretty different.  They're a pretty tight knit group; they all know everything (almost) about one another and support each other both in their work and in their personal lives.  There's always one student who's appointed as the "Captain" and who keeps a track of everyone else -- that means if you're going to leave early to have dinner with your girlfriend, or if you think you're going to sleep in the next day; you should tell him.  They also try to go on "member training" trips together (like Seoraksan) and share two meals a day together (roughly).

The lab group that I'm in is super awesome and I've enjoyed every minute of it -- I've already started calling these guys my brothers (and sisters); in Korean of course!

Now some more general things -- you can tell that the country has expanded quite rapidly.  Almost nothing that is here now was here before 1953(ish) -- the end of the Korean war.  Even the traditional and historic stuff has gone through serious rennovations in order to make up for that struggle -- and if you'd see the terrain here it would instantly hit you how hard it must have been for the soldiers...

A good example is Hyundai motor company -- it was founded in 1967 and in collaboration with Ford, started building cars.  It built it's first solo car in 1975 which was built mostly with imported technologies, and in 1988 produced the first all-Korean car.  Today it is the 4th largest automobile company in the world; and supplies MOST of the cars, trucks, buses, etc. in Korea.  In fact; finding a non-Korean car in Korea is super rare -- they're built by Hyundai, Samsung-Renault, or SsangYong (which was just bought out by an Indian company, but that doesn't count because it was so recent that the cars are still "Korean").

Korea has also developed an incredibly efficient public transit system, a very powerful telecommunications system and manages to keep it all clean and working.  Seoul doesn't even have "slums" -- there are a few homeless people but even they are scarce.  Crime rates are super low and everything is spotless (clean).  Now all of that stuff is also affordable -- the subway here is cheaper than places like New York and Paris, and I never have to worry about the metro workers going on strike; or getting onto a particularly nasty subway car.

To top it all off; the city-dwellers (and workers I suppose) are nice...   Now NYC and Paris (keep referring to these because they are also megalopolises that I've visited) can learn something from that.  If I ask a stranger (who doesn't know any English) for direction with my terrible set of Korean vocabulary and some creative hand-signs -- they will do EVERYTHING in their power to help me out.  It's really amazing.

Next, the 방 -- bangs.  Because of the population density in Korea having someone over to your house or apartment for dinner and a movie is rather impractical -- it's very rare to play host in that kind of a way.  So instead there are special "rooms" called "bangs" that cater to that same kind of entertainment.  So you might to to dinner together at a restaurant, then move to a bar, and once you're finished with that go to a Noraebang (norae = song; so song-room = karaoke) and sing your heart out.  Or you could go to a DVD-bang and chill and watch a movie on a comfy couch; a PC-bang and place some on-line video games (on a high-spec computer that you didn't have to pay for); a Jimjibang (or bathhouse -- sauna's, massages, hot tubs, that kind of thing) or even a Love-motel (which I will leave up to your imagination).  On top of that they have athletic complexes for super cheap -- you can get into a skate park for 5,000 won, or go to the batting cages for 1,000 won and hit about 20 fast-pitch balls (I'm actually getting decent at this...)

Arcades are affordable (they don't rip you off terribly) and are well located (one right next to the theater so you have something to do while you wait for the movie to start...)  They also have aloe drinks, yogurt drinks, cold canned coffee (affordable! equivalent to 50 cents!), and 24 hour institutions (shopping malls, convenience stores, restaurants...)   On top of that, there's no law against walking along the street with a beer (because people don't abuse it as much as we would back home) and there's not such a silly concept as "last-call" (seriously, it's WAY safer that way -- no one has any reason to want to drive home drunk; they can take there time and get sober first.)

Last thing -- whatever you think that you're "good at" you can find someone who specializes in it and is way better than you in Korea.  Whatever hobbies people seem to have here they seem to be really dedicated to -- you already know this from my post about Salsa dancing, but it's true about video gamers (you saw the TV channel dedicated to Starcraft), sports players (Soccer, Baseball, etc) and especially musicians.

That is all!  By the time it becomes "exactly" a month anniversary, I will be in the same town I was the first time I "stopped traveling" -- headed back to Busan!!