tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2687893632531902472024-03-07T13:26:55.839+09:00Busan Mike / 부산 마이크I haven't stopped writing yet and apologise for the inconvenienceMikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.comBlogger528125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-52210864745032411922012-09-04T22:25:00.002+09:002012-09-04T22:26:53.340+09:00Mostly HarmlessWhen I was tentatively asked to move from working part-time to full-time at <a href="http://www.bifskorea.org/">Busan International Foreign School</a> back in February – a job I finally began last week – I understood that as part of this my son could be educated at the school during the duration of my contract, which my wife and I had decided would be a good idea since we had become concerned at his interactions with other children when he met them. Because of this, we didn't search for a place in a Korean nursery for him, but a couple of days after I signed the contract we found out he was 10 days too young to qualify for a place. The moral of the story perhaps, is to always check the small print yourself.<br />
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Our son was born in the Year of the Tiger, which is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_zodiac">a Chinese zodiac thing</a> people here still find important, and apparently it was a "White Tiger" year. So while the "White Tigers" might sound like a resistance group set up by foreigners<sup>*</sup> in the Haeundae district of Busan<sup>**</sup>, the term actually refers to the multitude of 'white tiger babies' born during that Chinese year, or 'lunar year' as the Koreans prefer to call it for some reason.<br />
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Tigers are important in Korea as they are seen as a symbol of strength (whereas being white is important in cosmetic adverts and <a href="http://dokdotimes.blogspot.com/2012/06/shocking-reality-about-foreign-hagwon.html">hagwon teacher recruitment</a>), so it is believed that <a href="https://lizardpak.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/2010-the-year-of-the-white-tiger/">white tiger babies will become wealthy and powerful</a> as they are born with an extraordinary amount of potential, not like all those mediocre babies from lesser years you have to subconsciously write-off from birth. The upshot of this is that everybody who could had babies that year, and now two years later there are too many babies and not enough nursery places.<br />
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So by the time we realised we had to find a nursery place after all, the nearest place we could apparently find - after single-handedly boosting Korea Telecom's profits by 10% - was in somewhere called Pyongyang, and it seems there are no direct buses. My wife then resigned herself to another year of hanging around with our son in 'kids cafés', which are a form of disguised nursery which distracts you with food or drink you have to buy, while your child disappears and gets into trouble.<br />
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Then a miracle happened. My wife found a nursery which had 30 free places, which admittedly is slightly suspicious given the white tiger glut. It was beneath some kind of church. It was probably run by some kind of Christians. I was still working part-time so I decided to go the first day to make sure it wasn't actually a cult; I grew up a Catholic so I have a lot of experience in spotting them.<br />
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The nursery people were pleasant enough while not being suspiciously nice, there were some prayers on the wall and they said Grace before eating, but there were no models of crucified men hanging from the walls or fairy stories about a bad man with horns who knew what you were doing and probably made government policy. I concluded they were probably mostly harmless.<br />
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If the group did have a cult-like quality, it transpired to be in their attitude to the English language. After he'd been at the nursery for a couple of weeks, my wife was asked to "speak more Korean" to our son at home because the staff felt he was lagging behind other children.<br />
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From what I've read on the subject of bringing up children in a bilingual household, <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528653/">research suggests that it's entirely normal</a> for children to initially lag behind in terms of language development because they have two vocabularies and sets of grammar rules to learn rather than one. It's logical enough.<br />
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I think everyone recognises that this situation is far from ideal, but it is the reality of your circumstances unless you want to take the radical step of only teaching your multicultural child one language and one culture. I have known of people who have done this – both in Korea and in England and I wouldn't advocate it in either country, but I would particularly question the approach here given that in the current cultural environment you are not really going to be accepted as a Korean if you have 'mixed blood' (or indeed, if you don't have any Korean blood and <a href="http://view.koreaherald.com/kh/view.php?ud=20120604001275">become a Korean citizen</a>).<br />
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As I see it, the road ahead is potentially littered with this kind of attitude though, because in truth, the road behind us already has been. In the matter of the nurture or nature question, I have to say my attitude has been shaped by nurture. Bringing up a child in a multicultural family in Korea doesn't on the face of it have to be a constant battle, but somehow it regularly turns into one as people associate undesirable traits with '<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.kr/2012/08/dirty-smelly-foreigners-mixed-blood-babies.html">bad blood</a>' and try to force you and your child into being as completely Korean as possible, without seeing the irony in the fact that if you were they still wouldn't accept you for it. And this is the fundamental paradox of living here.<br />
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<font size="-2">* I understand – not that I would know – that the local resistance actually goes by the name 'Busan Alien Residents Front' or BARF, and it is vaguely affiliated the the Seoul-based 'Resident Alien Liberation Front' or RALF – Korea's oldest foreign-based resistance movement which dates back to 1994.<br />
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** I use the "Haeundae district of Busan" here for simplicity – many here are increasingly of the belief that Busan is, in fact, a district of Haeundae.</font><br />
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<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:4.97%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28198.7%20Hours%204.97%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com8Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-72005637145125653962012-08-13T23:26:00.000+09:002012-08-13T23:26:00.777+09:00BananamanWhen I started writing about my experiences here there were only two other foreigners writing blogs in Busan as far as I'm aware and so it enjoyed a level of mild popularity by virtue of absence of choice. This led to a few invitations to appear on Korean TV and radio shows, and I was also asked to write, but always for airline magazines - perhaps their editors had correctly surmised that I work best with a captive audience.<br />
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I always turned these offers down - even though I was invariably assured it would 'help promote my blog' - on the sound logic that I actually didn't want to promote my blog, and I have a face for radio and a voice for writing. Yes, perhaps with enough plastic surgery I too could look like one of those K-pop boy band members which women who are into the whole non-threatening-male-look would like, but it would represent the modern-day equivalent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man">The Six Million Dollar Man</a> project, and cost about the same.<br />
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The other reason for turning down 'a great chance to be on TV/radio/write for people trapped on a plane' is that the offers invariably came in from bizarre addresses at Korea's equivalent of Hotmail such as 'ilikegoats', 'bananaman', 'pussy80' and 'bkmhbdmukkk' with subject lines such as 'This is Arirang TV' to make sure you know it's authentic. So you end up in a situation where Bananaman invites you to some part of the city to appear on a TV or radio programme. You could run a background check on Bananaman but it's time consuming.<br />
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It was once explained to me - and it's entirely logical - that since most people here share about seven surnames and most of them are in fact called Kim - it's almost impossible to get anything resembling a sensible email address from your employer because someone's already taken it. The problem is though, I don't think they're even trying. Take the Korea Times for example. It can't have more than a few hundred staff so it shouldn't be anywhere near as difficult to choose an email address, but someone still elects to be 'foolsdie' at their domain name, and that means sooner or later they end up <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/08/123_92295.html">writing a piece about a plane crash where pilot error is suspected and signing it 'foolsdie'</a> at the bottom.<br />
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But mostly, Koreans seem to use their personal email addresses for work purposes - and this blurring of the lines extends to phones now, and chat systems such as Kakao Talk. This provides whole new opportunities for sexual innuendo because you can now not only expose your quirky textual inner thoughts but give the Freudians something much more graphic and substantial to sink their teeth into - such as the image below - the Kakao Talk avatar of a male bank employee who contacted my wife to tell her that her new credit card was ready:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/7772644166/" title="Bank Employee's Avatar by BusanMike, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7277/7772644166_1d3511dcc7.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Bank Employee's Avatar"></a></div><br />
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<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:4.81%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28192.2%20Hours%204.81%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com3Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-14311741372110864102012-08-12T19:26:00.000+09:002012-08-12T19:59:29.168+09:00Rogue TraderWhen I worked as a financial trader, people used to ask me from time to time about the viability of trading in Korea, and I tried to offer some polite ad-hoc advice elsewhere but I never really brought it onto this blog. This is a pity because the most comprehensive piece I think I ever wrote on the subject was on a forum for foreigners in Korea I later was kicked out of for not posting frequently enough to. The moral of the story – aside from the obvious question of whether you should actually avoid other foreigners and their forums in Korea like the plague – is if you're going to write something useful, put it on your own site.<br />
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That said, I'm not promising to make this useful because the first and last thing I'm going to say about trading in Korea is don't, with one caveat – there's a distinction between longer-term investing over a period of years and shorter-term trading.<br />
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On a general matter, about half the people I've ever talked to about trading have an idea about the system they will employ to trade. They may even have read books. If you're one of these people and you think you have a system, well, you don't. Sorry to rain on your parade.<br />
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It's an oft-quoted statistic that 90% of traders lose money and I've actually read the original research paper - and the figures are as frightening as you might imagine. Worse in fact, because it doesn't follow that the remaining 10% are wildly profitable – some are just treading water. Of course, you can read plenty of books on how to be successful in the world of trading (the real answer is writing books about how to trade).<br />
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Anyway, for several years I consider myself to have been a successful trader insofar as I was very much within that 10% to the extent that I paid my bills and funded my lifestyle from trading profits but I wasn't good enough to breeze in and out of the market like one genuinely gifted trader I knew so it all came from very hard work – I put in minimum 57-hour weeks and this is not an exaggeration. You can certainly get yourself over to <a href="http://eareview.net/">Birt's EA Review</a> and set your imagination racing but if running forex bots were easy in the long run I think there'd be no need for a site like that in the first place, so if you find yourself beguiled by such things you should also recognise the paradox.<br />
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When I was doing my 'Open Mike' segment on Busan e-FM I discussed the issue of Financial Trading in Korea and if you have an interest in this subject you should <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.kr/2011/04/busan-e-fm-week-25-financial-trading-in.html">link off and read the summary for this now</a>.<br />
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What's relevant from that particular show is that obviously the first hurdle facing anyone interested in using a Korean broker/trading product provider is the language barrier. The second is that my impression of the Korean market is that it's like the Wild West with rampant ramping of stocks in a broadly long-only product-providing market. That's not to say that you can't make money from it, but you may as well visit a casino. This is just a subjective opinion – although I'm pretty sure I'm right – but what is not subjective is the issue of liquidity and namely the fact that the Korean market doesn't have nearly as much of it as London or New York. Yes, the newspapers here will sometimes claim otherwise and I admire their unceasing efforts at assisting Korea's attempts to continue performing public fallatio on itself, but you probably shouldn't watch or try this at home.<br />
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The next problem is that because Korea's laws are fairly hostile to international financial institutions (it <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/10/123_96277.html">only recently allowed hedge funds to operate</a> in Korea) and because international financial providers have a hundred internal and regulatory rules of their own to comply with, it's actually quite hard in my experience to even find reputable forex providers prepared to accept foreign customers based in Korea. After a considerable effort which involved notarised forms of identification (try pulling off that trick with Korean notaries who can't understand English), I eventually opened up an account <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2010/11/when-last-sword-is-drawn.html">and discovered it wasn't possible to transfer money into it from Korea</a>. The conclusion is it's better to open accounts while you're living somewhere else and then operate a don't-ask-don't-tell policy with them regarding your location.<br />
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But let's assume you have a broker and can trade from Korea. Your next hurdle is the time-zone. Actively trading U.S. stocks is out because New York is open when you are in bed. I suppose you could play fire-and-forget with some trades and set a few limit orders to buy and sell but it's a risky business and inefficient (for which you can read 'unprofessional'). European opening hours are more Asia-friendly up to a point, although London's 1.30am finishes in winter are still endurance-testing.<br />
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Of course, forex offers a 24-hour market five days a week but what they don't tell you is that the best liquidity is still during London-New York hours, and strange and mysterious things often happen during the Asian trading hours. If you're looking at a trading bot with form it may well not account for these shenanigans and if you're rolling your own your backtesting will probably represent an ideal you'll probably never attain (I could give you chapter-and-verse on trying to build accurate backtesting results using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaTrader">MetaTrader</a> but the executive summary is forget it).<br />
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From what I can tell, shorting is not a tool generally available to Koreans so most people trade the kind of dubious "<a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2012/01/123_102762.html">theme stocks</a>" that are so Wild West they might even put London's AIM market – which actually <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_Investment_Market#Criticism">has been described as a casino</a> – to shame. <a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2936759">Many Koreans have traded Equity Linked Warrants (ELWs)</a> but the Financial Services Commission <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/05/123_87734.html">wants to ban short-term trading in them</a>. It may be just as well though because warrants with maturity dates (assuming the ELWs do) generally benefit from a knowledge of the Black-Scholes model and where offered to small investors they are – in my opinion – usually 'designed' (cough) to transfer money from said small investors to the issuers of the warrants (cough cough order book manipulation cough cough). I really must see a doctor. It also seems the market in Korea is imploding because <a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2938822">it was more directly manipulated</a>.<br />
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And even if I could understand Korea perfectly and had the tools at my disposal to trade Korean stocks, the conclusion I've drawn from my extensive reading of Korean news and personal experience of dealing with people here professionally is Korean business and political life is permeated by a intriguing kind of 'moral pragmatism' which would discourage me from wanting to invest in them.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/news/08091005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="77" width="200" src="http://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/news/08091005.jpg" /></a></div>For what it's worth 'Financial Hub Korea' – which is inexplicably marketed under the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation">obfuscated</a> title 'Fn Hub Korea', is pressing on in its tireless mission "to promote Korea as an international finance market" (or perhaps that should be "an international fn market") so perhaps one day things will get better and I sincerely hope they do, but in my limited experience Korea is hostile to the international movement of capital, I'm convinced from my reading of the news that it's hostile to foreign companies (to be fair like America and Canada also are), and it's hostile to domestic financial speculation of all kinds including the evil 'property speculators' that had <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/02/29/2012022901216.html">the temerity to buy property in Pyeongchang before it won its Winter Olympic bid</a>. How very dare they. (And they still aren't very keen on foreigners owning property – a long personal story for another time).<br />
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Ironically due to the hypocrisy around which so much of political life in Korea revolves, property speculation is such an important national pastime here that I'm sure they would actually make it an Olympic event in time for Pyeongchang if they could. Korea might not win gold but they might at least be in with a chance - the earnings-to-price index of salaries to property is eye-watering compared to my own country, where it is considered high.<br />
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It's a shame about all this regulation and sniffyness because the idea of Korea being a 'Fn Hub' in this region of the world isn't perhaps quite as utterly absurd as it first seems – <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino_Forest">nobody really trusts the Chinese</a> financial markets and <a href="http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/premium/world/tokyo-bourse-hit-2nd-major-system-failure-7-months">Japan evidently can't run a stock exchange</a> to save their lives.<br />
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So my personal conclusion is – and I did say I'd end on this – is don't trade Korean financial markets.<br />
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<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:4.81%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28192.2%20Hours%204.81%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-13332424301116037512012-08-11T23:43:00.000+09:002012-08-11T23:43:02.371+09:00Under Siege: Dirty and Smelly and Fusion Babies<i>"I'm not just saying this because you’re related to me, but I used to think that all foreigners were dirty and smelly... but you're not."</i> - a close relative who I am not permitted to name by title until the statute of limitations expires.<br />
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Does this mean I've pushed down the barriers of prejudice in Korea by just a little? Perhaps not, because this close relative went on to expand on that thought by adding <i>"When I pass them in the street, I can smell their bad smell, they look unkempt and their clothes look years old. But you always look neat."</i><br />
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And apparently I don't smell that bad either. If only foreigners could smell as wonderful as Koreans.<br />
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Filed under 'accidental truths close Korean relatives tell you when they finally let their guard down after five years'.<br />
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The observant among my two remaining readers will have noticed that I don't often write this blog any more. This is a function of many things such as my work as a writer elsewhere, aching fingers, a bad keyboard, my hatred of the updated Blogger interface that often no longer lets me post comments on my own blog, and the increasing amount of time I spend with the underground railroad here in Busan.<br />
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It is also - as I have previously mentioned - in no small part connected with the extra work and frequent interruptions that come with having a 22-month-old child, who is, shall we say, high maintenance. For example, this morning the wireless landline phone handset in our apartment was nowhere to be found until I finally spotted it in our aquarium, which led to a couple of hours of disassembling, drying, cleaning and re-soldering (it was not disassembly-friendly). This is the tip of the iceberg.<br />
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All small children can be a challenge I'm sure, but one of our close relatives evidently arrived at the conclusion that my son represented significantly more of a challenge than any Korean child they had previously experienced, prompting them to pose the following philosophical question:<br />
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<i>"Do you think his temperament is the way it is because he has mixed blood?</i><br />
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<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:4.81%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28192.2%20Hours%204.81%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com5Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-68897329631905394952012-06-14T22:02:00.000+09:002012-06-14T22:02:07.488+09:00Under Siege: Come On! Come On!I’m alone in the apartment and receive a call from an unknown number on my mobile. I don’t answer it because my son has only slept 30 minutes all morning, he’s just woken up, and I’m desperate to get him back to sleep again so I can do something productive in the little time this will afford me. To this end, I’m walking circles around our lounge with him in a sling on my back, which is the only way of getting him to sleep, at all, ever.<br />
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The same number phones again exactly one minute later. This time I answer it, because it's entirely possible that it might be important.<br />
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Allegedly it’s Kookmin Bank - KB - and I say allegedly because of the number of phishing frauds which are perpetrated on Koreans from both within Korean and beyond, <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/01/113_101832.html">by which I mean China</a>. The woman launches into a long sentence about something or other but it doesn’t sound like a sales call because it doesn’t sound like she’s just ingested helium, and she doesn’t make the well-practised corporate giggle like the kind of 18 year-old girl normally given that kind of job. I know what you’re thinking - is there such a thing as a corporate giggle in Korea? Yes, there is.<br />
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She tells me my name - badly - but it’s vaguely recognisable as my name, and I say yes, hoping she might switch from the Korean she’s been using so far, to English. But she launches off into a long Korean sentence so I stop her. “Jam shi man yo”... please wait a moment. And I tell her, “I’m a foreigner, I don’t speak Korean, so I don’t understand what you are saying.” So she starts again, probably from the beginning, in Korean. I try again, in Korean, slowly “I. Don’t. Speak. Korean. Therefore. I. Don’t. Understand. What. You. Are. Saying.” This at least solicits some kind of “Oh, you don’t understand?” “No”. So she explains again. In Korean. Over my “I don’t understands”.<br />
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But then she changes strategy. She tells me the branch of KB she’s from, and it is a branch I’ve dealt with, which makes it feel like it’s not a phishing call, although nothing short of being in the bank talking to them is likely to convince me because I’m naturally suspicious. If I don’t trust myself why should I trust anyone else? Then she says “ID cardeu, passport”, but while she might be requesting details I’m never going to give her, there’s no context, so I simply tell her I don’t understand again, but she says “ID cardeu, passport” a couple more times with increasing urgency and frustration.<br />
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I am also long beyond frustration, and I change strategy. In Korean I tell her, “I don’t understand. Therefore my wife will phone your branch later.” I thought this would provide her with the resolution she so badly needed, but it didn’t. Off she launches again into another round of indecipherable Korean. So I tell her again “I don’t understand. Therefore my wife will phone your branch later.” This is exasperating.<br />
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Then the surprise. In evidently frustrated English and a rather aggressive tone universally recognised the world over as listen-you-stupid-foreigner, she suddenly says “Come on! Come on!” My mouth and fingers know me well enough not to wait for orders in such circumstances. It took my finger about a tenth of a second to hit the “End Call” button at and I simultaneously heard my mouth say “Frak you” or words to that effect. I support their actions.<br />
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Later it transpired that I had a million won in a savings account that had matured. In case that sounds impressive let me put it into context – at the rate the power in our apartment mysteriously bleeds away into the surrounding atmosphere it will soon be about the cost of one month’s electricity bill. The money was put into the savings account to act as a guarantee for my credit card with the bank (making actually not a credit card with the tiny limit I’m given) because I’m a foreign criminal who otherwise might run away with their precious frakking card and go crazy with it in China with a couple of $3 hookers or something. And that is the reason by the way (not the hookers – the fact that KB don’t really trust foreigners with their credit cards).<br />
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So the million had matured from the ultra-low interest guarantee account which had earned me as much as an entire hooker worth of interest in a year, and apparently the staff member who phoned me had noticed this - three months later - and decided that I very urgently and immediately needed to find a new home for it, and certainly after her phone call I had a pretty good idea where I wanted the bank to shove it.<br />
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When my wife came home I related the story and she immediately phoned the caller at the bank. At first she denied it, so my wife asked “Are you calling my husband a liar?”, after which she finally admitted it and apologised for losing her temper and the whole “Come on! Come on!” business. One small step for a foreigner, one giant leap for Korean banking - I still need to provide cash deposits to guarantee my credit card though.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.75%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28150.1%20Hours%203.75%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com6Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-60717686324379814622012-05-29T20:04:00.001+09:002012-05-30T23:54:50.067+09:00Under Siege: Racial Abuse on a BusSo I promised to tell you the racial abuse on the bus story. It happened two days after I’d been <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2012/05/under-siege-get-out-of-my-taxi.html">kicked out of a taxi</a> when the driver saw I was a foreigner. It wasn't a good week for me in Korea.<br />
<br />
I was sat right at the back of a bus with a Korean colleague heading back to civilisation from Gijang after work. My colleague’s English is good but buses are noisy and you have to talk above it for comprehension.<br />
<br />
There’s a sort of unspoken rule on public transport in Korea although actually sometimes it’s spoken very loudly – which is that you shouldn’t speak very loudly on public transport. I like it, because it’s based on the fine principle of not bothering anyone else, and if Korea could see fit to similarly purge the stench of alcohol-sodden old men and women, men who want to sit on narrow subway seats with their legs wide apart and elderly professional jostlers from its public transport I’d be even happier, but of all the aforementioned things only public speaking is apparently deemed socially unacceptable enough to be publicly frowned on.<br />
<br />
But wait a moment... this just coming in – no, apparently you can also talk very loudly on public transport if you’re over 50. Because once you turn 50 in Korea, statistically you turn into the kind of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh6qqsmxNs">insufferable asshole</a> who can literally push your way to the front of a subway queue, steal your taxi, and talk loudly on public transport while telling younger people to shut up. I’m told it’s something to do with Confucianism – apparently he was some old guy a long time ago who said it was OK for old people to behave like insufferable assholes, especially if they were men.<br />
<br />
Every so often, you’ll see a story in the media here which will typically take the form of a young person – <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/01/113_111949.html">often a female I think for some reason</a> – suddenly turning on an old person in the subway while a dozen passengers video the scene with their mobile phones. And we all act shocked and say “what is society coming to?”, but secretly I imagine that they probably deserved it. There, I said it. Legions of ‘ajeoshis’ and ‘ajummas’ - older men and women – in Korea are actually completely self-centred and insufferable, everyone secretly knows it, but times have changed, and those younger than them <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_qgVn-Op7Q">are mad as hell, and they aren’t going to take it any more</a>. I imagine Korea has serious problems on the horizon – think ‘social breakdown in Japan’, but with very much more anger and compulsory military service.<br />
<br />
So this particular insufferable ajeoshi gets on the bus and let me tell you, this does not even figure on my radar because it’s nothing more than a flock of birds – common background noise here. But the insufferable ajeoshi is either particularly insufferable today or also drunk, because he gets up from the seat mid-way down the bus where he’s been complaining loudly to himself and presumably anyone who will listen, and moves to the front of the bus while becoming more agitated and animated. He starts treating the driver as something akin to his co-conspirator or drinking buddy, and while he’s now appeared on my radar, it’s the next sentence from my colleague that shocks me.<br />
<br />
“I think we should stop talking.” What? Why? “He doesn’t like foreigners.” So I sat there in with my clearly worried colleague in stunned silence. On the noisy bus. And all the Korean passengers had stopped talking too – oh except one, the insufferable ajeoshi that hates people talking on the bus, who spent the next five minutes shouting on the phone to someone about something else. And I do mean shouting.<br />
<br />
With the insufferable ajeoshi now distracted, my colleague explained in hushed tones what he had said, namely that:<br />
<br />
1. “He doesn’t like foreigners talking loudly on a bus.”<br />
2. “He doesn’t want to hear foreign languages in Korea.”<br />
3. “He doesn’t know what foreigners are doing in Korea."<br />
4. “He doesn’t want foreigners in Korea.”<br />
5. “Yankee go home!”<br />
<br />
Nice. And that’s only what he told me. I can’t help thinking there was a lot more to it than that. So as the only foreigner on the bus, apparently he’d been shouting all this at me but of course, I’d been wonderfully oblivious to it all.<br />
<br />
I know I should study Korean more, but sometimes I’m afraid of what will happen when I understand them and worse, what will happen when they can understand me. Douglas Adams said the discovery of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish">Babel fish</a> "effectively removed all barriers to communication between different cultures and races" causing "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." My not learning Korean very quickly might simply be a subconscious manifestation of my self-protection mechanism.<br />
<br />
Ironically though, I’m open-minded about all this 'Yankee go home' business, because if they did maybe Koreans would stop posting job adverts for <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-north-american-passport.html">North-American-passport-holders-only</a> on the principle that apparently a native English person teaching native English in Korea is no good. Not that I teach English, but in principle, the idea that I’m lower down the English-ability and employability scale than an American community college graduate speaking in a local accent that even other Americans can’t understand is kind of annoying. British people are already second-class citizens in Korea compared to ‘North American passport holders’, and yet when it comes down to it, we still get caught up in Korea’s random bouts of anti-Americanism.<br />
<br />
When Korean Mother found out about what had happened, she was actually ready to head up to Gijang to mount an improbable search for the insufferable racist ajeoshi on the bus. But other people in Busan simply said “Well, that’s Gijang for you.” (#visitgijang)<br />
<br />
Do you know what bothered me the most about the incident though? Foreign children from our school travel those buses.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.71%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28148.3%20Hours%203.71%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com12South Korea, Busan, Gijang-gun, Gijang-eup, Nae-ri, 138-535.199061533096334 129.2035102844238335.186086533096336 129.18376928442382 35.212036533096331 129.22325128442384tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-2255694253356435032012-05-22T10:03:00.000+09:002012-05-22T10:03:13.426+09:00Under Siege: Get Out of My Taxi!I remember that it was cold and raining very heavily that morning. So heavily, that when the taxi finally pulled up outside the the last station before I headed out into the wilderness towards Gijang, its windows were steamed up and I couldn’t see the driver. The wait had been so long that I’d begun to wonder if I was ever going to get to work, and I really didn’t rate the chances of the woman who’d arrived behind me to start a queue at the designated taxi point.<br />
<br />
I got into the taxi and started to give the driver my destination in Korean as I always did. But before I could finish the driver, a woman probably in her 50s – who’d turned around and appeared to be looking at me in an odd way - thrust her arm out and suddenly I was staring at an outstretched hand being waved in front of my nose, accompanied by something in Korean I didn’t catch, followed by “No! No!”. Huh? Now she was pointing at the still open car door and while I might not have understood the accompanying Korean, when it comes down to it “Get out!” is a fairly universal concept in any language.<br />
<br />
I got out slowly as if I were in a dream. What was happening? And why? Had her daughter dated a foreigner? Should I say <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Wasn%27t_Me">it wasn’t me</a>?<br />
<br />
So I shut the car door and stood there back by the side of the road, in the now thoroughly appropriate pouring rain. The taxi with the steamed up windows stayed where it was, only adding to my sense of surreality. The woman who’d arrived behind me to form a queue stared at me and we shared a telepathic moment. “What was that?” “Beats the hell out of me.”<br />
<br />
So the woman opened the passenger side door and started talking to the taxi driver. If body language told a story it began with confusion and ended with confusion, and the middle involved the woman gesturing towards me and asking what the problem was.<br />
<br />
After she’d closed the door, we both resumed our spots by the side of the road, but not before the woman had given me a pitying look. After about 30 seconds, the taxi driver decided to leave.<br />
<br />
I felt the woman had gone into bat for me but I was now late for work and I was only a few weeks into my new job, so I told her where I was going in Korean and asked her if she wanted to share the next taxi. But she wasn’t going my way.<br />
<br />
When the next taxi came, the woman made a point of talking to the driver in a disgusted tone as I was getting and it was pretty obvious she was making sure he wasn’t going to refuse to take me as she explained where I was going.<br />
<br />
I wish I could have told her it was unnecessary. I’d never been told to get out of a taxi before in Korea and statistically it hardly seemed likely to happen again immediately following my first time, and in fact I’d go on to make sure of it because after that I stopped taking taxis in Jangsan and opted for the bus instead.<br />
<br />
In the brief time I’d begun my Civilisation to Gijang commute, I’d had <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2012/03/spacehunter-adventures-in-forbidden.html">one good notably good taxi experience and faced the minor frustration of watching taxis fly by me without stopping in the countryside</a>. Now I’d had a notably bad experience, I wondered if it only evened things up, or whether it pushed Korea into negative territory with me. I settled on the latter, because the world should have a positive bias anyway, not a neutral one. When someone treats you badly, it can more than offset those random acts of kindness. I guess that psychology for you.<br />
<br />
Anyway, if I was in any doubt those doubts were removed two days later. I’ll tell you that story next time.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.68%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28147.3%20Hours%203.68%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com1South Korea, Busan, Haeundae-gu, Jwa 4(sa)-dong, 1058-135.174106492007304 129.1837692260742235.148145992007308 129.14428722607423 35.2000669920073 129.22325122607421tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-24124938563083650542012-05-14T23:28:00.000+09:002012-05-14T23:28:28.329+09:00Under Siege: Korean ManMy wife and I were waiting for an elevator when a little girl next to us, she must have been all of about six years old, said, ‘waegug-saram... anyoung’. ‘Anyoung’. ‘Anyoung waegug-saram’. Foreigner... hello. Hello. Hello foreigner. It was all smiles. Then she turned to my wife, and in a serious and surprisingly mature tone asked “Why did you marry a foreigner? Is it because you couldn’t get a Korean man?”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.65%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28146.05%20Hours%203.65%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com6Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9718133 128.75978460000002 35.3872953 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-41850328238251520832012-05-11T02:18:00.000+09:002012-05-11T02:24:12.792+09:0020 MinutesWhen I first lived in Korea I barely really lived in it at all. I stayed in my apartment trading the international financial markets, and when I ventured out – largely at the weekend on chaperoned trips – I felt more like a visiting alien, although to be fair that was the official classification the Korean government gave me; I still have the Alien Registration Card to prove it.<br />
<br />
Recognising that living in Korea conventionally meant actually trying to live in it, I took the opportunity to do some writing for the local English-language radio station and appear on their shows, and later I got a part-time programming job so I started spending a lot of my life really out there, on the move.<br />
<br />
One day I was on the move back from the radio station when the subway train stopped in a station and stayed there. Announcements were made by the driver in Korean so I had no idea what was happening. Ten minutes passed, and during one announcement, I held my phone up to the speaker in the carriage for my wife to listen to the explanation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’d been a suicide at the next station ahead of us.<br />
<br />
Right now, screen doors are being installed at most – if not eventually all – of Busan’s subway stations ‘for your comfort and convenience’, by which I’m pretty sure they actually mean “to stop you throwing yourself off the platform into the path of an oncoming train”, which I understand happens quite a lot.<br />
<br />
I don’t know if these suicides are planned, because it’s occurred to me in recent years that climbing up to the top of a building requires effort, but throwing yourself out in front of a train can be one of those spur of the moment decisions that mark a final act of rebellion amid Korea’s claustrophobic social conformity, although evidently placing doors on the platform to enforce a further level of social conformity is going to solve this problem.<br />
<br />
After twenty minutes most people had left the train, but I didn’t want to venture up to the surface and try and deal with a Korean taxi-driver, so I took my chances and waited with the five other people who remained, pondering the unanswerable question of who this person was, why they’d chosen to end their life by being hit by a subway train at 8.25pm on a Wednesday evening, and whether inconveniencing the many thousands of people who had found themselves stuck in the subway system was what they wanted from their final act in this world.<br />
<br />
I also wondered how long it took to clear a badly mangled body from the subway tracks. I imagined it would be quite a long time. Apart from the mess, surely the police would want to ensure there was no foul play? Twenty minutes is all it takes as it turns out. Because all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. The procedures for scraping humans off the subway tracks in Korea is well practised, and the local authorities are the Formula 1 pit crews of suicide clean-ups, which is a rather depressing realisation.<br />
<br />
As someone who has struggled on and off with depression for a long time but is determined to see life through to its bitter end, I’m not sure I would be the best person to try and talk a suicidal Korean out of their intended course of action. But when I walked down the subway steps to the platform of one of the many trains I was catching one Thursday recently, I momentarily checked myself on discovering a youth around the age of 18 sat at the bottom sobbing uncontrollably. The new screen doors are not yet functional and his proximity three meters away from the fast end of the platform instantly concerned me.<br />
<br />
Of course, because of the language barrier there was almost certainly nothing meaningful I could say to him, and even if I could, it might have only made him feel worse about himself that he’d embarrassed himself in front of a foreigner.<br />
<br />
Part of me just wanted to tell him to stop using an umbrella in the rain, which is what all Koreans do but I generally don’t. This marks me out as quite possibly mentally ill in the eyes of most Koreans who fail to see their own collected psychoses which are simply called ‘society’ here, but to live life is to endure a lifetime of emotional pain far greater than the minor discomfort of getting a little wet. If you can’t feel the rain on your head and stare up in the sky and see the wonder in it falling towards you, reminding you that you are alive against the odds and for the briefest of moments in this Universe, then how can you cope with anything else? Umbrellas are a great evil foisted upon society, quite possibly as part of a secret plot by the psychiatric industry.<br />
<br />
Becoming a father turned out to be a strange experience for me. I often look at my son wondering about his future and consider that as he is now, I once was, and as I am now, he may become. The circle of life goes on with many of the same scenes but different players. How will my story end? How will my son’s if he doesn’t live to see the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity">Singularity</a>? That mangled body on the tracks was someone’s baby once, and after all the joy and difficulties their parents must have experienced this is what it came down to.<br />
<br />
That day, our twenty minutes came to an end, the blood of someone’s child was cleaned off the Busan subway tracks, and the rest of us inevitably resumed our journeys to our own eventual destinations.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.65%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28146.05%20Hours%203.65%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com4Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-63512830433289264212012-05-07T20:22:00.000+09:002012-05-07T20:22:14.663+09:00Full FrontalAround six months ago Korean Brother went to a nightclub and related the events that shocked him to my wife the next morning.<br />
<br />
Apparently several years ago during happier economic times when you went to a nightclub there was a point in the proceedings known as ‘sexy time’, when people would be invited up onto the stage to dance in front of the audience, for prize money typically around 1,000,000 won. The winner would often be the person who was prepared to perform the most provocative dance, and apparently there were few rules imposed by the nightclubs because this invariable involved removing some items of clothing, and sometimes all. But these are nevertheless fairly normal venues – not strip clubs.<br />
<br />
Korean brother is older now, and these days he has a job with long hours, so he doesn’t get out to the nightclubs much any more, but the Chuseok holiday had provided him with a rare opportunity to revisit this element of his past and relive some moments from his twenties. Things have changed though – in these tough economic times the prize money was now 300,000 won. Perhaps it was because of being older, and perhaps it was the limited money, but it seems he wasn’t ready for what happened next.<br />
<br />
One girl – mid-twenties at the oldest – removed her dress and top during ‘sexy time’, leaving her dancing on the stage in black lingerie and high-heels. Evidently this escalation filtered the more modest out, leaving fewer contestants. And that’s when this girl went for broke, because off came her bra, followed immediately by her knickers. I gather that this may not have been unusual back in the days of 1,000,000 won prizes, but it’s more of a fading memory in the 300,000 won era.<br />
<br />
There was however, a slight problem. Apparently, it is not easy to remove your knickers while dancing in high-heels at the same time without professional training, especially perhaps if you’ve had a drink or two, and this resulted in what I think we must call a somewhat frog-legged approach to the removal of the said item of clothing, leaving really nothing left to the imagination for audience standing directly beneath her. Not that they will need to imagine what they saw in any case; most of them were filming it on their mobile phones.<br />
<br />
Apparently during ‘sexy time’ nightclub bouncers stand at the back of the stage with a blanket or duvet of some description ready to cover the belated modesty of the winning dancer who finally realises just how far she has gone while caught up in the moment, which leads me to think that the kind of outcome which results in a naked woman – or partially-naked women - dancing in front of the audience, is not entirely surprising to them. She did of course, win the prize.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.65%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28146.05%20Hours%203.65%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com0Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-65259756090931113732012-03-08T22:31:00.000+09:002012-03-08T22:31:54.096+09:00Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden ZoneRecently I’ve been travelling out from the edge of known space at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangsan_Station">Jangsan</a> to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt">Gijang</a>, which means that on the return leg of the journey I have found myself trying to catch taxis in the countryside to return to civilisation. It quickly became apparent that this may not be the same as catching taxis in the city.<br />
<br />
Situated as I have been, in the middle of hardly anywhere by a long stretch of six-lane pork-barrel project next to a bus stop, I can see the taxis approaching from some distance away, but there is clearly a problem. Out here the taxis have entered into what can best be described as <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ludicrous%20speed">Busan Taxi Hyperspace</a>, and either the taxi pilots have no ability to see beyond hyperspace, or it is impossible for them to decelerate to pick me up without turning themselves into a thin layer of jelly on the inside of their windscreens [that’s a ‘windshield’ for <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-north-american-passport.html">North American Passport Holders</a>].<br />
<br />
It has crossed my mind that I am not helping in this process. A reserved English cultural upbringing generally does not predispose me to jumping up and down like an American Televangelist by the side of the rural highway to attract the attention of the taxi pilots in good time. But it has also occurred to me that it may go further than this – because there may be an unwillingness to stop for foreigners. I mean, is it worth the hassle of trying to talk to an alien for the sake of $5? For all the movies and television episodes produced, Star Trek never adequately answered this question.<br />
<br />
The first time this happened, four definite taxis obviously passed me and I identified a further two blurs as probables. I was considering a new strategy of starting to run in the direction of Jangsan as soon as I saw an approaching craft in the hope that the reduced speed differential might actually tempt them to drop out of hyperspace briefly for me to jump in, but then one actually did stop for me, and I didn’t even have to recreate any of my greatest moments as a 100m sprinter for my school, which was fortunate because there weren’t any.<br />
<br />
When we reached civilisation my unfamiliarity with Jangsan caused me to reach for my wallet early and withdraw a 10,000 won note. The driver, who by this time had finally been forced to come to a stop due to the tiresome ‘red-light convention’ which even Korean drivers sometimes adhere to, saw this in his rear-view mirror and started organising the 1,000 won notes he’d give me in change. And then he gave me the change. This was confusing on account of the fact that we weren’t at my requested destination of Jangsan subway station yet, I had no intention of getting out, and my survival Korean does not extend to phrases like, “the rest of the ride is free”. Maybe I’m not meeting the right kind of women.<br />
<br />
So I revert to my well-worn Confused Foreigner Look. Seeing my confusion and sadness as finally outing myself as someone whose Korean ability was more of a carnival act of stock phrases designed to simulate actual cleverness, rather than being the real thing, he proceeded to press a button on his charging meter which moved it to zero, finishing with a fait-accompli gesture which marked him out as a person who even knew more French than me. I thanked him. In simulated Korean.<br />
<br />
We got to the subway station and I parted ways with my oddly charitable taxi pilot and waved farewell to his small craft. But it was as I descended into the subspace of Jangsan Station that I had a moment of self-awareness. I was very short-haired, wearing a black suit and carrying a small black attaché case with my documents, but not my Bible. Yes, I might have looked like a missionary, and while my frustrations with being unable to catch a taxi out there in the Forbidden Zone had not quite caused me to adopt the missionary position in a final attempt to attract attention, I may have been projecting the image of a lonely Christian-in-need.<br />
<br />
It then occurred that this might explain the philanthropy of the taxi pilot, and also the intriguing outside possibility that the reason the other pilots didn’t stop for me was because they were Buddhists.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.52%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28140.8%20Hours%203.52%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com5San 31 Nae-ri, Gijang-eup, Gijang-gun, Busan, South Korea35.21533166846627 129.2079734802246135.202358168466269 129.1882324802246 35.228305168466271 129.22771448022462tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-52714875306327423302012-03-07T16:34:00.000+09:002012-03-07T16:34:22.573+09:00NewsRadio<p><i>“If you do a live radio show in the morning, nothing worse can happen to you all day.”</i></p>
<p><b>Open Miked in Busan</b></p>
<p>I’ve been very busy recently. It’s the kind of busyness where you’re basically on the move and working from the moment you awake after five to six hours of sleep to the moment you go to bed, seven days a week, and I’ve pretty much been like this since November. It seems like a superhuman effort for a foreigner, but it’s just normal life for many Koreans. Is it a sign my attitude is becoming Korean? And if I don’t care, is the answer yes?</p>
<p>Before I became one with the near catatonic mental state that the Korean work experience brings about, I used to write this blog – this post may well be a figment of your imagination – and along the way I tried, and failed, to keep up with posts taken from my <a href="http://www.befm.or.kr">Busan e-FM</a> radio segment, <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">Open Mike in Busan</a>. For the sake of posterity, my desire to maintain a record of my Korean experience, I intend to complete these posts, which in the end will number 51, because my time on the show came to a close, something I was extremely glad of because after 51 weeks of strip-mining this blog, I’d run out of material and laid waste to the environment.</p>
<p><b>Zen and the Art of Radio Presenting</b></p>
<p>The radio station then posted an advert for writers and presenters, and I decided to apply because even though all the station’s writers are Korean, I like writing and the worst they could say was no if I expressed an interest. A phone conversation ensued during I was asked if I’d like to try out as a presenter, and even though I regard myself as having a face for radio and a voice for writing, I ended up going along with it because I’d decided to let the cards choose my fate considering how letting my intellect and logic choose the course of my life had turned out. There was also a strong element of my saying I was interested in writing, and the person on the other end of the phone hearing I really wanted to present. Many of my conversations in Korea seem to follow this pattern.</p>
<p>So it was that I turned up one day at Busan e-FM thinking someone was going to interview me about both options, but instead found an unfamiliar script thrust into my hands with the words “you’re on in ten minutes.”</p>
<p>As far as I understand the process, writers write pieces for the radio station, which are then translated into English by Koreans, and in my experience the results are invariably less than perfect in the way that a large asteroid hitting the Earth would be less than ideal. So I spent a tense ten minutes correcting what I was about to read in the studio.</p>
<p>During the reading, half-way down the second page and so far word perfect, I saw the end in sight and thought “I’m going to make it”, which almost inevitably was the trigger to make a small mistake. The producer immediately cut me off and ended the test recording. I knew it was over – live radio is a harsh mistress. As the producer clicked away on the computer, I stared out of the window contemplating the fact that if I’d had more than five hours of sleep the night before – which my baby son’s screaming had prevented – I might have been better. But in those moments I enjoyed the Zen-like realisation that my son was going to wake up at night for the foreseeable future, I was always going to be this tired – and hosting a live radio show was not for me.</p>
<p>I won’t pretend not to have been a little disappointed though; I was curious about how things would have turned out given that I’m just far enough beyond giving a damn not to try and have fun with it, which I expect would have ultimately pitched me against the people who run things.</p>
<p><b>This Segmented Life – Busan and More and Less</b></p>
<p>Something unexpected came of the test recording though. It was played to the station’s producers who’d gathered to formerly reject me in favour of someone better, but one of them was looking for a new segment guest and so it was that I was offered the role of writing and guesting on the <a href="http://www.befm.or.kr/program/morning/main.jsp">Morning Wave in Busan</a> show segment, <i>Busan and More</i>, which every Monday morning discusses the events taking place in the city in the week ahead.</p>
<p>On the downside, there was little scope to indulge in the kind of subtle freelance subversion I’d engaged in for <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">Open Mike in Busan</a>, but on the other hand I thought researching all those events would be a good opportunity for my wife and I to kick-start our social and cultural life which had ended after the birth of our son (I was wrong).</p>
<p>And then I unexpectedly got the chance to host a show after all, when – and I’m going to be necessarily vague here – the new presenter of a show was absent on their first day, leaving a hanging question of whether they would appear for their second. It was a one-time deal because no-one else was available and they were desperate, so I spent two hours the next day working through the translated English script trying to understand what it meant – no easy task - and correcting it. This certainly gave me an additional perspective on just how much work being a presenter at the station required, and how ill-advised doing such a job would be considering the hidden commitment.</p>
<p>I worked through that script correcting it and practising the Korean names within it, knowing that the missing presenter may resurface and I may not appear anyway – and so it was. I’d sent the station my corrected script anyway and later listened somewhat perplexed - and yet somehow completely unsurprised – as the new presenter awkwardly read out the original English translation, not my corrected version.</p>
<p><b>International Media Talk and Historical Figures</b></p>
<p>After this, I was offered another segment on the <a href="http://www.befm.or.kr/program/weekly/main.jsp">Weekly Review</a> programme, called <i>International Media Talk</i>, which I would do every other week and discuss news in the global media. Finally things came full circle when the formerly absent presenter left the station after three months, the original host returned, and I was offered another segment on his show – <a href="http://www.befm.or.kr/program/insideout/main.jsp">Inside Out Busan</a> – called <i>Historical Figures</i>, which essentially tries to discuss facts about famous people from history you possibly never knew.</p>
<p>Even by my standards, I knew the new segment would likely push me to breaking point, but the presenter and I had become friends along the way and I’d always said I would do more for his show if called upon. I also saw that the new segment potentially promised to be something I could have fun with because the entire premise bordered on the subversive. Seeing society through the perspective of the absurd is the only thing that motivates me to get up in the morning these days. Later in writing it though I’d discover that producing something that matched my expectations in the limited time I had would be a difficult trick to pull off.</p>
<p>About twelve to fifteen hours goes into writing those 30 minutes of radio for Busan e-FM every week, which I’d be the first to accept is probably far in excess of what most other people in my position would sanely put in. This is not work I’d recommend to anyone; I’ve long since developed a love-hate relationship with it, although I suppose at this point that could be said of most of my Korean experiences in general.</p>
<p><a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.49%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28139.7%20Hours%203.49%%29" width="200" /></a></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com4South Korea, Busan, Haeundae-gu, U 2(i)-dong, 147535.172896249540472 129.1307044029235835.166406749540471 129.12083390292358 35.179385749540472 129.14057490292359tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-20609654307305573542012-01-16T23:20:00.000+09:002012-01-29T17:08:47.786+09:00Koyaanisqatsi<b>4,000 Hours</b>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html">A year ago</a> someone told me that they’d read that it requires about 4,000 hours of studying to reach competency in the Korean language. I’d been struggling with finding the motivation to study in an increasingly busy life, and I seized upon this figure as a psychological tool which would give me a sense of there being an end point to my efforts to learn. To that end, I began posting a progress meter at the end of my posts to show my progress towards this fixed goal, fully knowing that any potential failure would be there for the world to see.<br />
<br />
And I failed. With the year over, I’m just over 3% of the way towards that 4,000-hour target, which means that theoretically it will take me over 30 years to achieve competency in Korean at my current pace of studying. <br />
<br />
<b>Auribus teneo lupum</b><br />
<br />
So what has gone wrong? I can give many reasons but when it comes down to it I believe that in this world you are either in control of your life, or your life is in control of you. Studying a language requires a commitment, mental focus, motivation and enough free time every day to make it happen, and these things are increasingly eluding me.<br />
<br />
In retrospect what I believe I should have done <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-new-home-and-financial.html">when I quit trading for a living</a> in August is taken a year off, and made studying Korean my primary goal with no compromises. Frankly, I’m getting too old to keep studying piecemeal here and there year after year, it doesn’t really work and it’s the road to becoming one of those foreigners who’s lived here ten years and who doesn’t speak the language and never will, but are living here with the delusion that they are still trying. It’s obvious though at this point that it’s the latter fate that awaits me. Perhaps I'm already there.<br />
<br />
But with my wife not working after the birth of our first baby, taking a year off would have led to a substantial drain on our savings, even if we had stayed living at my mother-in-law’s place. Our living arrangements were becoming untenable for me though, so we bought our own place last year – in itself a project that took two months of our free time – and the upshot is that our costs have risen by 50% and now we have a mortgage bearing down on us. Despite all this I still could have afforded to take a year out to study, but watching my savings disappear is psychologically something it turns out I can’t easily accept.<br />
<br />
So instead of studying Korean, I quickly found <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/10/33.html">a part-time position working as a software engineer</a> – my pre-trading career – and which officially takes 15 hours out of my week but is actually 22 hours with travelling. I was also offered more work at <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">Busan e-FM</a> and took that, I agreed to form a joint-venture business with a large Korean Internet company that approached me but ultimately didn’t manage to get their project off the ground, and I immersed myself in several side-projects which like a lot of things we ultimately do for our job prospects, were time-consuming and lacked any immediate return-on-investment. <br />
<br />
My wife did an eight-week TESOL course around this time, which very much left me holding the baby – both figuratively and in reality – and combined with my 'dash-for-cash' efforts to put a liveable income together, this was how I didn’t study in September and October, following the two months I lost due to apartment hunting in July and August. <br />
<br />
I began to realise that I used to complain about the long hours working as a trader was demanding, but while I certainly had to sit watching the screens, I did get a lot of other things done at the same time, which amongst other things included studying as well as writing my blog.<br />
<br />
The final irony of my choices turned out to be that the financial chaos in August was a bad time to make life-changing decisions; by the year's end I'd still made 64.13% in my trading account, and while that didn't compare all that favourably with previous years, sticking with trading was still a better financial option than everything else I plunged myself into. But in my life I traded the uncertainty of trading for the certainty and greater respectability of salaried employment, and perhaps there's something to be said for stability.<br />
<br />
<b>The Maginot Line</b><br />
<br />
Another wider question which has been on my mind in recent months is whether the greater goal should to be to learn Korean at all. In the last year I’ve met a lot of foreigners who have been in Korea for a long time. And one of them - who like the others is completely fluent right down to the body language - quietly told me that if he could live his time over again, he wasn’t sure he’d bother making the effort to learn the language. It’s a shocking revelation for an old Korea-hand, but one I increasingly understand as I reach the personal conclusion that more often than not Korea is a country that does not really reward you for your efforts as a foreigner. Of course, there are people who go native and find some contentment in their lives here - whether in reality or through wilful ignorance – but my own experiences are leaning me towards the idea that it might not be typical.<br />
<br />
To wit, consider the case of an English-language radio station I’m aware of – I won’t say which one - that employs foreigners, or Koreans who speak English well enough to be hosts, and is officially run for the benefit of the foreign community in Korea (even though I’m sure the vast majority of the audience are Koreans learning English). There is no prospect of progression into production or management for fluent Korean speakers because that’s their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line">Maginot Line</a> through which the invaders must not cross. What’s more, those defensive fortifications do not just protect against physical incursions, but also the cultural – because one strongly gets the impression that foreign ideas are not really welcome in even this small corner of supposedly multicultural Korea.<br />
<br />
Much like the Maginot Line though, I know these defences will eventually be swept away, but like a lot of things in Korea it’s a process which will take a lot of time, maybe even generations. But it’s 2012, and even in an organisation that is meant to be a beacon of multiculturalism I’m still left with the feeling that it's reflective of a multiculturalism that more often than not gravitates towards telling foreigners about your superior culture and trying to help them assimilate into Korea’s monoculture to become almost-Koreans. In fact I’ve long since lost track of the number of Koreans I’ve met who’ve told me they’d like to go abroad – not really to learn from other cultures but to tell everyone about bibimbap, Dokdo, Korea’s four seasons or some other repressed Korean secret they think the world should know and is going to be in awe of once it collectively realises, which it won't.<br />
<br />
Now people of limited intellect who like to summarise entire articles in single words will say this is a rant, but I’m afraid it’s far more nuanced than that because personally I have mixed feelings about multiculturalism, and I think the Koreans are entitled to be Korean if they want to be. If part of being Korean means not really accepting foreigners for who they are and largely keeping us in our place so be it, but what it means is that learning Korean does not carry with it the rewards I might be hoping for, which is the prospect of a seat at the table one day, and maybe even a proper job.<br />
<br />
<b>Motivation</b><br />
<br />
I say this attitude doesn’t put me off, but deep down, it doesn’t motivate me either, and after working all day in an office or spending my time babysitting I need more positive rewards than I’m finding to learn the language.<br />
<br />
Time is running out. Life is running out. I hope this year will be different while knowing in my heart that it won’t be. But without the hope for change, what is left?<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi">Koyaanisqatsi</a>" is a Hopi Indian term for "life out of balance".<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.35%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28134.0%20Hours%203.35%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com10Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-38632054465572687362011-11-29T21:04:00.000+09:002011-11-29T21:08:35.005+09:00Dog Gone<p>The decision <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-new-home-and-financial.html">to move out of my mother-in-law’s apartment</a> set in motion a lot of unintended consequences. One of these was the surprising declaration by Korean Mother that because she intended to spend most of her days out of the apartment, or engaging in bouts of potentially uninvited babysitting at ours, she wouldn’t be in a position to keep <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2008/04/cats-dogs.html">the dog called Max we’d rescued three years ago</a> and given to her to keep her company.</p>
<p>It was always clear we wouldn’t be taking him with us, because he doesn’t like to be poked and our son is very much at the poking stage, though I think he’s showing signs of graduating to tail-biting. The other problem was that if Max felt he’d been slighted in some way, he’d take revenge, and it got to the point where scolding him for something would almost inevitably lead to him urinating on one of the beds in the house, and if he needed to wait a couple of days to pick his moment, then he would. Max is a dog that plots against you.</p>
<p>So plans were hatched to send him down to Namhae to stay with my father-in-law and his father, who eventually vetoed the plan. It was probably a lucky escape for Max anyway. I met a dog on their farm once. It was tied up by a short rope walking around in a puddle of its own urine in the freezing cold, and it was pleased to see me in a way that was so friendly it suggested a certain form of madness and the impossible hope of rescue. The next time I went to Namhae, the dog was gone. I think something bad happened to him but I didn’t want to to ask. That was a ‘working dog’ I was told, so Max would be treated differently, but I had my doubts. Most Koreans are coming to terms with being the first generation of keepers of dogs as pets, <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/02/117_80694.html">and it shows</a>.</p>
<p>Without the easy option of the Namhae plan we were back at the status quo ante, and between everything else that was going on at the time, Max’s situation was not the foremost one in my mind. But what I didn’t expect to happen was for my wife to suddenly tell me at 4.50pm on some random Sunday that his new owners were coming to collect him in ten minutes. Max has bitten me badly enough to draw blood three times, once very early on when we were establishing our levels in the pack and twice I think in the mistaken belief that he was protecting our baby. So there have been long periods when there has been no love lost between us, but I have played with him a lot, and there was a time when I considered him my only friend in Korea, so I suppose when it came down I was rather attached to him, for all his faults.</p>
<p>I’d scolded him at lunchtime because he’d been trying to bite a towel on the floor, and with the handover now happening fifteen floors below me outside our apartment building after vital time had been spent with my wife who was trying to calm me down, it promised to be the last interaction Max and I ever had. Maybe ending things that way shouldn’t have mattered, but it did.</p>
<p>I rushed down to try and say this sudden and unexpected goodbye. None of it was very pleasant as my wife and mother-in-law were both upset and I was angry about not being told of this development. I might not speak the language but at one point I broke etiquette and deliberately stared at my wife’s mother in order to convey my feelings towards her. To my mind Max was part of the family and she’d made the decision autonomously with people we didn’t know anything about, and she had also failed to inform anyone. I was even more angered when she eventually appeared to reluctantly accept the money the new owners had brought for her, because it turned it into a cheapened financial transaction. Later I found out that it's considered 'unlucky' - for both parties - not to pay for a dog in Korea, even if it's a token amount. Not knowing this, we'd never paid any money when we rescued Max, and there may well be those who believe that in failing to appease the Gods in this way, everything else that followed we brought upon ourselves.</p>
<p>As for not finding out until ten minutes before, it turned out my wife had known in the morning – which is still far too late – and in rushing out to meet a friend had forgotten to tell me. So her stock wasn’t exactly going up in this whole affair either.</p>
<p>It’s a sore point with me that – especially because of the language barrier – I tend to be the last to know anything in my life in Korea, both domestic and beyond, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that it’s not good enough to just excuse it as a function of language difficulties. Rather, I’m coming to the conclusion that most Koreans I know are not great sharerers of important information, not because they aren’t good gossips, because they are, but because they aren’t always good at talking with foreigners, even if they can speak perfect English, like my wife.</p>
<p>Apparently Max’s new owners were ‘dog people’ of long standing, who had just lost their previous pet to old age. Needless to say though, this is not an ideal way to transfer ownership of a dog. But when the status updates came in, it was all positive. They’d taken him home, let him run around the garden of their house which he’d greatly enjoyed as I can imagine, and then they’d given him a bath and gone out and bought a new house and basket for him along with other items. The husband would take Max for walks by the river in the morning, and the wife stayed at home during the day, ensuring Max would have a happier life than we had been able to provide for him. I made my peace with it and wished him that better life.</p>
<p>The next day they brought him back. He’d growled at the husband and he’d refused to eat. And while the couple might have been dog people of many years' experience, they apparently didn’t know much about adjustment periods, or perhaps it finally dawned on them that when we said Max had a troubled early life and needed a good home with patient owners, this was really meant. So they had second thoughts, or no patience, and Max came back, but he still needed a new home and I was sure it would be worse than the one he had for a day.</p>
<p>Predictably I wasn’t told Max was returning either, so the first I knew of it was when I heard the familiar sound of his feet on the floor.</p>
<p>We moved out and Max disapproved of it. So he decided to step things up a gear, by urinating and defecating everywhere every time my mother-in-law went out. Despite this, I wish I found out what she was going to do before she handed him over to a government-registered kennel to be re-homed, because I believe they are inherently untrustworthy and there’s always the thought at the back of your mind that <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/10/113_96255.html">they will find ways of creating spaces in their kennels whatever it takes</a>, even if officially their government registration supposedly guarantees that they will never put a dog to sleep.</p>
<p>Max was probably traumatised by being separated from his mother after six days, and he never recovered from it, becoming a victim of this country’s general attitude towards dogs, if not – I increasingly feel - its general attitude as a whole. So when he had his lucky breaks he didn’t make the most of them, but while I was sympathetic I also didn’t know what to do because he was unmanageable and untrustworthy. You can’t easily have an untrustworthy dog in your apartment when you have a baby.</p>
<p>Still, I hatched a plan to rescue Max if he hadn’t been re-housed within a few weeks, although I didn’t tell my wife and I didn’t know how the idea would be received. The plan involved taking Max back and bringing him to our apartment despite his problems – where I would take him out every morning to exercise and tire him to see if this altered his behaviour for the better. Then, if it didn’t, he might have to go back to the kennel. But it wasn’t to be. Officially, Max was re-housed after two weeks, and that might be really what happened, or he might be dead, but either way it’s over and I’ll never know the truth.</p>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/6376240439/" title="Goodbye Max by BusanMike, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm7.staticflickr.com/6221/6376240439_30741775ce.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="Goodbye Max"></a>
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.30%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28132.0%20Hours%203.06%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com3Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-18357475135497080422011-11-20T16:08:00.000+09:002011-11-20T16:16:03.342+09:00Busan e-FM Week 36: Love Hotels, Sex and Adultery (Banned)<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/5648246620/" title="The english waves come in by BusanMike, on Flickr"><img align="right" alt="The english waves come in" height="180" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5261/5648246620_5167a212ce_m.jpg" width="240" /></a><a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">About 'Open Mike in Busan'</a><br /><br />
<b>Introduction</b>
<p>It took 36 weeks, but I finally had a script refused for broadcast. When I started doing my weekly segment with <a href="http://www.befm.or.kr">Busan e-FM</a>, it was with the agreement that I could be honest about my experiences in Korea, but the question is, does Korea want to be honest about itself?</p>
<p>Ostensibly, the problem was that Love Hotels and Adultery – the main thrust of my piece – were “not appropriate subjects” for the radio. <a href="http://tbs.seoul.kr/">TBS eFM</a> – an equivalent English-language radio station in Seoul had covered these subjects before – but that’s Seoul and this is Busan, which is generally much more socially conservative.</p>
<p>Exploring where these newly discovered boundaries lay, and whether they were strictly sexual, I asked - mindful that the <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/06/117_89574.html">2011 Dog Meat Festival in Gyeonggi Province had recently been cancelled</a> amidst protests – if the subject I was allegedly considering for the next week – that of dog meat in Korea – would be acceptable. I was of course, just screwing with them. I felt I saw a slightly pained look cross the face of my assigned handler. It was not really an acceptable subject either.</p>
<p>And so it was we reached the climax of our conversation. It was probably best to avoid ‘controversial subjects’. That was the spot I’d touched. The two people I knew that regularly listened to my segment – who for all I know were actually the only two people who listened at all - were surprised. Hadn’t the radio station really been listening to what I’d been talking about before now?</p>
<p>I’ve always found the <a href="http://dokdotimes.blogspot.com/2011/04/foreign-collaborators-to-be-tried-post.html">foreigners who only tell Koreans what they want to hear</a> for the sake of a quiet life somewhat soda-masochistic, even if we’ve all done it from time to time. So I escaped my temporary bondage and continued tackling controversial subjects in the weeks that followed, going on to reference attitudes to homosexuality in Korea, monoculture and corporate enslavement, racism and the often enforced dystopian existence of foreigners, consumer nationalism, chaebol media lies and the absence of critical thought, [stay tuned!] but I did it in my usual style – hopefully relatively gently, diplomatically, and with humour.</p>
<p>I’d like to think that if done sufficiently eloquently, it is possible to speak truth to power in Korea, but whether that’s because people here are truly prepared to have a light shone on certain subjects, or simply because they weren’t listening or didn’t understand, is the loaded question.</p>
<p>I include the script below as an example of the realities of Korean life and culture you can’t talk about on the radio in Busan in 2011.</p>
<b>Introduction – Love Hotels, Sex and Adultery</b>
<p>Last week I <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/08/busan-e-fm-week-35-get-room.html">talked about ‘bangs’</a> - such as the <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2006/10/kiss-kiss-bang-bang.html">‘DVD bang’</a> couples go to. This week I’m talking about a related subject, that of ‘love hotels’ or ‘love motels’. I don’t quite know how to translate this because we don’t use the word ‘motel’ in British English, but I’ve seen them called both hotels and motels here.</p>
<p>I think this highlights an issue with the cultural development of language. A motel is described as a ‘hotel for motorists’, and it makes sense this word would emerge from American English because of the long road journeys people have to make in the United States. They don’t have to do this in England because the country is geographically small – so you can normally get to where you want to go in a day. But I understand that many American motels are dropping the word now because it’s seen as being ‘seedy’.</p>
<p>We still have slightly seedy hotels in England – we just call them ‘bed & breakfasts’. But there are no love hotels in England that I'm aware of.</p>
<b>Love Hotels</b>
<p>So I was surprised when I saw the love hotels here, although not totally shocked – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_hotel">Japan is famous for its love hotels</a> and most people outside Japan have probably heard of them. To a Westerner like myself, there seem to be a lot of general cultural similarities between Japan and Korea, so it’s not a complete shock to discover love hotels here, but as I’ve said before, I really didn’t know that much about Korea before coming here, and I certainly didn’t realise how popular they are.</p>
<p>I took them as a sign of social restriction in Korea, in the same way that ‘DVD bang’ represent the same issue. They are both somewhere to go because so many young people live at home. Maybe ‘DVD bang’ are where they go to fool around, and when it gets more serious they graduate to love hotels. I find it funny though how people going there want privacy, but the buildings are usually so very visible and obvious because of their architectural tendency to employ large fake Roman columns, cupid statues, small windows and plenty of neon lighting.</p>
<b>Staying in a Love Hotel</b>
<p>I’ve actually stayed in a love hotel. The first time I went to Seoul it was just for an overnight trip, and my wife and I wanted to save money, so she said “love hotels are cheap... and usually have Internet connections.” I thought ‘why not?’ Anyway, if the word ‘cheap’ didn’t sell it for me, the word ‘Internet’ certainly did.</p>
<p>So we quickly came across a love hotel in some Seoul backstreet near the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_House">Blue House</a>, although I’ve learned that in Korea love hotels certainly don’t feel compelled to hide themselves away. That said, they do try to maintain a certain air of privacy, with curtains at the entrance to the drive-in areas to avoid cars and perhaps car licence-plates being seen, which always gave me the impression that a lot of older people might be using the hotels given that younger people generally own fewer cars – and probably don’t care about that kind of privacy as much. This quickly led me to believe that love hotels are frequently the venue for affairs in Korea. But if that didn’t convince me, when we reached the counter it also had a curtain over it, our money went underneath and a hand comes back with a key. No faces are visible and it’s all quite seedy actually, which made me feel vaguely guilty. I felt like trying to look underneath the curtain to say “we’re married”, but then I suppose everyone feeling guilty says that.</p>
<p>Last week I talked about going to DVD bangs with two Korean women, which in retrospect – given the area we were in – looked bad. And in some ways I felt the same way at the love hotel – if the staff had seen my face it wasn’t going to do anything positive for the reputation of foreigners. Then again, love hotels don’t always do much with foreigners for the reputation of the Koreans who run them – last year there wasn’t enough hotel space at the inaugural Korean Grand Prix, so a number of journalists <a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2927568">ended up staying in love hotels</a> – perhaps unsuspectingly. Anyway, the main point it that they were charged $310 per night – in other words they were ripped off – which means that evidently the love hotel owners realised they were foreigners early into the transaction – curtains or not.</p>
<p>While it might be cheap – unless you happen to be an unsuspecting foreigner – it’s not necessarily easy to get a good night’s rest there, because my wife was worried about hidden cameras. I don’t know if this is just an urban legend or whether it actually happens – actually I suspect it probably does happen sometimes. So it’s all about undressing in a part of the room where you think the camera won’t see you, then hiding under the covers and sleeping. I don’t want to be famous on the Korean Internet.</p>
<p>So I guess the love hotels are still too much of a risk for some. I was <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2007/10/darkness-ascending.html">up on Hwangryeong Mountain late one night</a> in Busan taking shots of the city after dark, and there were a few cars parked along the road, spaced apart. There seemed to be some kind of activity in a couple of the cars, and one of them had the stereotypical steamed up windows, and the car was moving around. Given the executive and old fashioned nature of the car concerned, I imagined there had to be an older couple inside.</p>
<b>Adultery is a Criminal Offence in Korea</b>
<p>Of course, <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110810000800">adultery is illegal in Korea</a>, so people have to be careful. I was really shocked when I found out about this law, but perhaps it goes some way to explain some of the behaviour I’ve encountered. When my wife and I were at another love hotel, another couple happened to come out of the room at the same time as us, and as soon as they saw us they dashed back inside.</p>
<p>I don’t know what to think about the adultery law. On the one hand, adultery is a bad thing, but on the other hand, in my opinion it seems like the kind of law the Taliban would have, and not something you find in a modern country.</p>
<p>I think the law creates a bad impression of South Korea. Maybe it’s not fair expecting Korea to be socially liberal, but this country is very keen to attract foreign investment and foreign companies, but I imagine business executives in foreign companies look at Korean society as a whole before they decide to come here and think “what kind of country is this?”</p>
<p>What I can’t figure out about this law is that legislators are mainly men, and men are usually willing adulterers – in fact male politicians around the world are known for their affairs – so why did these men create and pass this law? Do they like living dangerously or were they really worried about their lives? [I left this question hanging but I’m convinced that men passed this law to control women in the traditionally misogynistic Korean court system, although more recently judges may have been a little more balanced in their judgements].</p>
<p>It’s also worth making some comparisons between South Korea and other countries. China is not known for being socially liberal, but adultery isn’t a criminal offence there. But then adultery <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/13/adultery-still-a-crime-in_n_390366.html">is a criminal offence in the U.S. state of New Hampshire</a> – it isn’t enforced and there are people trying to get it removed from the statute books.</p>
<p>I think the whole issue raises some fundamental questions about freedom and democracy in South Korea. Should the majority be able to dictate to – and criminalise – a minority that don’t meet their moral standards? For that matter, what right does the government have to legislate people’s sex lives?</p>
<p>It’s a dangerous road to go down in my opinion. Some Islamic countries have ‘moral police’ who enforce compliance with Sharia Law – is that really what the police should be doing in Korea? Last year, I <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8439899.stm">read about an incident in Malaysia</a> where the ‘morality police’ were knocking on people’s doors in a hotel, and they ended up arresting 52 unmarried couples. I suppose if the Korean police really wanted to enforce the law here they could just visit love hotels, check people’s marital status, and make arrests. To be fair, they don’t, but the fact that the law exists means that one day they could, or just choose to do it selectively to target certain individuals or groups, which is why bad laws should never be on the statute books. Anyway, as far as Korea is concerned, I think the people should be spending their time arresting motorcyclists who ride on the pavements [sidewalks], rather than getting involved in policing people’s relationships.</p>
<b>Korean Porn Movies</b>
<p>While I don’t worry about getting arrested in a love hotel, I do worry about the perceived issue of hidden cameras and ending up on the Internet, but I haven’t avoided Korea’s love hotels despite this. When we went to a funeral in Namhae we found ourselves in the countryside and it was quite isolated. As you can imagine, there wasn’t a proper hotel for miles, but there was <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2007/04/love-hotel.html">a love hotel just up the road from the the funeral hall</a>. So given that Korean funerals tend to be multi-day events, and given that we didn’t want to sleep in the funeral hall with a heaving mass of older Koreans, we had little choice but to stay in a love hotel once again.</p>
<p>This one was even less subtle because even if the building's fake Roman columns and cupid statues didn’t give the game away to the uninitiated, it had a large collection of pornographic videos outside the elevator on our floor - most appeared to be Korean-made. It also had a great looking Jacuzzi placed centrally within the room, but sadly we daren’t use it because of the potential for hidden cameras.</p>
<b>Korean Culture</b>
<p>Staying in a love hotel is an interesting experience. When it comes down to it, staying in hotels in England is often all the same, but Korean love hotels have character. At the risk of giving Korean newspapers even more reasons to hate us, I think it’s something every foreigner should try at least once. They are part of what Korea is, and part of the cultural experience here.</p>
<p><b>Planned air date: 2011-06-29 @ ~19:30</b></p>
<p><b>Footnote</b></p>
<p>Five weeks after the planned air date of this piece, <a href="http://english.kbs.co.kr/News/News/News_view.html?id=Dm&No=83664">South Korea's Constitutional Court overturned the provision in the Criminal Code imposing a maximum two-year prison sentence on adulterers</a>, saying it was 'an infringement on the sphere of sexual life that society should maintain on its own' and that 'the state was excessively restricting a matter of personal decision.'</p>
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.30%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28132.0%20Hours%203.06%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com5South Korea Busan Haeundae-gu U-dong 147535.172896249540472 129.1307902336120635.171273749540468 129.12832273361207 35.174518749540475 129.13325773361206tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-68197041435351435972011-10-23T10:57:00.001+09:002011-10-23T12:08:28.332+09:0033<p>I got a job working part-time as a software engineer for <a href="http://www.bifskorea.org/">Busan International Foreign School (BIFS)</a>, developing and implementing a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_information_system">Student Information System</a> (or 'SIS') using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php">PHP</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysql">MySQL</a>. The position is open-ended but because I’m working on a specific project it feels more like one of the IT-contracts I used to do.</p>
<p>The hours work well for me because my wife is doing a TESOL course at the moment and I’m babysitting when I’m not working. That said, I had notions that a part-time position would leave me with much more chances to study, but after my first day of babysitting duties, I managed no more than ten minutes, and it set the pattern for what would follow. Perhaps I’m never going to be able to study Korean effectively or do anything else I want to until my son gets older, or someone pays me enough not to madly chase around Korea after work as I have been doing of late.</p>
<p>Busan International Foreign School is situated in Gijang, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gijang">which Wikipedia describes</a> as "the most rural of Busan’s districts" consisting of "mostly of vacant and agricultural land", which just about sums it up. Getting to the school before I moved from one side of Busan to the other - another of the many things which have occupied my time this month - involved travelling thirty-three subway stops and then using a taxi, because Gijang is sufficiently off the grid that it lies some distance to the north of Jangsan - the last station on Line 2. After I moved, I managed to cut my journey time down from one hour twenty minutes, to fifty-five minutes, which I'm obviously very happy about in a sarcastic kind of way, but we bought the apartment before I got the job, so I wasn't to know how inconvenient it would really be. In principle my new apartment is closer than the travel time would seem to suggest, but having to change subway lines twice to get to Jangsan really slows the journey down.</p>
<p>It’s somewhat ironic that I’ve found myself working for one of the two foreign schools here - because the question of whether to send my son to <a href="http://www.bifskorea.org/">Busan International Foreign School</a> or its rival, <a href="http://www.busanforeignschool.org/">Busan Foreign School</a>, has been vaguely at the back of our minds since before my wife even gave birth. Now that I work for BIFS I’ve finally undertaken more research into both schools and the choice has become much clearer - there isn’t one because I probably can't afford either of them.</p>
<p>The campus is newly built and larger than I expected, and the vast majority of the teachers and students are non-Koreans. That might sound obvious, but in fact some foreign schools which teach foreign curricula in Korea end up doing so primarily for the benefit of more internationally-minded Koreans. Another interesting and probably highly unusual aspect to BIFS is that it doesn’t teach a US curriculum which the US is not a particularly good advert for, but instead the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Baccalaureate">International Baccalaureate</a>, which seems determined to produce the kind of well-rounded individuals which Korea is desperately lacking due to the latter system's tendency to overspecialise and focus solely on measured examination outcomes while discouraging critical thought.</p>
<p>While there are American teachers at the school, most of the senior staff are British, and a surprising number of teachers are non-American native English speakers, so after what I wrote about the number of jobs in Korea which advertised for '<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-north-american-passport.html">North American passport holders only</a>', it feels like part school, part search-and-rescue mission for non-American English-speaking expats.</p>
<p>And so a new Korean experience has begun for me. Three days a week, I travel the subway like the office worker I now am. I have my first salaried position in this country, and much against expectations, it isn’t teaching English.</p>
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.30%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28132.0%20Hours%203.06%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com9South Korea Busan Gijang-gun Gijang-eup Nae-ri 79835.200394123636663 129.20750141143835.198772123636665 129.205033911438 35.20201612363666 129.20996891143798tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-27498435934069072152011-09-24T23:58:00.000+09:002011-09-25T11:46:43.920+09:00August Rush: The First Birthday Party<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-england.html">The failure to go to England</a> had another consequence. Our son would celebrate his first birthday in Korea. So we had four options in order of my descending preference: do nothing, have a meal with friends and family at home, have a meal with friends and family in a restaurant, or submit to the complete circus that is a baby birthday hall. Yes, they have baby birthday halls.<br />
<br />
Tired, sick, rejected from a job I wanted, and generally extremely fed-up, when my wife broached the subject with me, I famously said “just choose the option you think best”. Tens of thousands of years of language development and men still haven’t learned not to speak those words in sequence to women. I suppose one would have to conclude at this point that it must serve some evolutionary purpose, but if it does I certainly can’t imagine what. And I said it in Korea.<br />
<br />
So the baby birthday hall it was then, with all the consequences stemming from this that you don’t clearly think through until they are making your life a misery, such as the one-year photo shoot, the video, the invites, the hanboks, and the breakdancing.<br />
<br />
<b>The Photo/Video Presentation</b><br /><br />
Yes, it is not so simple as booking a time, sending out some invites and just turning up, because the first thing you’re going to need is to arrange the video and photo presentation that forms one of the centrepieces of the birthday celebration. Now in all probability you’ve spent the last year taking copious amounts of photos and videos of your baby – this is Korea after all - so you might be led to believe that these would prove sufficient, but nay, nay and thrice nay.<br />
<br />
The photo presentation must contain pictures from the one-year photo shoot – it’s the law – so this involved another trip to a self-studio, a lot of silly hats, and an understanding wife. Understanding because just before we were about to set off for said studio, I received an email telling me I hadn’t got an interview <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-web-job.html">for the job I wanted</a>, so I spent twenty minutes writing a reply trying to persuade them to change their minds (they did), and telling them I’d go there immediately if they wanted to interview me that afternoon, which would cause us to miss the shoot (I ended up going the next morning). We were late arriving at the studio, but they didn’t have another booking after us, so they let us run over, which was pretty decent of them.<br />
<br />
So we now had our full portfolio of photographs and videos, but they had to be packaged in a proper presentation format, because well... everyone else does and so like most things in Korea, it’s something of a social arms race.<br />
<br />
There are one-and-a-half ways of doing this. Either have a specialist company produce one for around 70,000 won, or go down the cheaper road of doing it yourself. Well, we’re all into self-empowerment here at Busan Mike Inc. (i.e. we’re cheap), so we did it ourselves. And it can be both fun and therapeutic too. Once I’d produced an outline photo and video montage and a credits sequence where I was only listed under <i>Professional White Guy as ‘Dada’</i> and which ended with the phase <i>“No Piracy in Korea!”</i> I really began to see the possibilities for indulging in a little satire for the purposes of self-therapy. It would have been lost on the audience of course, in fact there’s every chance they might have viewed the result positively as taking the process into a ‘new paradigm’, but sadly it was not to be. I <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-voice-in-wilderness.html">became too sick</a> to work on it any further and my wife did it instead. But I’m sorry my baby video as a parody of “Korea’s Got Talent!” never saw the light of day.<br />
<br />
My wife’s video-photo montage was more conventional, and perhaps the Windows Live Movie Maker produced result was not as polished as the professionally produced videos we’ve seen at other first-birthdays recently, but on the other hand my wife also speaks English well-enough to know not to choose a soundtrack with the lyrics “ooh, my ass, my ass, my sexy ass” to accompany those videos of baby crawling around. It’s possible the singer was intending some action to be performed in relation to her ass, but I never did decipher those lyrics, and perhaps it’s just as well. Meanwhile, one of the English captions read “Let is wet the baby is head” and since it appeared at a point devoid of head wetting, its purpose and that of several other captions will remain a mystery.<br />
<br />
Of course the other problem with burning a DVD is who does that any more? We had to go out and find a disc that was compatible with our computers and their DVD player, because you really only have one shot at this.<br />
<br />
<b>Hanbok</b><br /><br />
The next problem, if indeed it isn’t actually several problems further down the road, is that you need a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbok">hanbok</a>, Korea’s traditional dress and method of ensuring that you take up twice the physical amount of space you would otherwise need. For some inexplicable reason, hanbok have failed to sweep the world to the extent that even Koreans don’t normally wear them or own them these days. So a trip to the hanbok-hire store is in order so that you, your spouse and your child can pick out matching hanbok. Matching is a strong word because in my experience many hanbok are something of a conflict of colour which rarely match themselves let alone anything else, but in the end we pick the ‘Microsoft Office’ hanboks which limit themselves to pale blue and white. They even have ribbons as well, though it’s unclear if anyone wants them.<br />
<br />
It has taken us some time to reach this point however, because the small branch office of the hanbok-hire company located in the baby hall building has a very limited selection so we have to visit their headquarters, which much like those descriptions in Korea’s traditional fairy stories is “‘five minutes walk’ from a subway station in a land far, far away.” Which means more time wasted. Sorry, I mean more time usefully spent in subway trains with a crying baby.<br />
<br />
But I am relieved to discover that on this occasion, the hanbok I have to wear does not include a <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/4108526249/">square metal belt</a> and badly fitting <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_boots">Wellington boots</a>. And this is fortunate, because by attending other baby birthday parties recently I have discovered that it is customary in Korea to call upon the father to engage in the traditional Korean dance form known as ‘hip-hop’, ‘breakdancing’ or ‘b-boying’.<br />
<br />
<b>Can You Breakdance (in a Hanbok)?</b><br /><br />
“I’m the MC” announces a disturbingly wild-eyed youth who comes up to me at the start of proceedings – or at least as close as he can given my hanbok-exclusion zone. Except phonetically he says Em-Shi because Koreans pronounce ‘Ci’ as ‘Shi’ which is why Centum City is potentially such an immaturely amusing place to live. “Ah, Em-Shi-shi”, I greet him using the polite formal suffix for personal names, but it’s lost on him. “Can you breakdance?” he obliviously continues. I am wearing a large hanbok and after one year of being a parent I have the physical appearance of an 80 year-old. The correct response would have been a withering “Do I <i>look</i> like I can breakdance?”, but the best I can manage is “No.” One day, my language abilities will be good enough for my personality to escape its prison, and then the Koreans will hunt it down and kill it.<br />
<br />
So he tells me to just copy him when the time comes, because obviously the only alternative is to go with my own routine that helped my crew win the <a href="http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_2_1.jsp?cid=293322">R-16 Battle</a> three years in a row, although we weren’t wearing hanbok at the time. I promise you that hanbok breakdancing <a href="http://www.soompi.com/news/yo-seob-breakdances-while-wearing-his-hanbok">will be the next big thing</a> though. I might even email it in as a suggestion to the Ministry of Culture. They’ll go for it as well. You know it. I know it.<br />
<br />
<b>Guests or No Guests</b><br /><br />
So the guests arrive. I feel this requires mentioning explicitly since for the first 20 minutes, when nobody came, it didn’t appear to be a given. I was once setting up a meeting with some African-Carribean student leaders and their constituency, and they told me we’d meet at 8pm, which meant 9, “it’s a cultural thing” they explained. As a person who’s always been driven by each tick of the clock I admired that about them. Koreans are not always so unpunctual in my experience, but with our baby’s birthday and those of the other people’s we attended, people tended to drift over an extended period of time rather than actually turn up when you expect them.<br />
<br />
To be fair, it’s not like anything particularly urgent is scheduled, and perhaps that’s why. These birthday baby halls are much like wedding halls insofar as food is organised around a extended buffet layout, with side rooms leading off from this central area. The prepared baby video plays on a loop in the room for around an hour, until the MC turns up for his 15 minute entertainment slot. In the meantime, guests come along, bringing their envelopes of gift money, which has largely replaced <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/05/123_88041.html">the old tradition of giving gold rings</a>. In fact to some, the money is the most important part of the proceedings because before this point, an equation has been carefully calculated and much like an exam, this is when you get your answer.<br />
<br />
<b>P=(Gi*(Ga/100))-H-S-(R*i)-[(Ajeossis*Bottles)]</b><br /><br />
The equation is highly complex and normally requires several hours of supercomputer time to complete, or your Korean mother-in-law. Grossly simplified, the number of guests invited is divided by the ratio of guests likely to come, the costs of the wedding hall, per-guest buffet charge, hanbok hire and sundry expenses, versus the amount of gift money the guests are likely to bring (which is usually more than cost per head), plus the likelihood that these said guests will retaliate by subsequently inviting you to one of their baby or grandchild parties, which negates the financial advantage of inviting them given that you will, essentially, then have to return their gift money. There are many further sub-equations, such as the table-bottle amplification, which calculates the additional cost given that soft and hard bottled drinks are charged extra per bottle, and their consumption can rise exponentially if certain demographic critical masses occur, but they are beyond the scope of my explaining here.<br />
<br />
Overall, the more people you can invite, the more likely it is you will see a profit. But one complication of being a foreigner is that I know very few people to invite, and even if all but one of them weren’t working on a live radio programme at the time of our party, the Korean gift-money system makes inviting your friends tantamount to asking for money from them.<br />
<br />
Stress has been shown to be a major cause of health problems, so let me put your mind at ease now by revealing that we broke even on our baby party. We will probably end up running a small loss though as guests go on to have 20% more babies than us, according to our calculations.<br />
<br />
<b>Baby’s Future Career</b><br /><br />
So we reach the main event of the proceedings, which isn’t the hanbok breakdancing. After some gifts have been given out in faux-competitions by the MC, and more gift money has been begged for with a Catholic-church style collection tray, the collection tray, which has several other items within it, is presented to your baby for them to choose... their future career.<br />
<br />
In the tray is a toy pencil (scholar), stethoscope (doctor), ball (sportsperson), hammer (judge), microphone (entertainer), mouse (dot-com millionaire) which alongside the recently donated and now untraceable cash (<a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/09/113_94836.html">Korean politician</a>) provide you with your career options. But there had been a slight complication. A few days earlier our dog had torn the ball apart and it no longer existed, thus potentially changing the future course of our son’s life. Our son chose the pencil instead, which I suppose means my wife and I had better plan for our own retirement, and not expect our son to take care of us financially. Oh well.<br />
<br />
Next there is a fake cake with a candle on top to light. The cake is made out of some kind of material which – this being Korea – is probably highly flammable, but despite this it appeared to have survived several dozen previous parties.<br />
<br />
<b>Hanbok Breakdancing</b><br /><br />
The potential conflagration was followed by the threatened hanbok breakdancing. By this time our MC had been temporarily joined by two accomplices who were evidently either professional breakdancers or were used to being electrocuted a lot and had memorised the moves. I readied myself for my inevitable invitation to join them in front of the crowd as I’d witnessed with previous fathers at baby birthday halls. But it didn’t happen. I think our MC let his lack of English get the better of his clinically extroverted personality, and he decided against it. It was a wise choice. Deprived of their entertainment, the guests gradually drifted away seemingly destined to not eat again for days afterwards.<br />
<br />
<b>The Undiscovered Country</b><br /><br />
When I was told that there was <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-week-27-baby-photo-shoots.html">a 100-day photo shoot for my baby</a>, it came as a surprise because I wasn’t warned until the time arrived. The same is true for the 200-day photo shoot, and the one-year photo shoot. Similarly, the one-year birthday baby hall party had not been on my agenda. So I can not conclude this piece with a sense that I can put it behind me and consign the experience to history, because living in Korea is rather like the conquest of space – it’s a journey of exploration and you never know what you’re going to find next. Oh yes, and no-one really trusts the aliens.
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.06%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28122.5%20Hours%203.06%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com8시청역 3번출구, Yeonsan-dong, Yeonje-gu, Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-83460757292703062742011-09-13T20:57:00.002+09:002011-09-13T20:57:28.213+09:00August Rush: EnglandI was scheduled to return to England with my wife and baby son on the 25th, but that never happened; we cancelled our tickets on the 20th. Our baby is not a good traveller. In fact he is not a good sleeper or eater either, so this last year has been exhausting. Losing face in Korea is best avoided, so I’m not supposed to talk about it, but that’s the reality. It's been an extremely tough year. Our trip to England felt necessary for the sake of relatives and an ageing parent, but it was probably always the wrong decision, one made out of emotion rather than logic.<br />
<br />
Our long and many subway journeys across Busan from Saha-gu to the east of the city where we were searching for an apartment during August were fraught experiences, because he was not a happy traveller. Sometimes we had to get off at stations to calm him down, and once it was so bad we gave up and went to the surface to catch a bus. Suddenly twenty-four hours of travelling and fourteen hours of flights with him appeared a reckless idea, and we took the emotionally gut-wrenching decision to cancel the trip and disappoint my family. But as parents we had to do what we thought best for our son, and that was not going.<br />
<br />
There’s no easy solution to the problem of international relationships when the two countries are far apart; one partner is always going to make the potential sacrifice of being separated from friends and family. And for all the Korean government’s constant attempts to support multicultural families within Korea, there is one important respect in which they certainly don’t support them, and that’s in the provision of holiday time legislation, with a mere five discretionary days a year typical in many jobs. Contrast that with England, where twenty days is common. This means that when I get a job I simply may not have the option of returning to England except for a week, which stripping out travelling and jet-lag hardly amounts to quality time. It seems that sometimes the only solution to the problem is to quit your job, and apply for a new one when you return.<br />
<br />
Another ominous sign of more difficulties lying ahead came in the form of ticket prices. We booked well in advance as we always do, but this time there seemed to be much fewer viable choices in terms of airlines, and the price we paid was over twice that last time we bought a return tickets three years ago. Of course, the major variable in airline ticket costs is the oil price, but as someone who sometimes traded oil and certainly has the charts to hand, I know that by coincidence, the oil price was almost exactly the same this time as last. The airlines would probably argue about such arcane subjects as forward buying and hedging, but I don't really believe a word of it. Until there's more competition again on those routes in happier economic times, the costs of returning home may be destined to remain considerably higher.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:3.00%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28120.0%20Hours%203.00%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com4시청역 3번출구, Yeonsan-dong, Yeonje-gu, Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-63480794993800857432011-09-12T12:13:00.000+09:002011-09-25T00:22:08.287+09:00August Rush: Voice in the WildernessI eventually had to stop applying for English teaching jobs – at least temporarily. After several days of problems mid-August I’d ended up with a sore throat so bad that it somehow managed to spread as far as my shoulders. That was a new experience. After two hospital visits where I’d been unsuccessfully treated for some kind of chest infection, I went to a specialist ENT hospital to be quickly diagnosed with tonsillitis, and it wasn’t long before I had a second opinion from another specialist confirming this.<br />
<br />
I lost my voice almost completely just three days after my <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-web-job.html">web development job interview</a>, and I really don’t know how I managed to get through that in the first place. I was really under the weather around that time, but I don’t think it particularly impacted my unsuccessful interview, which I think I largely failed on my own merits.<br />
<br />
Still, it’s no fun being in an interview thinking that you’d talk more if you felt you were physically able to. I’d gone to the local pharmacist with the notion of buying something to get me through it but the best she could offer were some kind of cough sweets that I’d had before and lack the edge necessary to actually do anything. This seems to be a bit of an underlying theme with me in Korea – the kind of powerful over-the-counter medications we get in England either aren’t available here or actually seem to be illegal (like ‘Vicks’ for example, which I’ve gathered is banned in Korea <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/business/article749258.ece">as well as Japan</a>). Maybe the medical profession just wants you to go to the hospital instead, but it's a pity.<br />
<br />
My voice came back and then went again the next week, so I had to accept that not only was I not getting better, but also that it was clearly absurd to be trying to get interviews for teaching jobs when there seemed no prospect of being able to speak at them, unless I could pioneer an entirely new category of occupation here – that of the English-teaching mime. And just to put the icing on the cake, the many medications I was put on caused such intense drowsiness I was even unable to stay awake at my desk. Not that they warned me I’d be practically losing consciousness when I took them – it needed a visit to another pharmacist armed with the pills for them to confirm that yes, in fact that might happen.<br />
<br />
But I was not a good patient, and not just because of the language barrier. I heard the same phrase from each doctor - “the most important thing you can do is rest”. In Korea. Right. Seriously. It isn’t that kind of culture here and I’m not sure Koreans even know how to. And in that respect, I’m just like them – perhaps I’ve found my spiritual home.<br />
<br />
A further complication arose when my ENT doctor went away for a conference. I don’t know what it is about Korean doctors, but they often seem to be away from their jobs, on holiday, stuck in traffic, or on strike. Maybe I’m just unlucky but I seem to be forever hospital-hopping these days, although at least Korea is a country which actively supports that. Perhaps it has to.<br />
<br />
So I finished up in a rather dingy little clinic with a singular aged doctor - but my wife assured me that he was ‘famous’ locally, which is presumably why he didn’t feel the need to trouble himself with details like décor and the customary young women on reception, instead apparently opting to employ their mother, who also transpired to double up as the ass-injection nurse. But by this time I didn’t really care about the image of the place because I was beginning to think my tonsils and I were not destined to be ending the year together.<br />
<br />
The old doctor did give me some new pills - and they seemed to work more effectively than anything I'd had before. A few days later, my sore throat returned and voice went again, but this time, as it's the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuseok">Chuseok holiday period</a>, I'm just going to have to live with it. Hospitals everywhere, but no cure in sight.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:2.91%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28116.7%20Hours%202.91%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com0시청역 3번출구, Yeonsan-dong, Yeonje-gu, Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-11609154449813101472011-09-09T19:39:00.000+09:002011-09-13T22:16:38.751+09:00August Rush: The Web Job<i>Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'<br />
We are not now that strength which in old days<br />
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;<br />
One equal temper of heroic hearts,<br />
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will<br />
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.</i><br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(poem)">"Ulysses", Alfred Tennyson</a><br />
<br />
I always liked that poem, especially those final lines. I learned something shocking during my early days in corporate life and public office. Most people are basically apathetic and most people actually don’t know what they’re doing. So the secret to success in life is generally to give a damn and know your stuff. That might sound deceptively easy, but most people are lazy, so it means that all you often need to do to pull ahead in life is to go the extra mile and put in some of those twelve-hour days I regularly work. Of course, if you want a healthier work-life balance, you’re not going to do that, and for all I know maybe you’d be right not to. In fact, I think you probably are.
<br />
<br />
As I’ve got older, the lines in that poem have increasingly summarised my life. Towards the end of my time as an elected representative serving 9,600 constituents I wondered if everything I would do professionally after it would seem like an anti-climax – it did – and before long I ended up in a job that, anti-climactic or not, paid such a lot of money really that nothing was ever likely to surpass that either, unless I progressed into upper management, a near impossibility for an IT person in the medical corporation I worked for.<br />
<br />
So I’ve done my own thing past my peak, including working around the three years of my professional life that Meniere’s Disease wiped out, and actually I’m not sorry about much – but it has left me feeling like I’m a highly determined person blowing on the embers of past achievements. And while I know who I am and I know what I’m still capable of, my years out in the career wilderness working for myself means that I’m a riskier hire. I have to rebuild my resume. In Korea. Somehow.<br />
<br />
It was becoming apparent that even with my TESOL qualification, getting a foot in the door of the English teaching circuit in Korea wasn’t going to be entirely easy. I was logging into <a href="http://koreabridge.net/">Koreabridge</a> every day and I applied for my first position, a short-term role teaching Business English, which I thought there might be a least a little chance of progressing with given that relative to some people, I have around sixteen years of business experience. Still, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get an interview, because I’m feeling my way in the dark here with almost no expectations. As far as teaching is concerned, I probably have to work my way up from quite a low level, and I suppose Business English jobs probably go to more experienced teachers, not experienced business people, even ones with TESOL certificates.<br />
<br />
So the upshot of everything which has occurred recently is that I’m down on my luck, with a baby and an apartment to support, unemployed with only savings rather than income to pay the bills and career prospects that look about as attractive to me as the front of a subway train. I was desperate to find something outside teaching, but I knew it was probably impossible... until the fifth day of my Koreabridge search, when a job was advertised for a web developer with an F-class visa living in or near Haeundae, which at the time felt like a highly unlikely combination of attributes to find here in Busan amongst the relatively small expat community.<br />
<br />
The academic institution concerned - which is reasonably well-known - didn’t seem to have much in the way of expectations either, because they offered training for any candidate who was at least IT-literate. Yet here I was, a Computer Science graduate, former software and Internet developer with years of experience, a co-founder of two serious dot-com start-up companies behind me and a couple of mildly popular British websites to my name, which were still running, and which I thought nice and publicly demonstrated my proficiency in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL and PHP along with other equally relevant technologies they ought to want. I hadn’t kept up with some of the more peripheral or specialised tools in the way I once did, but I never let my core skills lapse - aside from anything else I’ve been developing my own desktop and intranet systems over the years to support my trading. Old habits die hard.<br />
<br />
My wife saw the job first and told me excitedly “you have to get this job”. And when I looked at the details, I replied that if I didn’t there really was no justice in world, although my answer may have used slightly stronger language. It felt like the Universe, having gone through a phase of persecuting me – things haven’t really been working out in recent months - was now offering me a break; the job was perfect for me, I believed I was perfect for it, and it came at a time in my life when I really needed it. And what was so perfect you couldn’t even make it up, was that six members of the institution’s management were British, so for once I didn’t even have to worry about the disadvantage of not being a “<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-north-american-passport.html">North American passport holder</a>”.<br />
<br />
I saw the job on Friday and I spent the weekend brushing up my technical skills and analysing their website, which had issues, thinking about how it could be improved and developed to meet their business goals while applying a user-centred design approach. It was good preparatory work and while I was excited and I didn’t get too carried away, because I know my days of being a well-paid software engineer are long behind me. Now I have to be grateful for finding any job in Korea I can use my skills in, which until I’m fluent in Korean and lose ten years off my age are virtually none (age discrimination is a huge problem in computing in England - where 25-34 has often been touted as an IT contractor's prime period - and I imagine Korea’s little different).<br />
<br />
Initially I didn’t get an interview partly due to a mix-up about when I was moving to the vicinity of Haeundae, but I made an effort to persuade them to change their minds, which to their credit they did. And despite the fact that it all happened so fast that I wasn’t geared up for an interview in the way I would have been in England – I own one suit in Korea and I took notes with me in an old National Union of Students folder rather than the expensive leather-bound document wallets or attaché cases I used to have back home, I thought I gave a decent interview - not my best - but then I was also feeling really ill, and not just because I wanted the job so much - more on that later.<br />
<br />
I suppose I’ve been around a bit in the business world. In fact, last time I sat in an interview it was when I was the one doing the recruiting and interviewing. So I knew during the interview that I hadn’t got the job. My wife had gone with me to look at the campus for future reference, and when I met up with her afterwards I told her the bad news. It was a pretty long and depressing journey home for both of us, because it looked like I’d failed in the one shot I had at reviving my technical career proper before I succumbed to the seeming inevitability of teaching English to children, and we both knew how much I’d wanted it to be different.<br />
<br />
I’ve been told many times, particularly in the last year as my enthusiasm for working alone and 2am finishes in the financial industry has finally waned, that I should draw upon my experience and find another non-teaching job, because the perception was that being a native-English speaker with an F-2 with my background in software and Internet development gave me a fairly unique selling point in an area that admittedly looked like a narrow market niche in Busan. But I discovered that the the institution I'd applied to had been overwhelmed with apparent talent and experience, so as much as anything it was depressing to discover that I probably didn’t have any apparent unique selling points after all, at least not in the activity commonly referred to as ‘web design’, so that illusion was shattered.<br />
<br />
I suppose for a brief moment I felt the Universe was setting me up to give me a break, but it turned out that it was just setting me up, because indeed, I didn't get the job.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
</div>
<br />
It transpired I did have one unique selling point - my experience in the field of web-based databases - So the institution suggested they might employ me to work on something else, but it didn’t sound very hopeful at the time.<br />
<br />
When you miss out on a job in your own country, you know another will come along shortly, but given the dearth of positions in my professional field here, it felt like I'd just missed the last bus home - leaving me stuck where I am, which is probably on the verge of becoming an English teacher. And with it this country moves a step closer towards turning me into to person it wants me to be, rather than me finding my own way in life here through having a plurality of options.<br />
<br />
John F. Kennedy <a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotation/true_happiness_is_the_full_use_of_your_powers/148091.html">once said</a> that <i>"True happiness is the full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope."</i> That's a definition - if you hold it to be true - that raises a lot of unhappy questions in Korea for an expat in my position.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:2.91%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28116.7%20Hours%202.91%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com2시청역 3번출구, Yeonsan-dong, Yeonje-gu, Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-39252785858317723742011-09-08T17:23:00.000+09:002011-09-15T10:55:13.565+09:00August Rush: North American Passport Holders OnlyChronologically, we signed to buy the apartment and then I lost quite a bit of money in the market, so I now had a major financial commitment and barely the funds to meet it. I remember my wife working through the apartment paperwork as I watched the London FTSE market futures drop a huge amount - 8.4% at one point - on my mobile phone. I was recklessly long overnight in the market on the ‘<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/09/august-rush-new-home-and-financial.html">Centum apartment play</a>’, and there promised to be an enormous progress crushing fall at the open, which there was.<br />
<br />
So it was definitely time to find another job in Korea, and for the first time I had to truly confront one of the fundamental problems with living here - namely that while I’d always been able to use my software and web development skills in England to put food on the table, and there I was capable of doing a myriad of other things, in Korea apparently there is really only option open to me, which is teaching. This was a pity because the one conclusion I had from doing a TESOL course many years ago is that I never really wanted to teach English again, even though I got good grades. Worse, many of the jobs involved teaching children. This is not my thing, and if I thought having a child might kindle some enthusiasm for it on my part, it only made me realise that I need a break from that, not more of it.<br />
<br />
Life is suddenly looking a lot tougher.<br />
<br />
And then, after I decided I had to find a job, I discovered something I’d always been vaguely aware of in Korea, but the scope of which had never quite registered in my mind. I started searching in earnest for jobs on Koreabridge, and I began reading the phrase ‘<a href="http://koreabridge.net/search/node/%22north%20american%22%20type:job_ad">North American passport holder</a>’ rather more than I expected. I hadn’t realised that being a Canadian and speaking Canadian English was a class above being British and speaking English English, but I guess now I know.<br />
<br />
I suppose it’s all aboot [sic] the accent, because while <a href="http://koreabridge.net/jobs/part-time-english-tutor-busan-jsk1020">the job ad I saw</a> which asked for an “american (but, if you have a very neutral accent, another nationality is possible.)” perhaps represented an individual preference rather than a corporate policy, it may well encapsulate the underlying prejudices Koreans have about anything which isn’t American English, or perhaps as I’m learning, Canadian English as the second choice.<br />
<br />
Korea <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110429000564">seems to get very little bang for its buck</a> when it comes to the subject of English teaching, and perhaps part of the reason is the kind of profiling that prioritises people based on nationality and race rather than on actual English and teaching ability.<br />
<br />
Another good one I saw recently - though sadly I can't find the link now - involved a group of male corporate executives who were looking for “an English tutor – female only”. Dear Sirs, I think what you are actually looking for, is a geisha.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:2.91%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28116.7%20Hours%202.91%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com5시청역 3번출구, Yeonsan-dong, Yeonje-gu, Busan, South Korea35.1795543 129.075641634.9719048 128.75978460000002 35.3872038 129.3914986tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-84607738175319415142011-09-07T19:35:00.000+09:002011-09-07T19:51:46.048+09:00August Rush: A New Home and a Financial SetbackSince I last wrote I feel as though I’ve lived another lifetime and I’ll forever call it August 2011. It’s hard for me to explain recent events in my life in a short narrative so over the next few days I’ll post a series of entries under the theme of my ‘August Rush’.<br />
<br />
My wife and I decided to buy an apartment. Since we returned to Korea we’ve lived with her mother, and that had both its emotional and logical reasons, but it changed the nature of our relationship and not for the better. Summer tends to be the slow season for apartment hunting in Korea, for the very good reason that people don’t want to hike around in the unbearable heat as I have just spent the last month doing, and <a href="http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?biid=2011060434328">with prices of apartments in Busan rising at a bubble-like pace</a>, we were watching our relocation options dwindle by the month. We had to take advantage of any lull there was.<br />
<br />
I became a full-time financial trader in December 2004, and I was quite successful for a few years, but since my wife stopped working alongside me last year - providing an all-important extra set of eyes and second opinion - my profitability just ebbed away and my heart wasn’t quite in it any more. I sat alone in my office trading London hours into the early hours of the Korean mornings, I wasn’t getting out of the apartment much at all, so I was failing to learn the Korean language. And the relentlessly negative financial macroeconomic environment of the last few years began to take its toll on me, because in the end I found it doesn’t matter whether you’re winning in the market if the constantly depressing news environment just wears you down. <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">I started doing a weekly radio segment on Busan e-FM</a> during trading hours just to get away from things, an unthinkable move during more motivated times.<br />
<br />
But the end of my career as a trader in August came quickly. I have a rule that if the running annual total of my profits falls sufficiently below the level I could earn from a normal salaried position, then I have to accept that I’m in the wrong job. When you’re ‘in the zone’ in trading, as we call it, you feel untouchable, but when you’re not it’s easy to see extended runs of losses, because this is an activity where studies have suggest 90% of participants consistently lose money. When you find yourself in that 90%, when general market conditions seem no longer aligned with your trading style, you have to find something else to do with your life. And while it would make for a great narrative if could say I’d suffered a major financial blow-up, really it’s been more of a setback, albeit a significant one.<br />
<br />
The culmination of my minor financial crisis was connected with the search for an apartment. I’d done a radio segment about ‘<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-week-19-gravitational-pull.html">the gravitational pull of Haeundae</a>’, and like a lot of Koreans in Busan I felt like I had to be there, but not just out of the need to climb the property and perceived social ladder; the two prominent foreign schools - <a href="http://www.busanforeignschool.org/">Busan Foreign School</a> and <a href="http://www.bifskorea.org/">Busan International Foreign School</a> - are both in the area, and with the prospect that this is where my son needed to go one day, we were planning ahead. But Haeundae is expensive, and it seemed like we had a choice – buy a nice apartment in a good area, or a bad apartment in a good area. We started looking around and it only seemed to make that choice seem even more stark.<br />
<br />
I’d seen some nice apartments in <a href="http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=526986">Centum City</a>, but they were out of our price range, and yet tantalisingly close enough that if I pushed hard with my trading accounts living there might be possible. So I did something I hadn’t done in a long time – broke my risk management rules, ignored the warnings I’d built into my systems, and went for it. If I failed at least I could say that I met my undoing out there on the ragged edge which so often defines who you are as a person. In earlier and more reckless times as a trader I’d done the same thing, and I’d always come out of it on top, but not this time. My decision came just <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8684246/Stockmarket-crisis-QandA.html">days before the market entered a particularly high period of volatility</a>, and in trading parlance, I was long when I should have been short and short when I should have been long. By the time it was over, I’d lost quite a lot of money and Centum City was no longer tantalisingly close but instead an even remoter dream.<br />
<br />
You live by the sword and die by the sword as a trader. I knew what I was doing, I let frustration and impatience get the better of me, and now I have to pay the price. That was my first financial disaster. My second may be buying the apartment itself, because I’m convinced that Busan is in the midst of an <a href="http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=040000&biid=2011071830738">unsustainable property bubble</a> that <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/08/123_93379.html">could entirely conceivably implode in on itself at any moment</a>. But we urgently needed a place to live, and rather presciently as it turned out, while watching what was happening in the international financial markets and the Korean construction sector, I predicted that Korean banks might stop lending, as banks in the UK had a few years earlier, excluding a generation from the dream of home ownership.<br />
<br />
In fact when we were arranging our loan, in a remarkable and frightening admission the bank manager told us that he couldn’t guarantee the bank would still be willing to honour it at the end of September when it was supposed to be released. Despite this, it wasn’t certain then that the turmoil in the financial markets would translate into real-world actions, but just days after we arranged to buy our new apartment, <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/08/19/2011081901060.html">the Korean banks made their move</a> as I’d believed they would, but much sooner than I expected.
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:2.90%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28115.8%20Hours%202.90%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com0South Korea Busan Saha-gu Goejeong-dong 578-935.0997922981414 128.9830541610717834.8920222981414 128.66719716107178 35.307562298141406 129.29891116107177tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-23175759819142803572011-08-03T13:02:00.007+09:002011-08-03T14:06:54.583+09:00Busan e-FM Week 35: 방 잡아! (Get a Room!)<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/5648246620/" title="The english waves come in by BusanMike, on Flickr"><img align="right" alt="The english waves come in" height="180" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5261/5648246620_5167a212ce_m.jpg" width="240" /></a><a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">About 'Open Mike in Busan'</a><br />
<br />
<b>Introduction</b><br />
<br />
PC bangs, DVD bangs, norae bangs, jjimjilbangs, manwhabangs, sojubangs... According to Arirang TV bang culture is ‘<a href="http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=116820&code=Ne2&category=2">unique to Korea</a>’, so today I’m talking about Korea’s 밯 (‘function-specific rooms’).<br />
<br />
<b>밯 in England</b><br />
<br />
We don’t really have 밯 in England. Karaoke became famous there in the 1980s, and so it was very popular in pubs, but they weren’t really ‘rooms’, so you couldn’t called them ‘bangs’. We do have cybercafes though, which are a bit like PC ‘bang’.<br />
<br />
<b>PC 방 on Planet Arirang</b><br />
<br />
According to Arirang TV Korea’s PC ‘bang’ represent “<a href="http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=116820&code=Ne2&category=2">an advanced cultural space that is benchmarked by businesses around the world</a>”. [Drugs are strictly illegal in Korea but if you eat enough kimchi perhaps it has the same effect].<br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2006/12/bang-machine.html">My impressions of Korea’s PC ‘bang’</a> is that they are usually windowless, hot, and occupied by mostly males, which combines to produce a signature smell of cigarette smoke and sweat. Is this what Korea defines as an ‘advanced cultural space’?<br />
<br />
They remind me of university, except they are better than that because they have snacks such as noodles with hot water so you can eat and keep playing [<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-14350216">and get DVT</a>]. Certainly PC bang are everywhere here - ubiquitous you might say [I really need to stop the intentional irony of using <a href="http://www.koreaittimes.com/story/2083/ubiquitous-korea-coming-us-soon">Korea’s most ubiquitous word</a>] - but cybercafes were never hugely successful in England, where they are much more expensive.<br />
<br />
PC ‘bang’ are all about gaming in Korea really, but in England, the cybercafes serve coffee and food. People there might go in and just pay for Internet access, but if they do it’s typically to check their email or Facebook updates, not to play games. Once I wanted to print out a document here in Korea, and it took a long time to find a PC ‘bang’ to do it in - and while we did, even then it wasn't part of the normal service, which only convinced me further that what they are used for here is gaming - not any kind of office work.<br />
<br />
I rarely go to PC ‘bang’ these days [<a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2939313">which are sadly dying now</a>], because we have computers at home [and my social circle have moved on from their <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2006/12/kart-racer.html">Kartrider</a> obsession]. When I did, I was very aware of security issues so I couldn’t do anything sensitive there, but I can understand why people once did check their emails and social networks there, because when I got here having a PC at home wasn’t common.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikimedia.org/wiki/Timothy_leary">Timothy Leary</a> - the 1960s counter-culture icon [and as an advocate of the use of psychedelic drugs, perhaps in some ways <a href="http://dokdotimes.blogspot.com/2010/11/disney-sues-arirang-over-korea-coverage.html">the spiritual father of Arirang TV</a>] popularised the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, and when I look at Korea’s PC ‘bang’ I think of those words, because they seem like the kind of place Koreans go to escape from the realities of Korean society.<br />
<br />
<b>DVD 방</b><br />
<br />
I’d been in Korea two weeks <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2006/10/kiss-kiss-bang-bang.html">when I went to a DVD 방</a> [or ‘DBD’ bang once it’s got over the Korean language’s lack of a ‘V’ sound] in a local university area with my girlfrend and her best friend. We watched ‘Inside Man’ for 13,000 won and I thought it was a really good idea - much more relaxing than going to a movie theatre.<br />
<br />
What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how the DVD ‘bang’ were heavily used for dates [or shall we say, ‘used for heavy dates’ <a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2938001"> - even casual sex</a>] - especially given the nature of that area. It didn’t occur to me at first [though I should have guessed from the clientele], but when we got into the room it had an amazingly comfortable couch, like a bed... If I was in any doubt at this point, then I noticed the room also provided a variety of wet and dry tissues, and when we left, a staff member went in armed with toilet roll and some serious looking cleaning products.<br />
<br />
With most young people in Korea living at home, where can they go to make out with their dates? So retrospectively I see that the strange look got from the staff as I disappeared into the room with two women probably didn’t do the reputation of foreigners any good at all. But it didn’t stop me frequently going back; it became one of my favourite things to do in my first year here.<br />
<br />
<b>Norae 방</b><br />
<br />
According to Arirang “Korea’s noraebang [노래방] culture is unique in that everyone in the room comes together to share a single space for singing.” Of course, I’ve already mentioned that karaoke became famous around the world [i.e. not unique, not yours]. I think I understand the reasons why - there is a lot of social conformity in Japan and Korea, so <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/06/02/2011060201080.html">‘bangs’ are a place where you can let your hair down</a> - and in a noraebang especially.<br />
<br />
I haven’t really let my hair down in a noraebang, and not just because I have very little hair to let down. I don’t like singing. In fact, I’m a bad singer. And that’s a problem in Korea, where everyone has so much experience in noraebang they are all practically professional singers [or at least they think they are, if ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea's_Got_Talent">Korea’s Got Talent</a>’ is any guide].<br />
<br />
I went to a noraebang once after eating. I didn’t want to, but there was a lot of pressure to conform, and then once in the room, a lot of pressure to perform. But I resisted. They had few English songs anyway - and certainly nothing easy - but the real problem for me is this: Koreans think they’re letting their hair down and escaping social conformity, but they are actually just replacing one kind of conformity for another.<br />
<br />
Arirang says that “in a noraebang, borders of nationality melt away as everyone sings their heart out!” I guess I like keeping my borders.<br />
<br />
<b>Other 방</b><br />
<br />
I have no experience of manwhabang [<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhwabang">만화방</a> where you can read comics or '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhwa">manwha</a>' - at least <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110725000832">until the machine uprising</a>], sojubang [where you can drink soju], or the ‘<a href="http://www.luuux.com/node/2008426">kiss bang</a>’ I’ve been reading about [where you pay for someone you don’t know to kiss you in a room, and maybe go a bit further]. My wife’s father has invited me to a <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2011/0524/The-latest-craze-in-South-Korea-the-jimjibang">jjimjilbang</a> [찜질방 - bathhouse/sauna] a few times, but apart from the language barrier I think I’d find the experience culturally and psychologically traumatic; I don’t really want to see my father-in-law naked.<br />
<br />
So although I’ve found Korea’s ‘bang’ fun, sometimes they are also difficult. Noraebang and jjimilbang are not for me. Do all Koreans like all ‘bang’? I don’t know, but ‘bangs’ made me realise that if that’s what I have to buy into to be a Korean, then I’m never going to be.<br />
<br />
Maybe someone here should combine a jjimjilbang with a noraebang, then I could do both at once rather than suffer twice.<br />
<br />
<b>Links</b><br />
<a href="http://www.befm.co.kr/">Busan e-FM</a><br />
<a href="http://www.befm.co.kr/program/insideout/main.jsp">Inside Out Busan</a><br />
<br />
<b>Air date: 2011-06-22 @ ~19:30</b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:2.78%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28111.2%20Hours%202.78%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-46818110175441027392011-07-20T14:43:00.002+09:002011-07-20T14:50:56.747+09:00Busan e-FM Week 34: Brands, Counterfeiting and Piracy<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/5648246620/" title="The english waves come in by BusanMike, on Flickr"><img align="right" alt="The english waves come in" height="180" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5261/5648246620_5167a212ce_m.jpg" width="240" /></a><a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">About 'Open Mike in Busan'</a><br />
<br />
<b>Background</b><br />
<br />
A week earlier while I was waiting to go on air at the station, a situation was posed which led me to say “But that would be unethical”. I needed to repeat that last word a number of times. We quickly established that the English word ‘<i>ethical</i>’ may sound hilarious to Koreans. I <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110712000702">wasn’t entirely convinced that this was merely a phonetic issue</a>, which resolved me to pick a topic related to ethics for this week’s show.<br />
<br />
Whatever I talk about on the radio, above all else I’ve been told that it has to be entertaining, so it’s fair to say I peppered the segment with the word ‘<i>ethical</i>’ on the principle that if it makes people laugh, instant comedy. I’ve also experimented with the word ‘morally’, but I don’t think the audience is quite ready for it yet, although I’m told ‘contract’ is quite an amusing idea here too.<br />
<br />
I wish I was able to communicate with the engineer, because perhaps then we could have set up some canned laughter for every time the word ‘<i>ethical</i>’ was used. That would have been great. Anyway, we decided that ‘<i>ethical</i>’ was the ‘word of the day’.<br />
<br />
<b>Introduction</b><br />
<br />
Korea seems to be a country which is particularly obsessed by brands, whether they are real or fake. I’ve always thought it must be something in the Korean psyche – there’s a need to belong to the clan.<br />
<br />
<b>The Korean Bag Market</b><br />
<br />
I read in a newspaper that “<a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2926004">For Koreans, a designer bag can earn prestige and maybe even a profit.</a>” What that referred to was the fact that in some cases, second-hand prices for these bags are rising above the original purchase price because the price of new bags is rising so quickly.<br />
<br />
As a financial trader it reminds me of the stock market – and it does seem that some people in Korea are <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/06/13/2011061300695.html">buying these bags as investments</a> and agonising about waiting to buy them while watching the price move away from them. I think nine times out of ten, when you find yourself in that position, it’s best to let it go. But why do prices keep rising? It seems that from the price differences between Korea and other countries, the brand companies are just raising prices here because they know the market will bear it. They are ripping people off in other words, turning Korea into a bubble-market. [This was especially noticeable when the recent Korea-EU Free Trade Agreement came into effect, and the removal of tariffs were actually accompanied by <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/07/123_90829.html">European designer brand price rises, instead of price cuts</a>]. So Koreans are going overseas to buy these bags instead. [Yes, it’s international designer bag arbitrage!]<br />
<br />
<b>The 397 Generation</b><br />
<br />
It’s not as if we don’t have brands in England or the West in general, but there seems to be more trust for them here. I think this is bad economically, because it makes it difficult for new brands to break into the market, and you end up with the chaebol system leading to a lack of choice. Two reasons why this is bad have been in the news recently – large chaebol-built apartment buildings have been accused of poor safety, and then there’s the beer issue. When I got here I kept seeing the same two brands of beer – which largely turns out to be because there are only two major domestic breweries [plus once again, tariffs help]. Korea isn’t a very diverse society but if nothing else you should really have diversity with beer.<br />
<br />
Apparently a lot of the brand-worship these days is being blamed on the ‘<a href="http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?biid=2011012848848">397 Generation</a>’, who are in their 30s, went to college in the 90s, and were born in the 70s. But from what I see, it seems more like it should be blamed on what I would call the ‘295 Generation’ - 20-somethings with IQs around the 95 mark [logically meaning in England we should probably have a ‘285 Generation’]. Anyway, it certainly isn’t limited to young people, because older people in Korea appear to have an obsession with German cars [specifically, <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/05/20/2011052000979.html">Audis – which mainly men buy – and BMWs, which mainly women buy</a>].<br />
<br />
But does this make people happy? In a recent OECD Happiness Survey <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/05/26/2011052601076.html">South Korea ranked 26th out of 34 in the Index</a>, with 36% of South Koreans saying they were satisfied with their life [I don’t know who these people are either because it’s nobody I know here, leading me to wonder how honest the respondents were considering the potential loss-of-face involved in telling the truth]. A lot of it is linked to stress, and a fixation with money [and probably brands by implication]. But I thought a Gallup poll around the same time offered a fascinating insight into Korean life: <a href="http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/n_feature/2011/04/29/29/4901000000AEN20110429003300315F.HTML">Koreans aspire to be richer and happier, but apparently they hate rich people</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Faking it</b><br />
<br />
So people harbour a lot of brand aspirations here, and animosity towards those that achieve what they don’t. Perhaps it’s this which leads to the view that if you can’t have it for real, you have to fake it. Making counterfeit items big business in South Korea.<br />
<br />
I was surprised when I came here and saw all the counterfeit goods. It’s not as if we don’t have this problem in England as well, but here in Busan they are just out on the street in plain view in districts such as Nampodong. And then up in Seoul you have areas such as <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2010/10/123_73965.html">Itaewon</a> and <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/03/113_83355.html">Myeong-dong where it’s said that 1-in-10 street vendors are selling counterfeits</a> (and I can’t help thinking that number is probably only that low because a lot of the other vendors are selling food).<br />
<br />
But there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of incentive to crack down because it’s good for tourism, with evidence that Japanese and Chinese tourists particularly come to Korea because the quality of fakes here is known to be ‘very high’. And this is the tip of the iceberg, because many more counterfeit items <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2010/11/123_76713.html">are being sold online</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Does it matter?</b><br />
<br />
Personally I don’t care about bags, and I don’t get paying $1,000 for one. But morally, the business of counterfeiting is <i>unethical</i> [stare into control room]. But then more visible danger is counterfeit drugs; counterfeit goods are a kind of cheat, but <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110321000729">counterfeit drugs can kill</a>.<br />
<br />
Doing business is an issue – if I were visiting Korea to sign a deal with a company, and saw all the counterfeiting activity going on and that it appeared to be so publicly acceptable, I might think this makes the country and people I’m dealing with in it seem less <i>ethical</i>, like with honouring contracts for example. So I’d wonder, is Korea an <i>ethical</i> or <i>unethical</i> country?<br />
<br />
<b>Software Piracy</b><br />
<br />
It also extends to the media industry of course. At PIFF [The ‘Pusan’ International Film Festival], when a message came up saying “No Piracy in Korea”, people laughed. And when I first came to Busan I noticed that while there were shops everywhere, there appeared to be a distinct lack of music, DVD and software stores. Every shop seemed to be running Windows XP Professional though – which is a premium priced version of the Microsoft operating system – and you have to think that the reason is because they’re probably not genuine copies.<br />
<br />
I used to be a software developer and I like the ‘open source’ concept but it doesn’t pay the bills. The incentive to build software that would help people in this country isn’t as prevalent as it should be, because there’s no reward if people pirate their software rather than buy. In fact it’s said that piracy in Korea <a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2936956">may cost this country around 20,000 IT jobs</a>. [I’ve never been totally convinced by these arguments – it may well cost 20,000 IT sector jobs, but I think the money saved just results in jobs getting shifted elsewhere – admittedly into the service sector which is a dead-end for economic development which Korea shouldn’t want].<br />
<br />
The excuse people who pirate always use is that they weren’t going to buy the product anyway, which is undoubtedly true in some cases and undoubtedly false in others. People in Korea don’t seem to care though. I went into a computer store once to ask for a quote on a computer, and was told “we can supply whatever you want – any software... no extra cost.” I actually wanted to buy a genuine copy of Windows – and after overcoming the proprietor’s incredulity he finally laughed and said sheepishly “we don’t have any”.<br />
<br />
I think this isn’t isolated because there was a case recently of a large supermarket chain being <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/03/123_82635.html">caught selling pirated software on netbooks</a>, and according to official figures software piracy has reached a five-year high.<br />
<br />
You know what really got me about my trip to a computer store? That the proprietor admitted that the one downside of the pirated copies of ‘Windows Vista’ these days is that you can’t update them, which means no security updates and all that implies. But people “don’t really care”. So there’s an <i>ethical</i> issue here but the bigger issue to my mind is security.<br />
<br />
<b>Korea’s Digital Pearl Habor</b><br />
<br />
People are taking reckless chances with their online security by running pirated software, because even if you don’t get caught by some downloaded virus, your pirated version of Windows itself may include programs that spy on you, and steal your passwords and bank account details. It’s obviously occurring too because once I was called in to look at a friend’s computer that was ‘running slowly’, and it transpired to be because of the large number of spyware programs infecting the machine.<br />
<br />
That’s a practical outcome of these security weaknesses – that to access your bank you have to go through a lot of quite complicated procedures involving digital signatures, and that sounds like it has its advantages on the principle that more security is always good, but it isn’t, because the upshot of the technical environment here is that everyone has to use inherently flawed ActiveX technology and because most people are running pirated versions of Windows which often can’t be updated, everyone designs their websites and security for Internet Explorer 6, which is very insecure.<br />
<br />
But where this problem might really manifest itself, is in the field of cyber-warfare, which is already with us, as <a href="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2936033">the attack on Nonghyup Bank earlier this year</a> – which was blamed on North Korea – demonstrates. People often think that if war with the North happens, it’s going to start with thousands of North Korean soldiers rushing over the border, but I think it’s more likely war will begin with a massive cyber attack which, will cripple South Korea. I can see this country very quickly losing its mobile phone networks, Internet, TV, financial, GPS, power and traffic infrastructure. And even if nuclear power plants aren’t connected to the Internet as the authorities in this country claim, the same was true of Iran but foreign intelligence agencies still managed to introduce a devastating virus into that closed system.<br />
<br />
North Korea <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110518000723">allegedly has 30,000 ‘electronic warfare agents’</a> or hackers as it is, so it seems optimistic to think they aren’t going to used as part of the initial strike against this country.<br />
<br />
So the way I see it, I feat it will be <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/03/09/2011030900429.html">chaos before the first shot is even fired</a>. And that’s the problem. Never mind stealing your bank details, how do you know your pirated copy of Windows doesn’t have a foreign program on it waiting to trigger as part of a cyber attack? You don’t, whether it’s <i>ethical</i> or not, using pirated software might turn out to be a danger to South Korea’s security, whether through war directly or just industrial espionage. Fake bags are not going to bring down society, but the thinking that accepts it, just might.<br />
<br />
<b>Links</b><br />
<a href="http://www.befm.co.kr/">Busan e-FM</a><br />
<a href="http://www.befm.co.kr/program/insideout/main.jsp">Inside Out Busan</a><br />
<br />
<b>Air date: 2011-06-15 @ ~19:30</b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:2.62%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28104.83%20Hours%202.62%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com4South Korea Busan Haeundae-gu U-dong 147535.172685770750718 129.1307687759399435.169440770750718 129.12583327593995 35.175930770750718 129.13570427593993tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268789363253190247.post-39918985062236227082011-07-08T10:36:00.004+09:002011-07-08T11:01:45.709+09:00Busan e-FM Week 33: Humour/Humor, Satire and Ire<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/5648246620/" title="The english waves come in by BusanMike, on Flickr"><img align="right" alt="The english waves come in" height="180" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5261/5648246620_5167a212ce_m.jpg" width="240" /></a><a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/04/busan-e-fm-open-mike-in-busan.html">About 'Open Mike in Busan'</a><br />
<br />
<b>Background</b><br />
<br />
In retrospect, I can’t quite believe I got to make some of these points on the radio. I love humour - I'd much rather be watching an episode of <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Blackadder">Blackadder</a>, <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Community_%28TV_series%29">Community</a>, <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Seinfeld">Seinfeld</a>, <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Big_bang_theory_tv_series">The Big Bang Theory</a> or <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Better_off_ted">Better Off Ted</a> [which inexplicably nobody watched] than <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Saw_6">Saw 6</a>. In fact I consider my life to be one long extended joke. So I wanted to talk about the subject of humour, but I also thought it would be nice if the next generation of Koreans that largely make up the Busan eFM audience could learn to lighten up. They won't of course, life in Korea is often an <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/05/113_86319.html">extremely serious</a>, <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/06/03/2011060300311.html">depressing</a> and <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/06/123_88789.html">stressful</a> experience, and anything I say on air is a drop in the ocean - an ocean in which everyone has long since drowned. But you know what? <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/quotes">Never give up. Never surrender</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Introduction</b><br />
<br />
Last week I talked about how the <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/06/busan-e-fm-week-32-hell-is-other-expats.html">Expat Internet is hell</a>. But foreigners can be funny too, and not just in a strange way. This week I’m covering expat humour in Korea.<br />
<br />
<b>What's so funny anyway?</b><br />
<br />
Humour is a very funny thing. What one person finds amusing, another may not. Between foreigners, there’s a difference between British and American humour for example – even the words are spelt differently. I feel that British humour is <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/British_humour">more deadpan, darker, sometimes meaner, and more surreal</a>. I think American humour is different, but still funny.<br />
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<b>Babopalooza in Busan</b><br />
<br />
I think there’s a huge difference between Korean humour and Western humour though. My first experience of this here came in the form of <a href="http://busanhaps.com/article/remembering-babopalooza">an expat comedy called ‘Babopalooza’</a> here in Busan back in 2006. It became quite a big issue in the foreign community.<br />
<br />
This is my understanding of it: essentially a group put on a theatre performance which made fun of life in Korea. The targets for the humour were Koreans and Western foreigners. But one of the potential dangers with cultural comedy, especially here I think, is that Koreans only see Koreans being made fun of. In fact one of the co-writers actually said the ‘babo’ in Babopalooza were the foreigners. Anyway, apparently the police or immigration officials came to watch, and allegedly the upshot of it all was that people lost their jobs and had to leave Korea, while others had problems with visa renewals. So really, it was a comedy with a sad ending.<br />
<br />
Babopalooza happened six weeks after I came to Korea for the first time. I appreciate that public comedy performances are really tough to pull off, but the reaction to the show made me think that however nicely people were treating me, beneath the surface this country might not be a very friendly place.<br />
<br />
I’ve seen Korean performers on TV putting on ‘<a href="http://www.lovelyish.com/730730194/korean-pop-star-wears-blackface-on-tv-show/">black faces</a>’ [or <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/busanmike/1565480774/">masks</a>] and pretending to be black or Africans. I guess that’s – apparently – OK here [it’s not], but you can’t do that in England because it would be racist. By our standards, that’s quite nasty – not funny at all – but it’s acceptable here, whereas Babopalooza was unacceptable.<br />
<br />
So these examples made me think that Koreans can make fun of foreigners, but foreigners making fun of Koreans is unacceptable. I’m afraid that doesn’t create a good image of Korea or Koreans [some foreigners also lean towards the view that foreigners in Korea <a href="http://www.ajarn.com/blogs/steve-schertzer/the-politics-of-babopalooza/">should keep their mouths shut and just do their jobs</a>].<br />
<br />
Anyway, while I gather there was a lot of creative energy here in Busan before Babopalooza, after what happened – for a while – <a href="http://www.rjkoehler.com/2006/12/27/busan-nine-in-kt/">foreigners were afraid to do any public performances</a>. Busan wants to have art and culture to create a multicultural city, but it makes me think that what they want is the Korean version of multiculturalism, where everyone thinks like a Korean. [<a href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/many-a-true-word.html">Bazinga</a>!]<br />
<br />
<b>The Line</b><br />
<br />
I don’t think Babopalooza went too far, but I’m not going to pretend that other expats haven’t crossed the line. Last year a foreigner started a blog [<a href="http://mykafkaesquelife.blogspot.com/2011/02/blackout-korea-scandal-2011.html">Blackout Korea</a>] which others perhaps contributed to as well, that consisted of pictures of drunk, unconscious Koreans. I can see how that might seem funny for a couple of moments, but beyond that I don’t find it funny – instead it’s a rather sad reflection on all the pressures in Korean society which causes this.<br />
<br />
Some drugs (like alcohol) [Korea likes to think of itself as ‘drug-free’ but that depends on your definition] are OK in moderation, but this kind of drug abuse <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/06/11/2011061100333.html">seems a big problem in Korea</a>, just like <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7616405/Britain-is-the-binge-drinking-capital-of-Europe.html">it is in my country</a> – and it’s not funny there either. But obviously some foreigners found it funny, and this shows that the problem with humour is that it can easily be one-sided and insensitive, and that ultimately it can easily slip into racism. It doesn’t have to be like that though because I think there are better and genuinely funny blogs written by foreigners in Korea.<br />
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<b>Humorous Expat Blogs... Or What Amuses Me</b><br />
<br />
I’ll tell you how I feel about expat blogs here. There are the big name bloggers which everyone reads, and they’re churning out entries for their audience, but some of the lesser known blogs here such as <a href="http://www.expathell.com/">Expat Hell</a> and <a href="http://thesupplanter.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/outside-the-store/">The Supplanter</a> feature – to my mind – excellent writing which really attracts me, and they contain a lot of self-deprecating humour. I feel I make fun of myself quite often in my blog so I suppose I appreciate that style.<br />
<br />
But then some of the expat blogs are written explicitly not as personal experiences of life in Korea, but more for the purpose of satire, which I find especially interesting.<br />
<br />
<b>Satire</b><br />
<br />
The satirical blogs are different to the other expat blogs, which tend to cover daily life. <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Satire">Wikipedia defines satire</a> as a format in which “vices, follies, abuses and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon.”<br />
<br />
So people can find satire uncomfortable, and that was the problem with Babopalooza. In fact, the Wikipedia page on satire even mentions something that happened here in Korea to the foreign journalist <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Michael_Breen_%28author%29">Michael Breen</a>, who wrote a satirical article in The Korea Times, which resulted in him <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/10/world/la-fg-korea-samsung-20100510">being sued for $1 million by the chaebol he satirised [Samsung]</a>. Mike Breen said the prosecutor in his case didn’t get his satirical article, telling him “<a href="http://www.rjkoehler.com/2011/04/11/five-questions-for-mike-breen-at-busan-haps/">It’s not funny if it’s not true.</a>” [comment 24].<br />
<br />
I gathered that apparently there’s no tradition of written satire in Korea, so writing satirical material can be a dangerous activity in Korea. And yet I think it’s important in today’s world because so many people are ignorant of the news. In fact, in America surveys show that presenters such as <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jon_Stewart">Jon Stewart</a> and <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Steven_Colbert">Steven Colbert</a> are the only way some people actually know what’s going on – even if it’s dressed up as satire.<br />
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<b>The Yangpa, Dokdo Is Ours, and The Dokdo Times</b><br />
<br />
I think the first satirical blog in Korea was <a href="https://theyangpa.wordpress.com/">The Yangpa</a>, which presumably was inspired by the famous American satire site, <a href="http://www.theonion.com/">The Onion</a>. The Yangpa blog started before I came to Korea, and people talked about it back then but I must admit I rarely read it. The problem for me was highlighted by one early entry <a href="https://theyangpa.wordpress.com/2006/03/27/114352283864528259/">about a pop singer/actress who was guilty of plagiarism</a> with her degree. When I first came here I didn’t understand enough about Korea to know who this was or why plagiarism was a good satirical subject, so the humour was lost on me. I think this illustrates why satire requires knowledge.<br />
<br />
The Yangpa ended in 2008, then a site started called ‘<a href="http://dokdoisours.blogspot.com/">Dokdo Is Ours</a>’, and when the writer ended that last year, another new site started, this time called ‘<a href="http://dokdotimes.blogspot.com/">The Dokdo Times</a>’, which is essentially written in the style of a fake Korean newspaper. What I like about these sites is that they aren’t just aimed at satirising one group of people – but everyone, including foreigners. For example, the most popular ‘story’ on The Dokdo Times’ site is about <a href="http://dokdotimes.blogspot.com/2010/12/woman-admits-new-foreign-husband-may-be.html">a Korean woman who married a foreigner and then realised he’s actually an idiot</a>. I think that’s something both Koreans and foreigners can relate to.<br />
<br />
<b>But What Do They Think?</b><br />
<br />
I’m not sure what Koreans really make of this foreign humour. Despite what Mike Breen said about the prosecutor in his case, I believe from what I've read that some Koreans in Korea really find some of these satirical sites funny. [And at least <a href="http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_entertainment/458210.html">one Korean comedian may be out there pushing the envelope</a> as well]. They are a test of English as well – if you understand humour written in another language then you’ve really done well. Even when I’ve learnt Korean, I think it might still be some time before I understand Korean satire, assuming that exists.<br />
<br />
‘Babopalooza’ was judged ‘not funny’ by the authorities, and sometimes Koreans get very angry at some foreign humour – either they don’t get it or the humour wasn’t funny in the first places and it just ended up being offensive. Comedy and satire can be very difficult things to pull off, especially in a foreign country.<br />
<br />
<b>Learning About Korea Through Humour</b><br />
<br />
I’d say that I’m learning about Korea through humour. I read the Korean news but it’s easy to miss things or not really think about them deeply. For example, one of these recent satirical ‘news articles’ from The Dokdo Times detailed how people with three or more drunk driving convictions <a href="http://dokdotimes.blogspot.com/2011/03/some-drunk-drivers-to-be-banned-from.html">would be banned from working as bus and taxi drivers</a>. It sounds like a joke but <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/05/27/2011052700885.html">it’s actually really true</a>, which to me is a serious issue which people should be thinking about more. Maybe if people did, the society we live in could become a better, more tolerant and less hypocritical place [or it might at least become safer].<br />
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<b>Can Satire Change Attitudes in Korea?</b><br />
<br />
I don’t know if satire can change attitudes in Korea though. Can anything change Korea? Recently I read that that Korea is <a href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/05/30/2011053000404.html">the fifth ‘most socially tight’ country</a> in the world [actually, the fifth among 33 countries surveyed, not that the Chosun Ilbo ever let a detail like that get in the way of a good headline], meaning there is a great deal of conformity here, and pressure to conform. Satire represents the opposite of conformity in many ways, because it points out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies in society. There’s nothing wrong with <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Zelig">conforming</a> if that’s what you want to do, but humour and satire are good ways of encouraging you to <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Critical_thinking">think for yourself</a> too.<br />
<br />
<b>Links</b><br />
<a href="http://www.befm.co.kr/">Busan e-FM</a><br />
<a href="http://www.befm.co.kr/program/insideout/main.jsp">Inside Out Busan</a><br />
<br />
<b>Air date: 2011-06-08 @ ~19:30</b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com/2011/01/infinity-limited.html"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bhs&chs=200x65&chco=003478,c6d9fd&chxt=x&chxr=0,0,4000,1000&chd=t:2.62%7C100&chts=000000,9&chtt=Korean%20Progress%20%28104.83%20Hours%202.62%%29" width="200" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">--<p>Source: <a href="http://busanmike.blogspot.com">Busan Mike</a></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15349691823513127693noreply@blogger.com4U 2(i)-dong, Haeundae-gu, Busan, South Korea35.172889805468984 129.13078501633335.15945280546898 129.115432516333 35.186326805468987 129.146137516333