Busan Mike / 부산 마이크

Koyaanisqatsi

2012-01-16T23:20:00.000+09:00

4,000 Hours

A year ago 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.

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.

Auribus teneo lupum

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.

In retrospect what I believe I should have done when I quit trading for a living 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.

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.

So instead of studying Korean, I quickly found a part-time position working as a software engineer – 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 Busan e-FM 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Maginot Line

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.

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 Maginot Line 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.

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.

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.

Motivation

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.

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?

"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi Indian term for "life out of balance".

Dog Gone

2011-11-29T21:04:00.000+09:00

The decision to move out of my mother-in-law’s apartment 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 the dog called Max we’d rescued three years ago and given to her to keep her company.

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.

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, and it shows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 they will find ways of creating spaces in their kennels whatever it takes, even if officially their government registration supposedly guarantees that they will never put a dog to sleep.

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.

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.

Busan e-FM Week 36: Love Hotels, Sex and Adultery (Banned)

2011-11-20T16:08:00.000+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

It took 36 weeks, but I finally had a script refused for broadcast. When I started doing my weekly segment with Busan e-FM, 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?

Ostensibly, the problem was that Love Hotels and Adultery – the main thrust of my piece – were “not appropriate subjects” for the radio. TBS eFM – 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.

Exploring where these newly discovered boundaries lay, and whether they were strictly sexual, I asked - mindful that the 2011 Dog Meat Festival in Gyeonggi Province had recently been cancelled 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.

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?

I’ve always found the foreigners who only tell Koreans what they want to hear 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.

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.

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.

Introduction – Love Hotels, Sex and Adultery

Last week I talked about ‘bangs’ - such as the ‘DVD bang’ 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.

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’.

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.

Love Hotels

So I was surprised when I saw the love hotels here, although not totally shocked – Japan is famous for its love hotels 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.

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.

Staying in a Love Hotel

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.

So we quickly came across a love hotel in some Seoul backstreet near the Blue House, 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.

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 ended up staying in love hotels – 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.

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.

So I guess the love hotels are still too much of a risk for some. I was up on Hwangryeong Mountain late one night 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.

Adultery is a Criminal Offence in Korea

Of course, adultery is illegal in Korea, 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.

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.

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?”

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].

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 is a criminal offence in the U.S. state of New Hampshire – it isn’t enforced and there are people trying to get it removed from the statute books.

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?

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 read about an incident in Malaysia 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.

Korean Porn Movies

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 love hotel just up the road from the the funeral hall. 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.

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.

Korean Culture

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.

Planned air date: 2011-06-29 @ ~19:30

Footnote

Five weeks after the planned air date of this piece, South Korea's Constitutional Court overturned the provision in the Criminal Code imposing a maximum two-year prison sentence on adulterers, 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.'

33

2011-10-23T10:57:00.001+09:00

I got a job working part-time as a software engineer for Busan International Foreign School (BIFS), developing and implementing a Student Information System (or 'SIS') using PHP and MySQL. 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.

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.

Busan International Foreign School is situated in Gijang, which Wikipedia describes 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.

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 Busan International Foreign School or its rival, Busan Foreign School, 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.

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 International Baccalaureate, 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.

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 'North American passport holders only', it feels like part school, part search-and-rescue mission for non-American English-speaking expats.

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.

August Rush: The First Birthday Party

2011-09-24T23:58:00.000+09:00

The failure to go to England 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.

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.

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.

The Photo/Video Presentation

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.

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 for the job I wanted, 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.

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.

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 Professional White Guy as ‘Dada’ and which ended with the phase “No Piracy in Korea!” 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 became too sick 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.

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.

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.

Hanbok

The next problem, if indeed it isn’t actually several problems further down the road, is that you need a hanbok, 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.

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.

But I am relieved to discover that on this occasion, the hanbok I have to wear does not include a square metal belt and badly fitting Wellington boots. 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’.

Can You Breakdance (in a Hanbok)?

“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 look 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.

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 R-16 Battle three years in a row, although we weren’t wearing hanbok at the time. I promise you that hanbok breakdancing will be the next big thing 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.

Guests or No Guests

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.

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 the old tradition of giving gold rings. 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.

P=(Gi*(Ga/100))-H-S-(R*i)-[(Ajeossis*Bottles)]

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.

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.

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.

Baby’s Future Career

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.

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 (Korean politician) 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.

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.

Hanbok Breakdancing

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.

The Undiscovered Country

When I was told that there was a 100-day photo shoot for my baby, 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.

August Rush: England

2011-09-13T20:57:00.002+09:00

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

August Rush: Voice in the Wilderness

2011-09-12T12:13:00.000+09:00

I 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.

I lost my voice almost completely just three days after my web development job interview, 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.

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 as well as Japan). Maybe the medical profession just wants you to go to the hospital instead, but it's a pity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Chuseok holiday period, I'm just going to have to live with it. Hospitals everywhere, but no cure in sight.

August Rush: The Web Job

2011-09-09T19:39:00.000+09:00

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
"Ulysses", Alfred Tennyson

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.

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.

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.

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 Koreabridge 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.

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.

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.

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 “North American passport holder”.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

John F. Kennedy once said that "True happiness is the full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope." 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.

August Rush: North American Passport Holders Only

2011-09-08T17:23:00.000+09:00

Chronologically, 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 ‘Centum apartment play’, and there promised to be an enormous progress crushing fall at the open, which there was.

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.

Life is suddenly looking a lot tougher.

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 ‘North American passport holder’ 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.

I suppose it’s all aboot [sic] the accent, because while the job ad I saw 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.

Korea seems to get very little bang for its buck 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.

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.

August Rush: A New Home and a Financial Setback

2011-09-07T19:35:00.000+09:00

Since 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’.

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 with prices of apartments in Busan rising at a bubble-like pace, we were watching our relocation options dwindle by the month. We had to take advantage of any lull there was.

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. I started doing a weekly radio segment on Busan e-FM during trading hours just to get away from things, an unthinkable move during more motivated times.

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.

The culmination of my minor financial crisis was connected with the search for an apartment. I’d done a radio segment about ‘the gravitational pull of Haeundae’, 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 - Busan Foreign School and Busan International Foreign School - 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.

I’d seen some nice apartments in Centum City, 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 days before the market entered a particularly high period of volatility, 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.

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 unsustainable property bubble that could entirely conceivably implode in on itself at any moment. 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.

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, the Korean banks made their move as I’d believed they would, but much sooner than I expected.

Busan e-FM Week 35: 방 잡아! (Get a Room!)

2011-08-03T13:02:00.007+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

PC bangs, DVD bangs, norae bangs, jjimjilbangs, manwhabangs, sojubangs... According to Arirang TV bang culture is ‘unique to Korea’, so today I’m talking about Korea’s 밯 (‘function-specific rooms’).

밯 in England

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’.

PC 방 on Planet Arirang

According to Arirang TV Korea’s PC ‘bang’ represent “an advanced cultural space that is benchmarked by businesses around the world”. [Drugs are strictly illegal in Korea but if you eat enough kimchi perhaps it has the same effect].

My impressions of Korea’s PC ‘bang’ 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’?

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 [and get DVT]. Certainly PC bang are everywhere here - ubiquitous you might say [I really need to stop the intentional irony of using Korea’s most ubiquitous word] - but cybercafes were never hugely successful in England, where they are much more expensive.

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.

I rarely go to PC ‘bang’ these days [which are sadly dying now], because we have computers at home [and my social circle have moved on from their Kartrider 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.

Timothy Leary - the 1960s counter-culture icon [and as an advocate of the use of psychedelic drugs, perhaps in some ways the spiritual father of Arirang TV] 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.

DVD 방

I’d been in Korea two weeks when I went to a DVD 방 [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.

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’ - even casual sex] - 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.

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.

Norae 방

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 ‘bangs’ are a place where you can let your hair down - and in a noraebang especially.

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 ‘Korea’s Got Talent’ is any guide].

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.

Arirang says that “in a noraebang, borders of nationality melt away as everyone sings their heart out!” I guess I like keeping my borders.

Other 방

I have no experience of manwhabang [만화방 where you can read comics or 'manwha' - at least until the machine uprising], sojubang [where you can drink soju], or the ‘kiss bang’ 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 jjimjilbang [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.

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.

Maybe someone here should combine a jjimjilbang with a noraebang, then I could do both at once rather than suffer twice.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-06-22 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 34: Brands, Counterfeiting and Piracy

2011-07-20T14:43:00.002+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

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 ‘ethical’ may sound hilarious to Koreans. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was merely a phonetic issue, which resolved me to pick a topic related to ethics for this week’s show.

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 ‘ethical’ 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.

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 ‘ethical’ was used. That would have been great. Anyway, we decided that ‘ethical’ was the ‘word of the day’.

Introduction

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.

The Korean Bag Market

I read in a newspaper that “For Koreans, a designer bag can earn prestige and maybe even a profit.” 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.

As a financial trader it reminds me of the stock market – and it does seem that some people in Korea are buying these bags as investments 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 European designer brand price rises, instead of price cuts]. So Koreans are going overseas to buy these bags instead. [Yes, it’s international designer bag arbitrage!]

The 397 Generation

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.

Apparently a lot of the brand-worship these days is being blamed on the ‘397 Generation’, 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, Audis – which mainly men buy – and BMWs, which mainly women buy].

But does this make people happy? In a recent OECD Happiness Survey South Korea ranked 26th out of 34 in the Index, 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: Koreans aspire to be richer and happier, but apparently they hate rich people.

Faking it

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.

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 Itaewon and Myeong-dong where it’s said that 1-in-10 street vendors are selling counterfeits (and I can’t help thinking that number is probably only that low because a lot of the other vendors are selling food).

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 are being sold online.

Does it matter?

Personally I don’t care about bags, and I don’t get paying $1,000 for one. But morally, the business of counterfeiting is unethical [stare into control room]. But then more visible danger is counterfeit drugs; counterfeit goods are a kind of cheat, but counterfeit drugs can kill.

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 ethical, like with honouring contracts for example. So I’d wonder, is Korea an ethical or unethical country?

Software Piracy

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.

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 may cost this country around 20,000 IT jobs. [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].

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”.

I think this isn’t isolated because there was a case recently of a large supermarket chain being caught selling pirated software on netbooks, and according to official figures software piracy has reached a five-year high.

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 ethical issue here but the bigger issue to my mind is security.

Korea’s Digital Pearl Habor

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.

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.

But where this problem might really manifest itself, is in the field of cyber-warfare, which is already with us, as the attack on Nonghyup Bank earlier this year – 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.

North Korea allegedly has 30,000 ‘electronic warfare agents’ 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.

So the way I see it, I feat it will be chaos before the first shot is even fired. 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 ethical 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.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-06-15 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 33: Humour/Humor, Satire and Ire

2011-07-08T10:36:00.004+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

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 Blackadder, Community, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory or Better Off Ted [which inexplicably nobody watched] than Saw 6. 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 extremely serious, depressing and stressful 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? Never give up. Never surrender.

Introduction

Last week I talked about how the Expat Internet is hell. But foreigners can be funny too, and not just in a strange way. This week I’m covering expat humour in Korea.

What's so funny anyway?

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 more deadpan, darker, sometimes meaner, and more surreal. I think American humour is different, but still funny.

Babopalooza in Busan

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 an expat comedy called ‘Babopalooza’ here in Busan back in 2006. It became quite a big issue in the foreign community.

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.

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.

I’ve seen Korean performers on TV putting on ‘black faces’ [or masks] 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.

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 should keep their mouths shut and just do their jobs].

Anyway, while I gather there was a lot of creative energy here in Busan before Babopalooza, after what happened – for a while – foreigners were afraid to do any public performances. 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. [Bazinga!]

The Line

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 [Blackout Korea] 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.

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 seems a big problem in Korea, just like it is in my country – 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.

Humorous Expat Blogs... Or What Amuses Me

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 Expat Hell and The Supplanter 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.

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.

Satire

The satirical blogs are different to the other expat blogs, which tend to cover daily life. Wikipedia defines satire 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.”

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 Michael Breen, who wrote a satirical article in The Korea Times, which resulted in him being sued for $1 million by the chaebol he satirised [Samsung]. Mike Breen said the prosecutor in his case didn’t get his satirical article, telling him “It’s not funny if it’s not true.” [comment 24].

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 Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are the only way some people actually know what’s going on – even if it’s dressed up as satire.

The Yangpa, Dokdo Is Ours, and The Dokdo Times

I think the first satirical blog in Korea was The Yangpa, which presumably was inspired by the famous American satire site, The Onion. 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 about a pop singer/actress who was guilty of plagiarism 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.

The Yangpa ended in 2008, then a site started called ‘Dokdo Is Ours’, and when the writer ended that last year, another new site started, this time called ‘The Dokdo Times’, 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 Korean woman who married a foreigner and then realised he’s actually an idiot. I think that’s something both Koreans and foreigners can relate to.

But What Do They Think?

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 one Korean comedian may be out there pushing the envelope 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.

‘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.

Learning About Korea Through Humour

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 would be banned from working as bus and taxi drivers. It sounds like a joke but it’s actually really true, 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].

Can Satire Change Attitudes in Korea?

I don’t know if satire can change attitudes in Korea though. Can anything change Korea? Recently I read that that Korea is the fifth ‘most socially tight’ country 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 conforming if that’s what you want to do, but humour and satire are good ways of encouraging you to think for yourself too.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-06-08 @ ~19:30

The Honey Pot

2011-07-02T15:16:00.001+09:00

In my mind the angry husband eventually accused his wife of caring more about her plants than she did about him, and this is the reason he chose to start dropping them, one by one, out of the window into the car park ten floors below.

As heavy ceramic pots of the sort favoured for Korean balconies, complete with large exotic plants, surreally dropped down the side of our apartment building, the ageing building janitor was called in to negotiate for the safety of the remaining foliage, even if the marriage at this point was beyond saving.

It’s not always a given that people are going to listen to their elders in this country any more, but thirty minutes later, the man was sheepishly picking up shattered ceramic fragments and traumatised plants amongst the thin layer of earth that now covered part of our apartment block's car park.

Stress is a huge problem in Korea.

Busan e-FM Week 32: Hell is Other Expats

2011-06-30T08:53:00.001+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

A lot of this was rather tongue-in-cheek, but it does explain my reticence to engage with the expat community during my time in Korea, both in person and increasingly on the Internet.

Introduction

Today I'm talking about what I've learned about the expat community here - at least the Western expats anyway - because the migrant workers and immigrant wives aren't really the same community so I can't talk about them from personal experience. Jean-Paul Sartre once famously wrote that "Hell is other people", so today my topic is "Hell is Other Expats".

Before 'The Station'

Before I started appearing on Busan eFM, I didn't have any interaction with the expat community at all. There aren't many foreigners living in the Saha-gu district of Busan anyway - and this was especially true in 2006 when I first got here. Evidently we were so rare that I asked myself what I would do if I met one. What is the social etiquette? Do we engage is some vague recognition of each other's presence?

It was three days of walking around my area before I saw another Westerner - but only at a distance - and it was two weeks before I really came face to face with one. We were walking towards each other in an otherwise empty hospital corridor and there really was no escape. "This is it" I thought, as we approached. And then she smiled, and I ignored her. It seems you can't escape your upbringing - and you don't smile at strangers where I'm from. It didn't help that, as I recall, she was quite attractive, and women like that shouldn't smile at people like me - it's just cruel. Also, when that happens in that context, I'm just going to think some handsome Korean doctor is walking two feet behind me and it's him the smile is aimed at. So obviously I'm going to play it cool and not risk looking like an idiot.

But there was no handsome Korean doctor. She probably recognised the fresh-off-the-boat look of panic on my face and felt pity for me. But I ignored her.

The etiquette

So in the end I decided to ignore other foreigners - it's just too weird to behave differently. I did wonder if Koreans have this problem? A person could be Japanese or Chinese. Can a Korean recognise a Korean overseas? [Well, they say they always can and to suggest otherwise is to invite the conversation to become quite... animated - it's an issue loaded with significance which makes it rather fascinating].

It's only 2011 now - five years after the hospital corridor incident - but things feel very different now; there are so many more foreigners - in fact so many, they're pairing off and dating.

So we're not just here to steal your women

I'm seeing more Western couples here now, which I never used to in Busan. I think foreigners here used to be so rare we were a bit like giant pandas. In fact I can't escape from that image in my mind - of a male and female Westerner locked up in a cage by the Koreans to see if they will breed together.

But whatever happens in real life with the expats, that's not what worries me, because these days a lot of life isn't real at all - it's on the Internet. And in cyberspace, all the expats are together in one big unhappy community.

One big unhappy community

In my first couple of years I read a lot of discussion forums here, mainly visited by native-English teachers. And let's just say that they created a certain impression of foreigners in Korea... namely the impression that they are slightly mad... or quite possibly completely unhinged in some cases. There was a lot of fuss a couple of years ago about foreigners being tested for AIDS when they arrived here, but it's quite possibly their mental health that ought to be checked on the way in. Or maybe they're fine when they get here, and it's Korea that turns you crazy.

I was asked once why foreigners come to Korea, and I said I think part of the reason is because they don't fit in back home, myself included. Otherwise, why are we here rather than doing something productive with our time? Korea often seems to be a place where foreigners flail around as their career prospects back home gradually seep away. You don't have to play the career game but if you don't it marks you out as different in an adventurous, eccentric and strange way. From everything I've read I'd describe many other expats here as rather dubious characters.

Dubious

'Dubious' is a very important English word. It doesn't actually mean anything, but it scares people every time. I always thought these dubious expats were mainly teachers; most are straight out of university, so they're young and inexperienced and think the world owes them a living. Then they come here, they're given an audience in the form of a classroom full of students. They get a lot of attention, and I think that causes some to fall into a kind of 'rock star' mentality.

So I think it all goes to some people's heads. It's like when you read some saying on the Internet that they don't want to work for less than 25,000 won an hour. You don't need a qualification in Economics to understand it's just supply and demand - more foreign teachers here means less money. That's capitalism. There end up being a lot of arguments on the expat Internet and it can get really bad tempered. I mentioned that - before I came onto Busan eFM - I really made no attempt to mix with other foreigners, and part of the reason for that is reading all these people being rude to each other. We often complain about Korean netizens and how bad their behaviour can be when they get angry, but I'm not sure foreigners are really any different.

Angry non-Korean netizens

So how it typically goes with angry foreign '외국인' netizens is that someone posts something about Korea on a discussion forum, and then it only takes a few posts (or less) for someone to become rude and then the insults fly back and forth. It's often like watching a battle of wits between two unarmed opponents - you grab your popcorn and watch - but it's also a depressing reflection on humanity in the end.

But it's not just teachers, as there are other discussion forums these days for non-teachers in Korea and on one, for example, the moderators themselves are quite happy to engage in attacking other users and making sarcastic comments. So there's no incentive to post or participate in the community for me if that's the kind of environment they want to have. Perhaps civil discussion is becoming a lost art, both amongst foreigners and in Korea as well.

The 'Sunfull' campaign

Cyber-bullying has become a big issue in Korea in recent years, which has led to the launch of the so-called 'Sunfull' campaign of 'online etiquette' [which essentially encourages people to be nice to each other online]. Of course it's been prompted by the number of suicides which have occurred due to online bullying. The campaign has - apparently - attracted over one million messages, so it may have touched a nerve.

The emphasis of the Sunfull campaign is on posting positive messages [it's actually got the potential to be quite sinister in that respect if you think through where that's going], but I think it would be a good start just to have people not being rude to each other online. Nobody wants to live in a society where you can only write positive things [not true - obviously it's a very seductive idea to some politicians and political groups in Korea and other countries, and later Busan eFM belatedly banned me from discussing certain subjects on air - more on this to follow], civil disagreement is an important part of our freedom but the trouble is many people seem to lack the education and intelligence to form reasoned counter-arguments - it's easier to be rude.

I think one of the ironies of the Sunfull campaign though is that while politicians in Seoul are trying to encourage people to be civil to each other, at the same time media and politicians are launching some quite nasty attacks on Japan, sometimes there are fights in parliament, and it sets the tone doesn't it? I sympathise with Korea over the Dokdo issue but getting really angry about it is a big turnoff for foreigners and therefore actually counter-productive. If you look at people like Ghandi and the Dalai Lama, with reasoned non-aggressive arguments they drew many people overseas to their campaigns. Angry Koreans attacking foreigners just damages the image of Korea, and angry expats arguing with each other in discussion forums just damages the image of expats. I think expats need their own Sunfull campaign.

I wouldn't set one up though because I really don't care enough - my solution is just to stop reading and posting on these forums. And anyway - foreigners aren't like Koreans. Recently I read that Korea was the 'fifth tightest society in the world' - meaning it's very restricted socially and culturally [actually it's the fifth out of 33 countries surveyed although the Chosun Ilbo went with the more salacious headline]. So whereas you might be able to convince Koreans to do something if the social pressure is there, if you suggest the same to foreigners they're probably just going to do the complete opposite instead.

No escape from Expat Hell

So there probably is no escape from the online Expat Hell. But not everything's bad. Rather than go crazy with hate and spend all their time arguing with people on the Internet, some foreigners turn to humour, and it's the interesting subject of expat humour that I plan to talk about next week.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-06-01 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 31: The New Address System

2011-06-02T11:12:00.001+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

The address system in Korea is changing. What does it mean?

Addresses in England... versus Korea

In England addresses are organized into house numbers, street names, areas – which are a bit like a ‘gu’ - city, county and then postcode, or zip code as it’s called in the U.S. Street names are random – more or less – and the house numbers are fairly logical, starting at 1-3-5 on one side of the road and 2-4-6 on the other. Letters are sorted by house number of postcode, so they are easy to find.

In Korea addresses have the city and the district which is what you’d expect, but then it gets rather strange. Buildings are given lot numbers in the order the property was built – a system introduced by the occupying Japanese in 1910. So of course, once you’re in an area finding the actual building – given that the numbers are randomly scattered around – is quite difficult.

Each road in the UK has a street name – usually given on a big sign at the start of a road, unless it’s been stolen. I used to drive around London quite a bit back in 1994, which was largely pre-satnav, so I had a book called an ‘A-Z’ with an index of street names in it – which you can quickly look up if you’re lost. So as long as you know what street you’re on, you should be fine. It was quite important back then because if you think the traffic in Busan is bad – try London.

White on Blue

Speaking of driving, I actually didn’t realise Korea had an address problem though until recently, because I don’t drive here, and I didn’t really think about it. Back in the UK, it used to be a habit to look for street name signs, but these days we just rely on our satnav screens. When I learned the address system was changing in Korea, I started thinking about those street signs and the fact that the Korean ones – such as they are – are really quite different. In the UK the street names are big white signs with huge black lettering, whereas here you get quite small white lettering on a blue background – it doesn’t help that they have to put both the Korean and English on the signs. I’d say the letters end up being about a quarter of the size in the UK – so they aren’t easy to read from the road. For that matter, I hardly notice them as a pedestrian.

Given that there seems to be this process going on now of creating new numbers and road names in some cases, I could help but wonder if there were going to end up being 10,000 Dokdo Streets. But however they did it, apparently Busan got the best score for their new system.

It’s all a bit low-tech

I don’t think the new system will help me get around better though, because I don’t recall ever looking for a building based on its number. That’s technology again – I just use Naver’s equivalent of Google Street View. For example, when I was looking for Busan eFM for the first time I ‘walked’ in the ‘street view’ until I found it. Even if you don’t hap the street view option, these days you have smartphone maps as well.

The subway system is my map

I feel like I spend most of my life in Busan down in the subway anyway – emerging at the required stop – and 90% of the time I’m almost there. I suppose the subway system works a kind of map as well – everything relates to where the nearest station is. So basically I’m using the subway as my address system – in fact I organise my life around it.

Sometimes I have to make compromises because I’m only using public transport. For example, there’s a big store I want to go to [Costco], but it’s not really near a subway station – so I just have to find an alternative. It would be different if I had a car. But then the subway is so convenient. The first time I travelled around London I was 14 – the city is very large of course – but I got no sense of its size because I’d go underground, take trains, and pop up where I needed to be. It’s the same with Busan – which is ten times bigger than my home city but it doesn’t necessarily feel bigger because of the subway system. There’s no subway where I’m from and it might take an hour to get from one side of the city to the other – about the same length of time it takes you to do the same thing with Busan’s subway. Imagine what a nightmare Busan would be without its subway system.

Cost-Benefit

I read that the subway system in Seoul is losing money, but I think people have to see the bigger picture. In the UK everything is costed out very carefully, but I think it leads to a lot of short-termism, big projects are hardly ever done, and there’s no long-term vision. This is one of the reasons I like Korea – people still believe in big projects here.

What’s the cost-benefit of the Busan subway system? You will never truly know what the economic impact is, but you know it must be there. I suppose the new address system is an example of a big project – there’s lots of short-term inconvenience with long-term benefits we can’t be certain of.

My address is changing but I’m not moving

Certainly, the new address system has created some inconveniences for me. I have a Korean bank but I’m still heavily using two banks in the UK and I’ll have to tell them my Korean address is changing. This is much harder than it seems because they are useless [one of them has a branch in Busan but to change my address I have to notify my British branch in writing and the other already has the wrong Korean address but we’ve established that to change it I need to do so at my local branch in England... in person(!)].

The other problem is that the Korean immigration authorities are incredibly strict about the notifying of new addresses – if you don’t, it can count against moving you from a temporary visa (such as the F-2 I’m on) to permanent residence (F-5, which I’d like to have just so I don’t have to go through the performance that is the F-2 renewal). But then, if I’m staying in the same place, but my address is changing, do I have to notify them and when The problem is with this, in the experience of foreigners here, each immigration office tends to have their own rules and way of doing things [to put it diplomatically].

Last minute nerves

But maybe now I don’t have to worry about the address changes so much – because of course, the government have decided people aren’t ready for the new system, and have delayed it for two years.

I was surprised about this, because it’s been planned for long enough. People are never really ready for big changes, but you pick a date and get through it. For example, in the UK in 1971 we decimalised our currency. More recently, in 1999 many countries switched over to the euro currency, and that was a huge change.

But recently I read about a guy here that tried to order food with his new address and the takeaway said they didn’t understand it, which meant he’d only get his food if he gave the old one. So that’s the problem – people aren’t motivated to adopt a new system until they have to. There comes a point when you have to do it – but with attitudes like the one with the takeaway, I have a feeling that even after the change people will still use the old system unofficially for some time.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-05-25 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 30: Family Month

2011-05-25T12:47:00.002+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

I prepare notes for my radio segment; I always felt that to be my best on the show I had to construct a narrative. Like most of the things I write, it’s more time consuming than the result appears to suggest or justify; I tend to debate each word and nuance in my head. Sometimes it turns violent. This week was a new low; the preparation time for my ten minutes on air was nine hours.

My topics are sometimes purely anecdotal experiences and while there may be deeper points to be made, the intention is primarily to entertain. But other times there are serious issues to discuss, and this seemed to be one of those times. I feel there are a lot of stereotypes of foreigners in Korea, often perpetuated by the media. One of the reasons I agreed to do a weekly slot on Busan eFM – and then sign on for a second season – was the notion that in just being out there and talking to a Korean audience – albeit one that is learning or already speaks English – it might provide more of an insight into the deeper thoughts and fears of a foreigner living here. I wanted to speak out. I think if you don’t, Korea is something which just happens to you.

But after kicking the ideas around in my mind for a long time, forming structure and writing sound-bites, I felt the result I wanted had eluded me. Writing to me feels like a game of chess, where the paragraphs are pieces and the various parts have to be carefully choreographed into a winning position. Except it’s not so much chess as blitz chess, played against the clock for suboptimal results. This week I really felt the need to win the game, but as it wore on I realised I’d forgotten how to play.

The powers that be at the station seemed to like it, but I’m not under the illusion that anyone really cares. In the end, my writing is as much about getting my own thoughts in order and understanding the confusion of contradictions that is myself, as much as it is about anything else.

Introduction

May is kind of family month in Korea, because of the close proximity of Children’s Day and Parents’ Day. So the TV channels are running lots of family-related programmes. Inevitably this includes the vaguely self-satisfied ‘foreigners integrating well into Korea’ genre of programming, and there are two main types of show – women from South-East Asian countries brought here via marriage brokers for older Korean men, and Western foreigners married to Korean women.

Reality and unreality

I find the programmes featuring the Western men fascinating. Some are obviously willing collaborators, but sometimes I feel that others have a kind of haunted look about them – the look of men who are trapped. There’s something in the body language and the tone of what they say in English. It’s a subtlety I suspect is lost on most of the Korean audience; it’s easy to focus on how well foreigner is eating kimchi or speaking Korean.

I suppose I don’t find these programmes realistic – certainly at least, they don’t match my experience. But then I’ve read a lot of foreigners talking on the Internet about their Korean lives, and these programmes don’t often seem to match their experiences either. They tend to create a positive image, but perhaps that’s not the reality. My wife actually said to me that she hopes her mother doesn’t watch too many of these shows, because they make me look bad in comparison.

Unfortunately she does watch them. In fact we were in a taxi a few ago and the female driver watched these programmes too. “Living with him must be ‘fun’” she suggested. My mother-in-law smiled, but gave no answer, which I think tells you the truth.

So I think these programmes make my life more difficult – I can’t live up to the snapshot positive image they create. I suspect that if I were on one of these programmes, even I’d look better than I am on them; I’d look integrated because I live with my mother-in-law, and now brother-in-law (again), but it’s not the reality.

It can be difficult marrying someone from another culture and living in that culture. It’s easy to feel isolated because of the cultural barriers and language barriers. There’s the pressure to integrate, to learn Korean, to conform, and it can create a lot of stress. My life’s pretty messed up really. Don’t get me wrong, I like living in Korea, but my living here is full of problems – and that’s the reality.

International Marriage Damage and Prevention

There’s been some controversy about these TV programmes in the last week, which stems from the rise of ‘anti-multicultural groups’ in Korea.

One group, the wonderfully titled International Marriage Damage & Prevention Center, plans to hold a rally outside KBS headquarters in June to urge the broadcaster to stop airing the programmes which they accuse of ‘beautifying’ multicultural families by creating ‘illusions’ about them. That’s basically the same thing I said, but the difference is that my concern is purely the portrayal on television of these relationships – I think it’s clear what these anti-multicultural groups really want is just for certain types of foreigners to be kept out of Korea.

I find it fascinating that they are mainly targeting migrant workers and imported foreign wives – not Westerners – even though we’re all part of multiculturalism here. Their argument is that migrant workers are taking away jobs from Koreans and ‘committing crimes’, and immigrant wives are coming here as part of marriage scams to ‘earn money’.

I think this ‘committing crimes’ thing is a huge clue as to where they are coming from. There’s always been a strong nationalistic streak running through Korean society, and there’s nothing wrong with being proud of your country, but there’s a narrow line between pride and hatred. The English author Samuel Johnson said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. I don’t think he meant that all patriotism was necessarily bad, but he was highlighting how common it is for people who have no intellectual argument – or no intellectual ability – to dispense with rational debate in favour of appealing to people’s fears and hatred. I think Europeans like myself are especially sensitive to this kind of behaviour because of what happened in 1930s Germany and other European countries in history. Nothing good ever comes out of trying to make an entire country irrational and angry by lying to them, and it scares me when groups start trying to manipulate people by creating fear.

All Foreigners in Korea are (Potential) Criminals*

I don’t agree with these criminal accusations. I’ve said before that National Police Agency figures show that foreigners in Korea commit fewer crimes per-person than Koreans, and it makes sense if you think about it; if you’re an economic migrant – or any kind of foreigner here – the last thing you want to do is commit a crime, get caught, thrown out of the country and lose it all. Of course, a few foreigners will commit crimes, but these groups are trying to create the fear among Koreans that all foreigners are criminals – it’s certainly the implication of the statements they are making – and that’s just simple racism.

Even though they aren’t targeting Western foreigners, we’ve had these accusations ourselves in the past of course. A few years ago the newspapers were full of suggestions that foreign English teachers were coming to Korea and spreading HIV and AIDS. This time, these hate groups are attacking ‘economic migrants’ from countries perceived to be ‘inferior’ (i.e. poorer) to Korea, which is another thing that tells you this is racially motivated.

The odd thing is if you think about it – given the poor job situation in my country and especially America, many Westerners here are really economic migrants too. It’s not uncommon to hear native-English teachers here say they can’t easily go back home because there are no jobs. But these anti-multicultural groups aren’t attacking Westerners - strangely only people from other Asian countries seem to have this stigma attached to them - although if they aren’t stopped they’ll probably come for us next.

Of course, Koreans in the U.S. have committed crimes – some very high profile like the Virginia Tech Massacre. But how would Koreans here feel if American groups started campaigning for Koreans to be kept out of the country? For that matter, people from Busan have committed crimes in Seoul – how would Busan citizens feel if groups in Seoul said people from this city shouldn’t be allowed to move to the capital because people from Busan are ‘criminals’ or only going to Seoul as part of ‘scams’. It would be ridiculous, but then why should foreigners in Korea have to be treated like this?

Fairly unbalanced

I think these TV programmes are actually part of the problem. By making multicultural families look more positive than they are they are feeding these hate groups. I don’t know if there’s a solution, but it’s clear that migrant workers have lots of problems with discrimination and working conditions, and there have been numerous cases of immigrant wives being abused and even murdered by their husbands in recent months alone. Even as a Westerner, I have problems here. Of course, these groups are probably pretending that these things don’t happen, unless they are particularly ignorant – which is always a possibility.

But perhaps if these programmes showed more of these problems then maybe – like my mother-in-law has realised, and that taxi driver hasn’t – multicultural families are not necessarily as much ‘fun’ as they are made to look on TV.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-05-18 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 29: Smaller Fish

2011-05-16T20:10:00.003+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

The new season at Busan e-FM has seen some changes, and one of them is a new segment which precedes mine called "Bigger Fish". The title derives from its coverage of literature and by extension philosophical issues which are the bigger questions we often rarely stop to consider in the prisons of trivia we build for ourselves in our daily lives. The content is thought provoking and I'm glad that the station is pushing the envelope as far as its material is concerned.

During my time with the station I'd like to think I've covered some hard-hitting subjects, even if a lot of it has been secretly dressed up under the guise of my personal experiences in Korea and hardly anyone noticed. But some of it - like today - isn't tackling racism, social inequality or anything philosophically substantive - so I titled today's topic 'smaller fish', proving that in the absence of other targets, I can always take a shot at myself.

Someone new to the station said that they'd worked out what most of the other segments were about, but not yet mine. I've been joking for some weeks that as I exhaust my pool of personal experiences and move into personal thoughts and opinions, my segments have increasingly become, in a Seinfeld-type of way 'about nothing' - although possibly without the humour - because there is no common theme running through them. In fact, this is now a running joke with my wife every time something trivial happens, punctuated with the punchline 'and that's a show' - as I struggle with the question of what I'm really going to talk about on air over the next few months. Maybe it doesn't matter anyway; I think the modus operandi at the station is to just plow on regardless sometimes - I suppose that's the mindset live radio creates for you.

Introduction

This week I'm returning to the subject of food - to talk about a specific type, and that's fish. I quickly discovered the importance of fish here, and perhaps a particular type of seafood is sometimes shocking for foreigners - and that's live seafood.

Going coastal

I’d been in Korea three weeks when my wife suggested that we go to the seafront to ‘eat fresh seafood’ with her mother, in an area of Busan with a harbour and a fishing fleet, from which you can take it that the fish are supposed to be especially fresh, even by the local standard of preferring freshly killed seafood – hence the large number of tanks crammed with barely surviving creatures you see on many streets.

Let me explain how this kind is in England. First of all, we don’t have those kind of tanks – the animal anti-cruelty groups would never stand for it, but we also don’t have much of a culture of eating really fresh - or raw - fish. Given that this is the case, freshness is less important because everything is going to be cooked anyway. But this isn’t to say we don’t have areas where the seafood is perceived to be better because we have fishing fleets there – we do, and when northern English people - ‘northerners’ - go to places like this, we’ll quite often seek out a good meal of ‘fish and chips’.

Fish and chips

Typically, ‘fish and chips’ consists of de-boned haddock or cod in batter, with thickly-cut potatoes fried at very high temperatures in industrial fryers, which makes them impossible to cook properly at home. A slice of lemon may be squeezed over the fish, and the chips are sprinkled with salt and a type of vinegar which seems impossible to find in Korea. It’s a very difficult dish to get right – for example, the potatoes taste different depending on the season and some times are better than others, and if the fish is cooked too long it becomes dry and unsatisfying.

Fish and chips became a popular meal among the British working class – partly because it was filling and inexpensive. When I was young it was really the only type of take-away there was in the working class areas I lived in. In that sense – it is similar to the cheaper seafood dishes in Busan which Korea’s working class eat.

When I came to Korea I assumed it would be impossible to eat fish and chips here. In fact, I worked out that the nearest fish and chip shop was in Australia. But I was wrong, because then I discovered that there actually was a proper fish and chip shop in Haeundae – inevitably – set up by a British expatriate. He wrote on one of the Internet forums here about the difficulty of setting up the business and getting the food right, and he even mentioned the near impossibility of getting the right type of vinegar. [Unfortunately it appears it's since closed].

The Battle of Songdo Bay

So, three weeks after arriving here I went with my mother-in-law and wife to Songdo Bay, a coastal area near us in the west of Busan that is regarded as a good place to eat raw fish. At that point I hadn’t even seen the sea in Busan yet, so given what I’ve said about fish and chips, I had it in my mind that we’d be dining in some sort of restaurant with a window view over the sea. The fish wouldn’t be haddock or cod, but rather some local variety, and Korean Mother might be eating something more exotic such as octopus.

But, as in often the case in my life in Korea, there was a considerable gap between my expectations and the reality which played out. It was windy and raining heavily. The restaurant was a seafront tent, in fact so close to the seafront that the tide was coming in and out of about half of the tent, which creates an interesting theme. There was no menu, but the food was picked from large bowls outside - most of it was unidentifiable and some of it was frightening. My mother-in-law picked some kind of sea slugs - which later I discovered were called 개불 - which was meant to be good for vitality. Ten minutes later thy were on her plate - minus their insides - but the loss of their internal organs was not stopping them trying to escape. I'm told they can live for up to thirty minutes like this. Then she chased the creatures round the plate with her chopsticks, which only seemed to make them angrier. I'd been here three weeks at that point as I witnessed the unfolding horror, and I thought, "What am I doing here?" and "Who are these people?"

I didn't try the 개불. I kept waiting for my 'when in Rome' moment, but it didn't happen. Even my wife wasn't eating them. Then I made a bit of a mistake. As the last few creatures tried to hide in a corner of the plate, I voiced my thought to my mother-in-law that these creatures would still be moving around in her stomach. For some reason apparently she'd never really thought about this before. So she continued, but without the same level of enthusiasm. The next day she didn't feel well, and it was two years before she ate 개불 again, which I feel partly responsible for. [More details and video here].

Bring your own fish restaurant

I haven’t eaten any other live fish here. In fact, the longer I stayed here the more I was put off by the idea. I’ll tell you the problem. Sunday was parents’ day so my mother-in-law once again wanted to eat fresh fish – we went down to Dadaepo Harbour this time, where the restaurants are just over the road from where the fishing fleet is docked.

Now it turns out that the type of ‘restaurant’ she wants to go to was one where you bring your own food, so she walked into one of the markets and before I had time to realise what was about to happen a two-foot long fish was pulled from a bowl, it’s neck or spine was immediately broken and the chopping along with the associated blood-splattering began, even though it was still moving. Then it was taken to the restaurant with us where it was prepared. I'm afraid it doesn't do much for my appetite. When I explained to my wife what I'd be talking about on the radio today, she said that the way I describe it, it "kind of sounds a bit disgusting". But then the next thing she said was "I'm hungry." Maybe it's a cultural thing.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-05-11 @ ~19:30

Lotus Lantern

2011-05-14T21:55:00.001+09:00

If you ever want to know why I like living in Korea, it's because last Saturday evening at 9pm I was stood in the middle of Yongdusan Park with thousands of other people, immersed in the 2011 Busan Lotus Lantern Festival (there's another in Seoul). By contrast, the only reason you go to a park after dark in my city is to shoot up hard drugs or get murdered. And while there are things to do and places to go after dark, it involves locking yourself in your car and hoping someone doesn’t ram you from behind in one of the bad neighbourhoods which are too numerous to avoid, as part of an insurance fraud or carjacking.

During my first stay in Korea, I saw a lot of places and did a lot of things, and now I have a child I have to reluctantly acknowledge that it was a more carefree lifestyle which might never be fully regained. So whereas once we would have made a date to visit Yongdusan Park on Saturday evening for the Busan Lotus Lantern Festival, and culmination of the three-day Joseon Tongsinsa Festival – it was past our son's bedtime and we thought we probably wouldn't make it unless he was in a good mood. But Thursday was Children's Day in Korea, so we went then instead, after lunch. The lanterns were out but the effect was obviously less impressive in the daytime, and we're getting to that time of year where the heat and humidity are becoming uncomfortable, which also detracts a little from the experience.

As things were, we actually did manage to get back on Saturday, although it didn't quite work out as planned. The event was scheduled to begin at 8pm, but it was late starting, and we didn't really think through the nature of the event. We went for the lanterns, but there was a parade. Korean parades are often noisy affairs, and when the lights were finally turned on and this one arrived, it was no different. To an extent you can move away from the samulnori and other sundry musicians, but there was no escape from the on-stage performances which were so loud over the speakers I left the park barely able to hear myself speak - this is not an exaggeration. I haven't experienced anything like it since university. Add fireworks into the mix, which admittedly were rather nicely enhanced by the fog, and it explains why my wife - concerned about our baby’s hearing - immediately fled from the park with several other parents.

Now our baby is old enough to start seriously venturing from the confines of the apartment, it's occurring to me for the first time that, at least as far as festivals and other events are concerned, Korea may not be particularly baby friendly. Maybe there's a way of holding an event like this without getting noise complaints from Japan, but if there is it hasn't crossed the organisers' minds.

Unfortunately at the point at which my wife ran away we were separated, and she had my phone, leaving me with Korean Mother who had taken a seat near the stage and was largely inaccessible – not just because of the language barrier. I spent at least thirty minutes looking for my wife and child, although it could have been longer since without my phone, I didn't know the time either. I discovered why I couldn’t find my immediate family once I worked my way to Korean Mother. "Shall we go?" I asked in Korean, but she said no, she was having fun. I lacked the depth of language to ascertain whether she was saying this for my benefit or not, and I didn't want to press the issue by emphasising that it was really OK to leave, because I was afraid of dragging her away from something she wanted to stay at. Predictably, it later transpired that while she was enjoying the event, she also mainly staying for my benefit.

The misunderstandings meant that I saw the events through to their conclusion. Confusion, noise, colour, laughter, large crowds, barely organised chaos among the performers and the possibility of permanent physical damage afterwards - the Festival was a microcosm of life in Korea, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Busan e-FM Week 28: National Identity

2011-05-05T21:44:00.001+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Well, unless you were hiding in a cave, this week has seen a huge global news event – the culmination of a ten year plan in fact. And someone who has proven difficult to pin down has finally been caught. I am of course, talking about Prince William and the British Royal Wedding. And this got me thinking about the subject of national identity – and what it means to be British in Korea.

Queen Elizabeth

I didn’t watch the royal wedding, but over 24 million British people did. The week before the wedding someone told me they weren’t watching it, and I didn’t even know when it was. Then I found out, because I received an email from one of my brokers covering the week ahead in the financial markets – and of course, the British stock market was closed.

According to a British newspaper survey, 37% of people in the UK were “genuinely interested and excited” by the wedding. That’s actually 23 million people – so presumably another 1 million watched because they were bored. A lot of people said it was a kind of Cinderella story, and I guess that Korean people can relate to that because many K-dramas seem to centre around a plot where a poor woman falls in love with a wealthy man, or a rich man falls in love with a poor woman, if you look at it from a male perspective, which often seems more important in Korea.

But if 37% were interested, it also means 63% were not really interested and didn’t watch, and I was one of them. I think to a lot of us our royal family is like a long running soap opera that refuses to get cancelled. But on the other hand, the queen is like our own version of a halmoni [elderly Korean woman] – stoically going on despite everything. So I accept she’s a national symbol. I guess Korea has it’s own modern-day royalty in a way, because I keep reading about ‘Queen Yuna” in the newspapers.

Queen Yuna

I didn’t watch the royal skating performance either, but I did see her Olympic performance last year, albeit accidentally. When she skated for the gold I was at a hospital having heart tests – but not because I was worried she wouldn’t win.

My wife told a friend that she might not have watched it if we hadn’t been at the hospital. She said her friend gave her an odd look. Maybe it’s not the sort of thing you’re suppose to admit to. I know there was a strong feeling of patriotism surrounding her performance – and I felt sorry for her because of that, because she’s very young and there must have been a lot of pressure on her; she’d become a national symbol but one, like the British royal family, that could easily disappoint. Of course we have had numerous disappointments with our royal family, and more than that, I’ve even had it with my government – and I’ve come to feel less British because of my experience.

The British Anti-Ambassador

I came to Korea to get married and then I was going to go home. Little did I know that by the time I set foot in England again my government would have done its best to prevent me from calling it home ever again, because they wouldn’t give my wife a visa and told me I was “free to live my life in Korea”. Those were the exact words with which I was effectively exiled. We won our legal case but there was no sense of victory after all the money and time we’d spent on the case. You know what the funny thing about governments is? When you break the law as a citizen, they send you to jail, but when they break the law (they did and I’m pretty sure they knew what they were doing as well), nobody goes to jail, and nobody apologises. That’s difficult when people expect you to be some kind of British representative.

Because there are relatively few British people here, I suppose sometimes I feel a sense that my behaviour and views are representing my country in Korea much more than they might be if I were American. So maybe I play this unwilling ambassadorial role. For example, an old Korean guy walked up to me while I was taking photos once, and after he discovered I was British he starts telling me how he owns a company and met the British Ambassador once – and how he gets invited to their parties sometimes.

I don’t get invited to parties at the British Embassy, and it’s a fair bet that there’s more chance of Kim Jong-il getting an invite than me. But this ajeossi tells me how much he likes British culture, and I’m trying to smile and be polite, but at the same time I’m thinking ‘why should I have to play this role after what happened?’ People say you tend to become more patriotic when you leave your country, but I became less.

National Identity Crisis

I might be having some kind of national identity crisis. It’s not like I feel welcome back home. What is it to be British in Korea anyway? Koreans have this notion of being a pure-blooded race ‘민족’, but there’s no British ‘race’ per se. Overseas Koreans are some of the most vocal defenders of Korean culture – even if they’ve never lived here, but I don’t think any British people really feel as strongly as that.

And there are lots of American brands here, with fast food, coffee and clothes retail. And what do the British get? One supermarket chain (Tesco Homeplus aka ‘Homeplus’ aka ‘Home plus’ aka ‘Samsung Tesco Homeplus’ aka ‘I can’t believe we’re not Korean’), and even that kind of hides its British origins. We can get a bit of British food there. There’s this kind of desperate discussion thread on a website for foreigners here (AFEK), where British expats talked in excited tones about being able to get their hands on tins of ‘Value Beans’ which are probably around 180 won in the UK but cost 1,000 won here.

Another problem with countries like Britain and America – wherever you are in the world, is that you also feel responsible for your country’s foreign policy – all the bad things that it does in your name. I think Korea doesn’t have that kind of issue as much.

The 51st State

I think my experience here is different from that of an American in some small ways. There’s always this worry in the background I think that American soldiers are going to get into serious trouble in Seoul – or American language teachers. But then often I get into taxis and the first question the driver will ask my wife is “is he American?” And you know, sometimes I sense this feeling of relief when my wife says no – he’s British. But I feel a bit bad about it as well, because the thing is with Brits and Americans is that we’re are all supposed to be on the same side now. Although you know what the truth of being British here is – we’re all Americans when we’re in trouble.

Links
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Air date: 2011-05-04 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 27: Baby Photo Shoots

2011-04-28T18:10:00.001+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Back in January I talked about the birth of my son in Korea, and how we named him. This week, I wanted to talk about another apparently important baby issue – baby photos.

Counting days

Part of the significance of these baby photos is to do with the way people count days here. Actually, I found that Koreans are obsessive counters of days, formally marking such occasions as 49 days after the death of a loved one, 15 days after Seollal with Jeongweol Daeboreum, and even more modern examples, such as burning a wedding bouquet after 100 days to ensure a trouble-free marriage. Some of it is really quite inconvenient too – I used to live in Hadan, where there was a ‘Five Days Market’ - which occurs every five days, so basically you never know when to go. It would be a lot easier if it happened every Wednesday, for example.

We don’t count days a lot in England. Of course, we’re generally really bad at maths, so that wouldn't help. I find it especially confusing here because it’s not just the normal calendar you have to contend with, but also the lunar calendar. I don’t know how Koreans manage it – but maybe there’s a smartphone app that helps you with it all these days.

Apparently there’s not much counting with marriage though – when I asked my wife about it she told me “once you get married you tend not to celebrate any more” - isn’t that the truth? But babies are a different matter.

50 days

We had a few shots taken with a photographer for our baby’s 50th day, although it felt quite informal. At the time I didn’t think much of it because I thought it was part of the baby package that we’d bought through the hospital for my wife’s birth.

100 days

So we counted the 100th day for our baby, when I gathered photos must be taken. But evidently there’s more to it than this, because my wife started browsing the Internet intently for baby things, and making a lot of phone calls. Packages began to arrive. By the time the day came we had a big banner across the wall with my son’s name on it plus the words “Happy 100th Day”. And surrounding it we had the world’s entire supply of purple balloons. Then there was a cake with candles for ‘100’, which was surrounded by dishes of fruit, and of course, I had to take the photos.

So I figure we're done here right? Wrong. These were not the official 100th day photographs. No, we still had to go to a studio – except on the 130th day, because apparently this is when the baby ‘looks better’. I’m told it’s not uncommon, but then it’s all a lie really isn’t it?

130 days

So for the 130th day 100th day photo shoot we hired a studio, which was basically a big room split into six different themes with various props. And I took along my DSLR to take the photos. You can hire a camera, but this probably isn’t a good idea because most DSLRs – especially the high end ones – can take a lot of getting used to. I know a lot of men don’t mind fiddling around with their equipment, but trust me, you don’t want to be doing this against the clock, in-between bouts of baby and partner screaming, depending on the quality of the results.

It was quite stressful, and I hadn’t worked with big studio flash-lights before. Plus I had to keep an eye on what was going to be in the background to each shot, because the props were sometimes a little odd. Fortunately I noticed the words “Adolph Hitler” on the spine of a book in the background of one photo before I took it. These are probably not the words you want floating around above your baby's head in the family album.

Of course, the advantage of the self-studio is that you can take all the shots you want, but the downside is that you probably can’t take all the shots that your partner demands. And it gives you freedom, but the freedom to mess things up. So the next day it was my partner’s face that was the picture – she said only five shots were worth saving out of the 554 I took. For what it’s worth I saved 94 of the photos, but clearly it’s debatable whether it’s worth the stress; there’s something to be said for going down the professional route, rather than apparently as it was in our case, the unprofessional route.

200 days

So I thought, well, thank God I don’t have to do that again. And then my wife said to me “We have to do another photo-shoot on the 200th day”. No. You know, I do like this country, but sometimes it feels like a nightmare I can’t escape from.

The 200th day photo-shoot was booked, and my wife wanted to do another self-shoot, but I caught a break, at least, I think I did. My wife entered our baby’s photo into a photo competition run by a large studio here, and we won a free photo-shoot with a photographer.

In fact, my wife’s been entering our son into a few competitions. I think it’s very Korean behaviour, but being British I have reservations about the whole thing, because it just seems quite presumptuous to think your baby looks nice, especially when I look at myself in the mirror and think that if he does it can’t be from my genes. But it seems to be a very serious business in Korea – there was a national competition on an Internet site here, and when the last ten were announced, hundreds of mothers were so disappointed by the exclusion of their baby that they were posting lots of angry messages on the site, with levels of rhetoric almost approaching that of North Korea. I half-expected them to threaten to destroy the site in a sea of fire.

So it was quite a relief – in a way – to just be a bystander at the photo-shoot we won. Except there’s still some stress, because our baby was full of smiles before the shoot, and as soon as it started, he wouldn’t smile, and he began to cry. He did get better - but it helps to understand Korean, because eventually I discovered the photographer was complaining that he was smiling too much. Apparently the ‘concept’ was ‘being moody’. I don’t know why there has to be a concept, but there was. It seems they wanted to highlight his big eyes – and if he smiled, his eyes weren’t as big. But anyway, the photos are better than mine.

365 days

But remember I mentioned that before the competition win, we’d originally booked the self-studio for his 200th day shoot? My wife re-arranged it... for his 1-year shoot.

[to be continued...]

Links
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Air date: 2011-04-27 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 26: Expats Who Run

2011-04-26T19:30:00.078+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

This should have been my last week at Busan e-FM. They’d reached the end of their six-month season and this is when they shake things up and change around the schedule and even some of their staff, but they persuaded me to sign on for a second season, or as I think of it, 52 more hours on the subway.

I wasn’t keen on the idea initially simply because during my time on the air I’d been primarily talking about my experiences, and I felt like I’d covered most of the major topics such as social responsibilities, festivals, health, technology and so on. But - apparently – the new season afforded me the scope to sometimes talk about a wider range of issues that weren’t anchored so much in personal experience as personal opinion and current events. At least in principle. I’ve developed a sense that when you think you make agreements here the other end of the bargain is perhaps... a little more fluid than one might normally expect.

But as such, there was a change of tone this week, at least. This is the last of my mad month of daily 7.30pm posts, because I’ve now caught up to reality. Possibly.

Introduction

This week I’m going to talk about Japanese radiation, Mount Baekdu, living long-term in a country like Korea, and escape plans.

Escape plans

I don’t have an escape plan. I don’t know if I should. But recently we had the Fukushima nuclear accident, and because of that there were fears for Tokyo. It really never looked like there was a risk of high fallout levels in Tokyo – but of course there’s always a chance things could change quickly, and then maybe it’s too late.

But what surprised me about Fukushima was how quickly foreigners got out of Japan. They showed little loyalty to their Japanese colleagues, friends and family. Loyalty is important in Japan, and I believe it’s also important in Korea, where you have family loyalties, loyalties to companies, so many loyalty cards and programmes, and of course, the importance of brands.

So I wonder, what happens when these foreigners go back to Japan? Are they accepted back so easily? We have a phrase in English - ‘fair-weather friends’, which basically refers to the way some people will happily be your friend in good times, but not when times are bad.

Nuclear issues

It’s not just a Japanese issue; Korea has nuclear power stations as well and just this week there have been a number of ‘issues’ with the Gori nuclear plant here in Busan [it seems not an isolated case]. There are other factors at work in Korea as well.

A year ago, after North Korea’s attack on the Cheonan I was reading foreigners on an Internet group here discussing what their escape plans were. Some were highly detailed descriptions, referencing American Embassy communications and plans. I don’t really get the same kind of communications from the British Embassy. Reading these comments, I realised what a serious issue it was for some people. But what does it mean about how much loyalty we have to our lives in Korea?

Then, after the North Korean attack on Yeonpyeong Island, there was a newspaper article about expat evacuation plans. Perhaps these plans will never have to be put into operation, but the fact that Korean newspapers are highlighting how ready we are to leave doesn’t make us look good. Of course, I understand that it’s naturally a big issue in Seoul. But what’s interesting about that is how many expats there think that Busan will be safe – I don’t think that’s necessarily true. They have plans to come to Busan in the event of an attack, but over Seollal I read that it was taking eight hours to drive from Seoul to Busan [unfortunately I didn't remember this correctly, it was the other way - Busan to Seoul - but I'm sure the principle holds true]. I think if something suddenly happens it might take them eight hours just to get out of Seoul.

Mount Baekdu

Then there’s the potential eruption of Mount Baekdu. There should be more warning with this, but the damage could be greater. Eruptions are measured in terms of the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI. So-called supervolcanoes such as Yellowstone in the U.S. and Toba 74,000 years ago that possibly killed an 60% of all humans at the time, have had a VEI of up to 8. Mount Baekdu is thought to be capable of an eruption of up to 7.4 on the VEI scale. To put this into context, the eruption in Iceland last year, which caused massive problems for flights in Europe, had a VEI of 5. The scale is logarithmic so one point in magnitude equals ten times the difference. In other words, Mount Baekdu’s forthcoming eruption could be over one-hundred times more powerful than Iceland, so the damage could be considerable.

There’s evidence that an eruption could occur in the near-future, geologically speaking. Since 2002, there has been a 10cm rise in the mountain’s height, there are reports of many dead trees on the Chinese side of the mountain, and the frequency or earthquakes has increased noteably. Satellites have detected a temperature rise in the mountain.

Some politicians here have tried to say that a Mount Baekdu eruption won’t be a problem for South Korea [although clearly there is concern], but this doesn’t seem to be borne out by history and logic. In its eruption just over 1,000 years ago, the volcano created enough ash to cover the entire Korean peninsula up to a height of 1.2 meters. Now to be fair, in the event of a similar eruption not all of that is likely to fall on Korea – although it depends on wind direction. But any eruption is also likely to cause a mini volcanic winter, rising food prices and the temporary breakdown of infrastructure. And that’s not the only issue with this – China is building nuclear power stations only 100km away from the volcano.

Clan culture

So again in connection with Mount Baekdu, this question comes up – do you leave, and what happens afterwards?

Japan has a strong clan culture if I can call it that. There’s a high value placed on belonging to a social group, and taking part in activities such as drinking, karaoke, eating and so on. It’s the same in Korea. You’ll always be a foreigner, but you have to try and be an honorary member of the Korean clan.

It’s like that movie The Last Samurai – you know, the one with Tom Cruise. Actually, that was based on the life of Jules Brunet, who was French – and this is an example [yet another example] of the way Hollywood is Americanising history. In other words, as a cultural superpower America is re-writing history in its image. And this reminds us of an important lesson – history is written by the victors.

Now The Last Samurai is just a movie, but what kind of ending would it have been if as the Japanese clan leader – Katsumoto – is preparing for the final battle, Tom Cruise’s character says “well good luck, I’ll be up on that hill watching”? Of course, his character has to ride into battle with the clan leader – the major point of the film is loyalty.

Loyalty to Korea

So should I be loyal to Korea? Maybe. But I don’t know where you draw the line. Based on the science, I’m sure I wouldn’t have left Tokyo. And if something happened with North Korea or Mount Baekdu, again, maybe I wouldn’t want to leave. But I admit, it was an easier decision when I didn’t have a baby son. Now I do, but what about my Korean family and friends who have nowhere to go? And how do they treat you when you get back?

But... I used to read about people who’d been in Japan for twenty to thirty years, and they often said ‘it doesn’t matter how Japanese you become – you’ll never really be Japanese’ [or fully accepted by them], so maybe that’s a significant issue to consider, because although I haven’t been in Korea long enough, I suspect the same is true here. We’ll always be treated as outsiders – so maybe it’s OK that we make these plans. But from what I’ve read foreigners saying in Korea, and what we saw recently in Japan, it’s surprising just how quickly some people are ready to run.

[The day after I did this segment on Busan e-FM, the following story appeared in Britain’s Daily Telegraph: “Rebuilding Japan: Special scorn for ‘flyjin’ foreigners who fled country”].

Links
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Air date: 2011-04-20 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 25: Financial Trading in Korea

2011-04-25T19:30:00.057+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

This week I’m going to talk about my job. I’m a financial trader, and I work for myself.

Provenance

I read recently that seven out of ten Korean people regretted changing their jobs. Clearly there’s a lot of stress here connected with people’s working lives. It’s the same in England. In fact, there’s a word for it in English – we call it the “rat-race”, and it’s a race many people dream about dropping out of. There’s a book about trading by Alexander Elder, which begins with these words: “You can be free. You can live and work anywhere in the world. You can be independent from routine and not answer to anybody. This is the life of a successful trader.” It’s a good opening because it speaks to the dream of freedom and independence people have.

Job stress and the desire for a better life on fairer terms are big issues in modern society, and it’s part of the reason I quit my job working for a company. I think a lot of Korean people can understand the motivation. And as far as trading is concerned, it seems there’s quite a lot of it happening here.

Ants

I was both surprised and appalled to find out how much some Korean people were trading the financial markets. You know, I found out they call Korean traders ‘ants’, and I guess that sums all of us up. When I came to Korea in 2006 – before the Credit Crisis – everyone was talking about their investments, or their funds (‘pundue’), if they left the job to the bank. The percentage gains were enormous – I heard stories of people making 20-30% per year. This is scary... and unsustainable. They’re the kind of gains you usually see before a crash. But even before people lost so much money in the Credit Crisis – I saw TV stories here, and heard stories from my extended Korean social network, of people losing tens of thousands of dollars (or tens of millions of won) in the stock market.

Korean trading TV channels

You can tell it’s a serious business because of the dedicated Korean TV channels aimed at these ‘ants’. We don’t have those kind of TV channels in England. We have Bloomberg, which is a sorry excuse for a financial channel [In the hour running up to the London market opening, Bloomberg UK runs a heavy mix of adverts and sports/entertainment stories to the detriment of reporting on the morning’s corporate news releases]. The Korean channels feature lots of charts and chat-feeds like Twitter with viewer commentary. It’s intense stuff, it’s what trading is really about [sadly], and I think there might be three Korean channels just like this.

Financial trading in Korea

The market here – and the way people trade – seems to be different to England. There’s a lot of actual real stock buying, which means betting on upwards movements only, although there are also Equity-Linked Warrants (ELW) which are quite popular [if it’s anything like ‘covered warrants’ in Europe the deck is probably, by design, heavily stacked against the trader]. It’s easy to look clever in a bull-market with products like this.

I buy and sell financial contracts. In theory, it’s the difference between the price now and the price at some future point in time [but unlike most warrants, they don’t carry exponentially volatile expiry dates]. Think of it as the theoretical ownership of shares in a company, but you never actually own the stock. I might hold these financial contracts for weeks, minutes or even sometimes seconds. I also bet on downwards movements in the things I trade – which is called ‘short-selling’ or ‘shorting’. Overall, it’s not a term I’m fond of, but I suppose you could class me as a ‘daytrader’.

Trade what you know

I don’t trade any Korean companies. When I lived in England, I used to trade the UK and the US primarily, but I can’t really trade the US any more because of the time difference.

The problem with trading Korean companies is mostly the language barrier [although I suspect market liquidity isn’t as great either]. If I used a Korean securities company (or ‘broker’), even if I can overcome the Korean language interface – or they offer one in English – I can’t understand the news. I have to understand what’s happening with what I’m trading [another school of thought in the community differs on this point]. Anyway, as things stand, with my brokers and trading systems, I have no access to the Korean market. I’m not exactly sure why this is – I have access to many other global markets including Japan – but historically I think there have been lots of restrictive laws in Korea which make the whole business rather difficult.

The fn Hub

Of course, Korea has its ‘Financial Hub’ project – or ‘fn Hub’ as they [bizarrely] call it [or as I call it, ‘another fn hub’]. The fn Hub wants to create an environment where “domestic and foreign companies can compete freely (and thrive together)”.

One of the reasons London has been successful as a financial centre is that there is little regulation there. But here there are barriers – for example in foreign banks taking over domestic ones. The Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act 2009 broke down some of the regulatory barriers, but the government is still talking about whether to allow hedge funds to operate here – hedge funds [rightly or wrongly] are a fundamental part of the modern system in London and New York.

So some companies can’t operate here, even if they want to. Of the contracts I trade, which include stocks, commodities and currencies, none of my currency brokers will let me have an account in Korea, because of the Korean financial and banking rules. And I understand the difficulties, because my bank – [fn] HSBC – which is a global bank advertising a ‘global account’, doesn’t allow online UK to Korea money transfers. It all has to be done by phone. [I found this important fact out after they’d convinced me to open an account on the basis I could do my global banking over the Internet – which given I specified I wanted it for Korea, they should have known was impossible].

So with HSBC – and other banks I suppose – I can’t bring money into Korea electronically, or move it out. So, no electronic movement of money. I think I understand why this is – it’s probably a legacy of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which created a fear that money moving in and out quickly could lead to a rapid economic collapse. But restrictions are the enemy of capitalism. I’m not ethically justifying this kind of global capitalism – it’s responsible for lots of problems in the world like the Credit Crisis. But it’s the way things are. Modern global capitalism means the free movement of capital, money in other words.

Korea as an ‘Asian Financial Hub’

I think the government here is trying to head in the right direction, and working sincerely towards their goal of making South Korea an ‘Asian Financial Hub’. But clearly it’s slow progress, and I think people have to be realistic about this idea. Look at what you’ve got right now – Singapore and Hong Kong are financial centres of sorts because they use English [for business at least]. Japan is a major financial market because of its financial power and the financial infrastructure it built up as part of that. You get the impression with the ‘fn Hub’ that it’s being talked about as some kind of replacement for these other financial centres. But what’s Korea’s unique selling point?

I don’t see that Korea will ever be the kind of Asian Financial Hub they are dreaming of. First of all, politics is a problem I’m afraid. Can you persuade companies to come here when this country is regularly threatened by an aggressive neighbour? Then there’s the language barrier and the anti-foreign rhetoric which private hate groups and the government regularly engage in [the latest is that apparently Ulleung Island could be 'militarily threatened' by Japan, in addition to the 'foreigners are spreading AIDS' political issue which I've previously mentioned. It's not that Japan is necessarily any less xenophobic of course - but they already have a financial hub whereas the government in Korea is trying to attract foreigners in to build one up].

No more hubs

But the bigger issue might be the whole idea of financial hubs and international financial centres in the first place. These days markets are consolidating, becoming increasingly electronic-only and speed of execution is an issue [high-frequency trading]. In the past, financial traders had to be near where the action was, but increasingly you put your computers there (or actually at the geographical mid-point between two markets) and you sit somewhere else. If anything, one day, there might be no financial hubs of any kind.

Don’t try this at home

I wouldn’t recommend trading as a job. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy. Longer term investing can be sensible, although nobody knows what the future is going to bring.

Links
Busan e-FM
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Air date: 2011-04-13 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 24: Korea and the English Language

2011-04-24T19:30:00.051+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Now this probably a very important subject in Korea – especially for Busan e-FM listeners – today’s subject is Korean and the English language.

The Korean English language school

I met my wife in England, where she did some postgraduate studies at the local college and university in my home town. Both were quite popular with overseas students, and perhaps that’s what led to the story of the Korean English language school.

In my job as Student Union President, I spent a lot of time liaising with the university’s management. One day they called me up and asked “Do you know anything about the plan to open an English language school for Koreans here?” Well I didn’t, but the story was this: apparently some Korean businessmen intended buy a building near the university and turn it into a school that would just teach English to people who would come over from Korea. Then the businessmen actually came to the city, met local council leaders, and finished up having their pictures taken, shaking the mayor’s hand, which then appeared in the local newspaper.

And that was the last I heard of it, until six months later, when suddenly the first Korean students arrived. There first question was naturally, where is the school? Exactly. Where, indeed, was it? I knew the building the Korean businessmen said they were intending to buy, and I’d looked at it every time I walked by – and there’d been no visible signs of any activity at all. I had contacts in the local council as well as with the university, and they hadn’t heard anything about it since the businessmen had gone home either. Didn’t the plans work out suddenly, or was it a con from the beginning? I don’t know, but it didn’t look good.

The students had spent all their money in some cases. Some returned to Korea, and some transferred to the local city college. But I specifically remember the story of one girl, who had no money and felt too ashamed to go back home. What I took from this was how important English must be in Korea, and what a big business it seemed. But it didn’t always seem a fair business.

Fusion-combination under fusion-combination environment

And then I came to Korea and saw it for myself. I was shocked by the number of hagwons. Yes, you know there are going to be a lot, but I wasn’t expecting there to be ten within a hundred meters of my apartment. I guess there are thousands in Busan alone. It’s mindblowing. But I can’t help feeling that despite all this it doesn’t really work.

At first – I admit – it was funny to see all the badly written English signs, and all the badly used English, such as the “Korea Literature Translation Institude” and the restaurant advertising “Spaghetti with swimming crap”. But soon it made me a little sad because of all the money you can see being poured into it, and it can have consequences.

For example, one wedding album we looked at started off “You will always have a special place in my hear”. Then, under a picture of the bride you’d have the words “with palpitation just like the fist time”, and it finished with what appeared to be a disastrous cut-and-paste failure from Ben E. King’s classic song ‘Stand By Me’, where the main line “Just as long as you stand by me” became “hust as ling as you stand by me”. Well, that’s not a wedding album I can send back to England really, because it creates a bad impression of Korea, and it kind of makes the whole wedding seem like a bit of a joke.

It’s not just companies that end up with odd English. The Ministry of Health and Welfare sent out a multi-language leaflet on the importance of having children vaccinated “in order to ensure our children grow up to be healthy human resources of the future.” Then again, this is Korea, maybe we are all just ‘human resources’ to the chaebol in the end. But my favourite is the Korean Internet & Security Agency. Recently I visited their English page trying to find out why a website I’d tried to visit was blocked. It explains “We need to prepare a counter-measure system against infringements related to fusion-combination under fusion-combination environment.” The page goes on to talk about the need to create “digital warmth” for minimising the ‘dysfunction’ of the Internet. What is ‘digital warmth’? [The whole page is worth reading because it essentially encapsulates so many of the failures that English translations have here - and translations into Korean from English can raise very serious issues too].

The english waves come in [sic]

I became more sympathetic as I struggled with the Korean language, but it’s still surprising though when you see these really big brands using bad English – why don’t they pay for proper translations?

Then I started to hear a few stories from foreigners doing the translations. They were rewording advertising material from a first draft in English done by a Korean, but after they’d corrected it, the company would often go back to the first one, because they said it sounded better.

[I can’t believe they let me mention this on air]. Take the Busan e-FM slogan for example. “The english waves come in” - it’s on the signs and advertising. This is a small issue, but it makes a big difference: there’s an apostrophe missing between the ‘E’ and ‘S’ of ‘waves’. So instead of “The English Wave Has Come In”, instead it really states that the waves come in around the coast of England. 그래서, 영국의 파도가 옴니다, 그리고 나감니다. There’s no capital for the word ‘English’ either.

Working in a Korean business environment is hard [story pending]

So seeing all this makes me think that working in a Korean business environment could be very hard for a foreigner. My impression is that whatever foreigners might say, Korean businesses just plough on regardless. They don’t care.

Whose language is it anyway?

But then I had a revelation, at least about the English language. Maybe these Korean companies don’t even want good English... because they’re not pitching their messages at English speakers, they’re pitching it at people who ‘speak’ English in Korea. And who’s to say they can’t? Perhaps Korean English is a new language like American English [an earlier bastardisation of the original language – although modern British English is in itself arguably a bastardisation of ‘olde [sic] English’]. If people are happy with this new version of English - ‘Korean English’ - then maybe it’s OK.

And really, the way some ‘native’ English teachers write on websites here – what language is that? I call it “native English teacher English”. Maybe that’s a new version of the language – with bad grammar, awful spelling, and a general inability to communicate. My God, I wouldn’t want some of them anywhere near my child teaching English.

To quote the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language.” What he meant by that of course is that you can have two groups, essentially using the same language, but still not communicating well. So maybe this is the problem with English written in Korea – or Korean English, and we can’t necessarily expect it to ever change. And looking at it from a Korean language point of view, perhaps when I reach Korean fluency I’ll still have problems communicating, so the Koreans and I will still be divided by a common language too.

And that might be the world we live in today anyway – everyone’s talking but many people are not understanding what’s being said.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-04-06 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 23: Korean History

2011-04-23T19:30:00.002+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Today I’m going to talk about Korean history. Now you know what they say about Korea having 5,000 years of history [or more], so obviously I’m not going to discuss all of it – only bits.

Knowing history

I didn’t know a lot about the history of Korea before coming here. Of course, everyone knows about the Korean War... or maybe they don’t – a few months ago I read about a 2008 survey conducted by the Ministry of Public Administration and Security, and in it of 1,016 Korean middle and high school students surveyed, 51% didn’t know the war started with an invasion by North Korea. In fact 14% blamed Japan for starting the war, 13% blamed the United States, 11% blamed the Soviet Union, and 2% said it began when South Korean invaded the North. I found this lack of knowledge of the historical facts of something which is so important here very surprising. There was another survey conducted last year by Gallup, and that produced broadly similar results.

Don’t get me wrong. British children are no more familiar with their history – perhaps they are even less so, but South Korea has a strong reputation for its educational system, so that’s why I found the results so unexpected.

Haeundae Beach Memorial Day

Last year I was on Haeundae Beach on Memorial Day. A group were running a photo display of the Korean War on the beach and they had the flags of the 68 countries which had assisted South Korea in the conflict. The lack of knowledge of these historical events was one of the issues the group mentioned in its display.

In fact, it was also interesting that the group had pictures of the alleged destruction of one of their previous displays by a ‘candlelight rally’ in Seoul, so it suggests that history here can be a highly controversial subject.

Because they were highlighting the international effort there were pictures of British soldiers and their contribution in the Korean War amongst the display, and I have to say that was heartening to see. The U.S. carried a lot of the effort in the war but often other contributions get ignored in this and other historical events because of the cultural imperialism of Hollywood and the frequent rewriting of history it conducts as part of that. [It's not just truth sacrificed in the name of entertainment either - some of it appears to have a particularly nasty agenda].

885

I haven’t visited the U.N. Cemetery in Busan. I’ve looked over it from a nearby hill but haven’t been inside – I’ve been putting it off because I think it will be an upsetting experience. There are 885 British soldiers buried there. I didn’t know about them when I came to Busan. I find these kinds of numbers overwhelming – and it’s just a very small percentage of the total number of foreign casualties, let alone the Korean ones.

The Haeundae Beach display, which highlighted the sacrifices of people from other countries, carried the title “Thanks Runs Forever”. But maybe it doesn’t, because today in Korea foreigners are under attack, even receiving death threats, just for voicing opinions that some people here don’t like. Even I’ve been attacked for relating things I’ve seen in Korea, which perhaps don’t portray this country in a positive way. I don’t know what it is with these people – maybe they don’t know their history, and maybe they don’t care. But when foreigners are attacked – when I’m attacked – I think of those 885 British soldiers buried here in Busan, who fought to defend this country. People like Private G.W. Harrison – to mention only one random name of those 885 - who died on the 27th March 1952 at the age of just 19.

Affinities foreign and local

As much as I feel an affinity for my countrymen who fought and died here to defend South Korea, I also feel an affinity – as a former student activist myself - towards the student activists who fought against the dictatorship here. I saw a display about the Busan-Masan Democratic Uprising while I was at PNU [Pusan National University]. They risked their lives – not against an external aggressor – but for a domestic idea – democracy and freedom of speech in the face of an extreme right-wing regime. It’s something I hope foreigners will one day have here too as we battle against today’s right-wing threats.

Japan

Aside from the Korean War, and the Democratic Uprising, the other particularly well known part of Korean history overseas, is the Japanese occupation. I know it’s very much part of the ongoing narrative in South Korea, but even so I was a little surprised to see a statue of Park Jae-Hyuk – who threw a bomb at the head of the police station here in 1921 – in the Children’s Park. Parents were standing their small children beneath the statue to take photos of them. I guess the ‘Japanese awareness issue’ starts at an early age in Korea. I’ve also been to Tapgol Park in Seoul – the birthplace of the March 1st Movement, which was a really interesting place.

Korea has a long and unfortunate history of invasions, and I understand that the national psyche, even today, is traumatised by that, which manifests itself sometimes as this sense of many aspects of life being about Korea versus the rest of the world. In other words, understanding Korean history is important in understanding Korea today.

Mongols, more Japanese, Korean Neo-Confucian Radicals

I went on honeymoon to Gyeongju, the old capital of the 신라 [Silla] Kingdom, because my wife knows I’m interested in history. But I thought it would be like Kyoto, and of course it wasn’t, because over the years most of it has been destroyed by the Mongols and Japanese during their historic invasions, and Korean Neo-Confucian radicals [who oddly enough, as far as I can tell, seem to often get relegated to a footnote in the cultural-destruction blame game].

So Gyeongju wasn’t what I expected, but then what is? I saw many temples in the region, such as Bulguksa, but I left feeling honestly confused about what is real and what is a rebuilt copy. History is being destroyed in Korea – and it continues today with Beomeosa and Namdaemun.

And Modern Koreans

But it’s not just about the destruction of history which disappointed me, it’s also about the way that history is disrespected, even if just from a tourism perspective. For example, the first historical place I ever went to in Korean was Beomeosa, and there was a beautiful building there which housed the temple’s drum, and it’s a great sight and a great first ‘traditional Korean’ photo to take... except there are vending machines next to the building and phone boxes. Gyeongju has a similar issue. There’s a Korean folk village down there – Wolseong Yangdong - and obviously, like Beomeosa, it’s marketed as a tourist destination. But amongst all this 15th and 16th century architecture you have a big modern church and satellite dishes on the side of the traditional Korean houses. [It’s a ‘living’ historical village but for the effort the authorities are making you’d think they might have sorted out a cable TV solution for the residents, and the Catholic church I used to attend in England didn’t have a tall spire or fall into the architectural trap of looking overtly religious, so this can be done too I think, if the will is there].

I seriously banged my head in the folk village – low beams. It demonstrates the importance of understanding history [people used to be smaller and Korean architecture is sometimes designed accordingly].

I want to learn more about Korean history. During my time here, I’ve tried to come to terms with what Korea is, but to really understand that, I feel I need to also know what it was, and how it became what it is today. It’s an important part of living here.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-03-30 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 22: Crime in Korea

2011-04-22T19:30:00.060+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Today I’m going to talk about crime in Korea, and as I’ve mentioned before crime is a big problem in England, so it’s often on my mind.

England versus Korea

Crime in England is much worse than in Korea according to statistics. The robbery rate for England is 188.7 per 100,000 people – that’s worse than the United States at 146.4, and Busan which is only 24.7.

Korean policing – apart from at protests – seems almost apologetic. I think my father-in-law, who is a retired police officer, feels that the job got a lot more difficult after South Korea became democratic... But there certainly seems to be a fear of violent crime here; when I first came here I was surprised to see all the bars on the windows at low levels, and the steel apartment doors - a steel door is a hallmark of a criminal property in England. Of course though, there is a lot of non-violent crime here like counterfeiting, piracy and corporate crime.

Normally as a foreigner you might expect to be at a higher risk of falling victim to a violent crime in another country, but despite that I actually feel safer here than in England. It’s relatively safe to walk the streets at night – at least as a foreign man, it’s perhaps not so much the case for foreign women, which is a different issue [and if the racial roles had been reversed in this care, I can't see the Korea Times limiting themselves to a brief 8-line piece about it].

In Korea, you can walk around with expensive gadgets like smartphones and cameras, or use your tablet computer on the subway, so you can really benefit from the personal technology revolution in a way that’s harder to do in England, which is great. When I first came here I was really nervous about taking photos with my $250 digital camera because back then you would have had to be careful doing that sort of thing in the streets of my city [now that a digital camera can cost $30 maybe not as much, but then some people in my city would rob you for less, for fun in fact]. I’ve got used to taking photos here now, but it’s a bit of a problem when I go back home, because it’s easy to slip into the Korean way of thinking and forget to watch your back.

Witnessing crimes

I haven’t really experienced any crime in Korea directly, but I have see quite a bit. For example, in one incident we witnessed sexual harassment taking place on the subway. A man had his hand under a woman’s leg – it was summer and she was wearing a short skirt. His hand was moving further beneath her and some touching was going on. It looked suspicious at the time but we couldn’t be sure that they weren’t together – the woman was fairly expressionless even though she must have known what was happening. My wife said that if the woman moved that would prove it, and sure enough she got up and moved to another seat further down.

This kind of thing doesn’t really happen in England – certainly not in the middle of the day in a busy train. But I’ve read that 21% of women have experienced sexual harassment on the subway in Korea – so unfortunately it appears that it isn’t uncommon. Personal crime is more serious of course, but still, I was surprised when the public phone box near us was smashed – it made me think Korea was becoming like England. [I forgot to mention the fights I've seen].

It was the drink what made me do it, officer

One thing that has surprised me here is the way alcohol is used as an excuse – and defence – by people who commit crimes, especially sex crimes. And it often works too, with more lenient sentencing.

Alcohol is blamed for a lot of crime in England, where ‘binge drinking’ in large groups is a huge problem, but it’s not a legitimate excuse in court. Here it does seem more accepted, and I find there’s a hypocrisy in that – you know, that the drugs you drink here are so socially acceptable whereas the drugs you smoke - apart from tobacco - are totally not. And yet, speaking to my Korean family, I gathered that historically there was quite a lot of smoking of ‘agricultural substances’ going on in the countryside in Korea – whereas now it’s usually foreigners, especially foreign English teachers, who are blamed for being drug users here.

Native English teachers are molesting students and spreading HIV/AIDS

So how about the portrayal of foreign crime in Korea? Sometimes there are high-profile cases here. In 2007, several newspapers carried reports that foreign teachers were molesting their students and (deliberately) spreading HIV and AIDS. The reports were ‘never substantiated’, which is a polite way of saying that these newspapers had no proof and they were deliberately printing racially inflammatory here-say and lies. But what came out of these fantasy ‘facts’ that were printed by these liars was the political move for all native English teachers to be subject to mandatory HIV/AIDS testing. But ethnic Koreans were apparently exempted - even if they were born and raised in America [because apparently a Korean is not a molestation/HIV/AIDS risk whatever their background - whereas non-Koreans obviously are. A Korean once told me that 'Koreans don't get AIDS' though, so there you go].

Similarly, newspapers run scare-tactic headlines saying that the number of crimes committed by foreigners is increasing, and you know they are trying to shock and scare people. The number of crimes committed by foreigners [but are they native English teachers?] is increasing, but so is the number of foreigners [the figures are complex and there the foreign crime pro-rata crime rate does appear to be increasing - but the media likes to run simple figures that make things look worse than they are]. But let’s put it into context – in 2007 – the last year comparative figures were published, the crime rate for foreigners was 1.4%... but it was 3.4% for Koreans. So portraying foreigners as a particularly criminally-inclined group is not fair in that context.

In fact, according to the National Police Agency, rapes were up 28% last year, theft was up 25%, and murder 9%. Last year 15.8% of women said they were beaten by their husbands. Perhaps this is what the media should be focusing on rather than demanding AIDS tests for foreigners and implying that we're responsible for some kind of crime-wave.

Korea is becoming more like England

With these increasing crime figures, I fear this country is becoming more like England – and crime is changing Korea. Places I’ve visited such as Namdaemun and the gate at Beomeosa here in Busan, have been destroyed since I arrived by criminal acts. When Namdaemun happened, there was an initial report that someone thought they’d seen a foreigner running away and I was terrified. That’s the reality of being a foreigner here – I live in fear of what we might be blamed for next, and how Korean people will treat us afterwards.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-03-23 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 21: The Korean Media

2011-04-21T19:30:00.001+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Today’s topic is the media in Korea – so I’m talking about TV, radio and the newspapers.

Television

I never saw a lot of Korean TV before I came here. I’m afraid that there’s no Korean Wave in England. Of course, I’ve seen some here now. From what I’ve seen I suppose you’d say it was broadly similar to British TV, but there really seem to be three main types of Korean television programme – historical dramas, soap operas and light entertainment shows. Or maybe I have this impression because it’s what my mother-in-law always watches.

We subscribed to a big multi-channel package here, and it has a lot of American programmes. I had a service like this in England, but it’s a lot cheaper in Korea, which is just as well because really, I’m too busy to watch it. Anyway, it’s pretty difficult to work out what’s on when you have to translate the Korean schedules. In a way, the video-on-demand service seems more of a promising option, but with ours [Mega TV] the menu system is awful and the hardware is worse – it’s painfully slow, and has a badly designed remote control with poor infra-red sensitivity. Changing channels is an ordeal - you can press a number on the remote control and wait five seconds for it to it to appear on the screen, and it doesn’t always catch it so you end up on a different channel and then the whole process begins again. It can take up to a minute to change channels. You can watch a lot of programmes on TV about serial killers, but this might actually be the first TV service that can turn you into one.

When we were shopping for a new television, we also looked at TVs with a time-machine function – it’s like TiVo – essentially a system where the TV records programmes automatically. We had this in England and it was quite useful. But the staff member in the first store we went into said “Why do you need it? Just download what you want to watch from the Internet.” I appreciated his blunt assessment of the realities of watching TV in Korea, but if anything it was almost an argument for not buying a TV at all.

Television versus learning Korean

Maybe it would have been better not to buy a TV; it’s bad for learning Korean because it’s easy to end up watching American TV shows all the time. I think this is the paradox of learning Korean in today’s world. In principle, we have more technology such as computer programs, mobile applications and electronic dictionaries to assist us, but on the other hand it’s a more globalised, smaller world in which it’s much easier to stay in touch with people and the culture back home.

I imagine that twenty years ago there was a much greater sense of isolation – less television, no Internet [for the general public at least], no Facebook and no easy phone calls to friends and family back home. There weren’t the fancy toys to help in the learning process, but it was real immersion in the language and culture. Now, we can sit around in our Korean homes watching American shows and not have to learn Korean for our TV fixes.

Favourite Korean programmes

I don’t really have any favourite Korean TV programmes because my language ability isn’t good enough. But some programmes are useful, such as the game show with parents and children, guessing a word from clues. Things like that are easier to follow.

I’d heard about the e-leagues – video game leagues – here, but I’ve still been amazed to find an entire channel apparently dedicated to StarCraft. It’s even more amazing now they show StarCraft II in HD. I used to play Kartrider a lot and it was interesting to see the Kartrider competitions on TV too. We don’t have game channels in the UK.

Non-Favourite Korean programmes

What shocked me about Korean TV was the casual animal cruelty you can see. I turned on the TV once and was immediately confronted by a show showing cock-fighting – and it was an entertainment show, not some kind of documentary. In the US there are organisations such as PETA monitoring content, and you always see the disclaimer on programmes and movies ‘no animals were harmed during the making of this’. When I saw the cock-fighting I half-expected to see Borat commentating – it had that kind of atmosphere.

Then there was a show that featured fish fighting, with an excited sports-commentary style voice-over. I have to say, watching fish tearing each other apart can be pretty brutal. And on another game show contestants had to scoop as many live crabs up from one place in a bucket to deposit them in another. It was rough – legs were coming off and flying everywhere. It’s sad to see this kind of thing.

Sex and violence

Then there’s the ‘19-rated’ programmes – a mixture of sex, porn and violence – that are on all day [I'll do a post on this in the near future]. In principle I don’t mind the idea of there being sex on TV during the daytime – I’m no puritan – but now I have a child, I have to worry about what he might see when he’s old enough to watch TV.

It’s different in my country. Anything with explicit sex or violence – which has an 18-rating in the UK – has to be shown after 9pm, which is what’s called the ‘watershed’. Maybe it’s hypocrisy, because the sex doesn’t bother me, but I really don’t want to see a guy getting his finger chopped off at 11am when flicking through channels. For that matter – I don’t want to at 11pm either.

You know what really seems to be a hypocrisy though? The way knives and cigarettes are regularly blurred out on TV but the violence isn’t. I watched a war movie once and there was a lot of very graphic and bloody killing, but in a scene where the soldiers were smoking, the cigarettes were blurred out. So it’s OK showing you how to kill a person in great detail, but let’s not encourage anyone to smoke.

Radio

As far as radio is concerned I listen to a few shows on Busan e-FM, including Inside Out Busan. I’m contractually obliged to say that of course, but I really do. Segments like What’s Popin Busan [sic] are quite useful. Because I’m not a teacher here I don’t really feel part of a community, so it’s good to hear about local information, events and news.

Newspapers

I read the Korean newspapers for thirty minutes to an hour every day – but the English-language versions of course, which are very useful. I’m struggling to learn Korean, but it’s still important to understand what’s going on here with society, economics and politics, which newspaper is attacking foreigners this week, that sort of thing.

But the newspapers themselves are an interesting subject, because I think they regularly present things as facts with very little basis for doing so, and they have a habit of manipulating stories into what they want them to be. [It's not just the newspapers either]. And then there are the ridiculous stories like the 2012 alien attacks in the heavyweight newspapers. Of course, we know how racist some of the portrayals of foreigners are, but it goes much further than that, with urban myths such as ‘fan death’ regularly given credence as fact even though Korean scientists have said there’s really no basis for it. I call it the K-facts issue – facts that are only facts in the Korean media. Unfortunately it creates a dangerous society, because then the kind of people who blindly believe what the media is telling them tend to then react badly to foreigners [incitement to racial hated is a crime in my country] and they also react badly to anyone who disagrees with the 'facts' they've been told about other issues.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-03-16 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 20: Things That Have Shocked and Surprised Me

2011-04-20T19:30:00.023+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

I thought we had a plan, but it seems it was only ever my plan, not Busan e-FM’s. In my version of the plan I was finishing at the end of Week 21, and the last two weeks would be my summaries of the good and bad of my life in Korea. And that’s how I ended up delivering the first of my final summaries for Week 20. In the alternate plan, I was contractually obligated to appear until Week 26. The contract was mythical, by perceived Korean social obligation to continue beyond my warranty period was not.

This could be perceived as a list of the things that I’ve been less than enthusiastic to find out about Korea. I thought it was a given that people in Korea would be less than enthusiastic to hear it – but perhaps times are changing, because I received positive feedback from Koreans on today’s subject.

Don’t look for anything too salacious below – I actually like Korea, I wouldn’t live here otherwise. You know, looking back, I can’t believe I left out bloodletting.

Introduction

Over the last few months I’ve talked about my experiences in Korea, and now I’ve covered all the major subjects such as food, language, festivals and family. Today I want to do a summary of sorts – I’m going to talk about the top ten list of things that have shocked and surprised me, in reverse order, like a chart run down.

#10 – The British Embassy in Seoul

Number 10 is about something in Korea that really did shock me – it’s about how the British Embassy in Seoul treats its overseas citizens – and Koreans as well. I came here for six months, I got married to my Korean girlfriend, and then we planned to return to England. But my government refused her visa, so even though we eventually won a legal case against them, it changed my life and I ended up staying here and calling Korea home instead.

#9 – Getting called ‘ajeoshi’

Number 9 on my list is getting called “아저씨” [ajeossi/ajeoshi] – which is really about the very hierarchical nature of society here. So it’s not just about people reminding me that I’m old, it’s also about the way I’m supposed to constantly alter my language depending on who I’m speaking to.

#8 – The Korean weather

I met my wife in England, and even though there was a lot about my country she didn’t like [and nobody issued her with death threats because of it either], she always used to say “at least I don’t have to go through another Korean summer.” Now that I’m in Korea, I finally really understand that. Our apartment is very hot, but it’s not just about temperature. When I first came here the Yellow Dust and sand-rain were really bad. I’d seen it before on TV and in photos, but it’s nothing like experiencing it for real.

#7 – The smells

Temperatures might also partly contribute to number 7 on my list – which are the smells. This country smells different to England. Maybe it’s inevitable with millions of people all living too close to one another, but for some reason there seems to be a lot of – shall we politely call it, ‘feedback from the sewage system’. And then, although I’m getting more used to Korean food, one or two dishes just smell so strong that all I want to do is go into another room, close the door, and hide.

#6 – Religious people

Sometimes there’s no hiding place though... from religious people. They are knocking on my door – not so much now since we moved to an apartment with security on the main door – but in the small apartment block we used to live in, it must have been once every couple of days. “I’ve come from the temple – I’ve come from the church – it’s important”. And religion is so very important here, but it can be strange. For example, a monk was being treated near me in hospital once, and he suddenly looked at the nurse and said “you should stay away from water.” That would scare me for the rest of my life, and I’m not even Korean.

#5 – Driving

Something else that scares me here, is the driving. One week I came onto the show and just talked about safety – and a lot of that was the airborne taxis, the two-speed buses (very fast versus full brakes), and the way I wish motorbikes would stay on the road, not speed past me on the sidewalk [pavement – sometimes I have to try and speak American English here to be understood], which makes me a bit angry to be honest. But then the other thing about roads is the way I used to have trucks with loudspeakers driving by my first floor window at 5.30am. And even though I live higher up now, there’s no escaping from the roadworks at 2.30am in the morning.

#4 – Building quality

Speaking of construction, that leads me onto number 4 on my list – building quality. My building is continuing to fall apart. I suppose it’s almost seven years old now though. Perhaps that’s old in Korea, In England, the last house I lived in was considered relatively new because it was build in 1963. The three houses I lived in before were all about 120 years old. I suppose I expected that things would be better here, but I’ve seen some real poverty so it does put some of these apartment problems into perspective.

#3 – Poverty

The poverty here surprised me – and along with homelessness it’s such a big issue that I made it number 3 on my list. Don’t get me wrong, we have people begging in the streets in England too, despite our social security system, but when I saw all the homeless people bedding down for the night in the subway station next to 남대문 [Namdaemun – a famous ‘gate’ in Seoul] – so close to Seoul City Hall, it really hit me how much of a big issue it is here. I mean, the people who beg on the subway pass out these cards telling their stories – but you never really know how true they are. But when you see these people sleeping like that, well, it doesn’t get any more real than that.

#2 – The Chaebol System

It’s difficult to place anything above homelessness, but the last two items on my list are about freedom and fairness. Number 2 on my list is actually the 재벌 [chaebol/jaebol] system. Bear in mind, my list isn’t necessarily about what’s bad about Korea, it’s about what has shocked and surprised me. And the 재벌 system certainly has. In some ways, it feels as though the Korean people bravely won their democratic freedoms in 1988, but in some ways the economy is still a dictatorship, controlled by a few very powerful people.

You have to be careful about publicly criticising these corporations, because the law here seems to favour them, rather than ordinary consumers. And the media is largely part of that system, so there’s no help there. We have these issues with corporations and mainstream media in the West, but it just seems so much bigger here under the 재벌 system. When so much economic power ends up in one place, society tends to end up divided between the haves and the have-nots. There’s a lot of talk these days about making Korea a “fair society”, so it seems to be an issue Koreans themselves are very concerned about.

#1 – Free Speech

I used to enjoy working for a large American corporation, but after the 9/11 attacks things changed. My American colleagues became more patriotic and uncompromising, and it made them difficult to work with, because they only saw everything from one point of view – even business decisions – and they didn’t tolerate constructive criticism any more. I think people here should be proud of their successful fight for democracy, but democracy is not the end of history, it’s just the beginning. It has to be protected. And that means protecting free speech.

A number of foreigners have received threats – even death threats – for what they have said about Korea. So if I have to be careful about what I write on the Internet, I don’t have free speech here. But then, do Korean people either? To understand free speech, you have to understand both sides of an argument. I think it’s very easy in Korea to constantly hear only one point of view, and that makes some people very angry when they suddenly hear another.

So in my opinion, free speech in Korea isn’t as strong as I thought it would be, and that’s my number 1.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-03-09 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 19: The Gravitational Pull of Haeundae

2011-04-19T19:30:00.001+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Today’s topic is one relatively small but important part of Busan, Haeundae-gu, which is where Busan e-FM has recently moved to.

"The new multicultural heart of Busan"

I feel Busan e-FM’s move is an interesting issue in itself. Because – according to the station’s adverts – this is meant to be “the new multicultural heart of Busan”. As a foreigner here, I see this as a very important subject. You see, because of my job I can live anywhere I want to in Busan. Right now, I live in Saha-gu, but if there’s supposed to be a place here which is multicultural, it makes me wonder if it’s better to live there myself.

Saha is very different to Haeundae. There really aren’t that many Western foreigners living there at all. When I first came here in 2006 I walked around the area for three days, and never saw another Westerner at all. But as soon as I visited Haeundae, I saw several other Westerners within 30 minutes. So it definitely feels more multicultural here.

Versus life in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of Busan

In some ways it doesn’t matter to me if I’m not living in a multicultural area; there’s something to be said for living out in the far west of Busan, because I feel it’s more of a real Korean experience. With few other foreigners around it’s much more isolating, and it has also really meant that if I made friends, it had to be with Koreans.

I think as a foreigner here, when you live in a place where there are a lot of other foreigners, it’s easy to start meeting up with them and kind of disappear into your own community. That doesn’t help you learn Korean or integrate with Korean society though. Of course you do it because you feel isolated, but in the end I think it only helps continue that sense of being isolated as a foreigner. Having said that, there actually are reasons why living in a multicultural area can be attractive, so it can matter where I live as a foreigner.

The Haeundae advantages

But Haeundae has its advantages. Even though I have Korean friends, most of our conversations are translated, so it is tempting to live in an area where it’s easier to make English-speaking friends. And I think in multicultural areas a kind of ‘support network’ builds up. So, for example, you get more doctors and other professionals who speak English, the local authorities create more activities for foreigners, and – this is a real issue for me now – even the schools you want your child to go to are based in the area.

The schools issue is a really pressing one. My wife and I had a son last year, and this being Korea we’re already trying to plan out his education. I think school can be very difficult for a child... especially a child who is different. So I’m not sure about whether my son should go to a normal Korean school. Maybe it wouldn’t be a problem, and maybe it would – this is a huge worry for me. But Busan’s two foreign schools [Busan Foreign School and Busan International Foreign School - I know, shades of the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front in those names] both decided to base themselves here in Haeundae. Well, it’s really difficult to live in Saha and send my son to school in Haeundae, so if we want him to go to a foreign schools, we’ll probably have to move here.

I don’t expect a foreign school to open in Saha, and I understand why, but it’s disappointing that both foreign schools ended up being in the same district, especially when that district is right on the edge of the city rather than being more central. Along with other things such as all the festivals that happen here, it means that Haeundae has this kind of gravitational pull, and the more it develops in this direction, the more gravitational pull it develops – so to continue the astronomy metaphor, it feels like a bit of a black hole, sucking everything in.

In the end, Haeundae will probably only continue to grow as a multicultural area. Some people say this is a good thing, but I’m not so sure. Even the British Prime Minister said recently that multiculturalism hasn’t worked in my country. In the city I’m from, arguably multiculturalism has been a disaster.

Multiculturalism – I have seen the future and lived it

Historically we had a lot of immigration in my home city. For example, even though I’m British, I have an Irish surname because my family were immigrants once too. But we integrated. In recent times though, there was more concern with respecting and celebrating people’s differences. That’s good... except there’s a risk that if you go too far, immigrants stop trying to integrate, because they can just live their own lives in their own community, and suddenly you have two separate communities trying to live in the same place. In my city, that eventually led to race riots [and some ethnic cleansing I found myself on the receiving end of].

What’s happening in Haeundae reminds me a little of my home city. It will never be as bad as my city, but sometimes I wish that it was OK to be a foreigner here and just live anywhere in Busan, without feeling that I ought to be living in a so-called multicultural area, or that worse, I really have to. But if what I need as a foreigner is all in one district – like the foreign schools – it makes integration harder. In fact it would be great if I didn’t feel I had to send my son to a foreign school, but once you create them and all the foreign children go there, it makes it harder not to choose that option yourself.

So my son will become part of that ‘separate community’ problem, and even I’ve been sucked into it despite my own reservations.

KNN moves to Haeundae

So as a foreigner it feels almost like I can’t escape from Haeundae – it’s almost inevitable that I’ll have to live over here eventually. But actually, the whole Haeundae issue is not just about foreigners – I was very surprised for example, that Busan’s biggest media company [KNN – Busan e-FM’s parent company] moved over here, because in England you normally expect local TV and newspaper companies to always be based in a city’s centre, where they can reach each part of the city more easily.

So I wonder if it means that Haeundae is becoming Busan’s new city centre – even though it’s actually on the edge of the city. It’s remarkable considering that twenty years ago this part of the city was really not that developed at all [in fact, I think it wasn’t really even regarded as part of the city]. People who bought property here back then must have made a lot of money. In fact, it’s becoming so expensive here perhaps soon I won’t be able to afford to buy a place in Haeundae anyway, then my son will have to commute further to school.

Moving – to the next Haeundae?

My wife and I are actually looking at properties all over Busan right now. I must admit, despite my reservations, I do like Haeundae as an area, and I’d love to have a view of the sea from my apartment. But I have mixed feelings about buying into an expensive area. I’d love to buy into the next Haeundae, because as a financial trader I suppose I’m always thinking about longer-term investment opportunities.

But where is the next Haeundae? I’m wondering whether it’s going to be Dadaepo. It has a beach and crucially, I understand the subway line is going to be extended there. It will never really be what Haeundae is, but you have to think what it might be like in twenty or thirty years. After all, if you could go back in time thirty years to Haeundae of the early 1980s and show people what it looked like now, they probably wouldn’t believe it. The change here has been huge, and it is a nice place, but it’s a pity that I feel in some ways I have to move here. Personally as a foreigner, I’d love Busan to be more integrated, rather than focused on one area.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-03-02 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 18: Shopping, Vitamins and Other Imports

2011-04-18T19:30:00.026+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

I think I mentioned LG and Samsung before on the show. In fact, it’s kind of hard to get through talking about life here without mentioning Korea’s ubiquitous [yes] brands. But this was the week I was told not to mention them – not even the foreign ones - even though this week’s subject was shopping - 20 minutes before I went on air.

One of the K-satire sites seems to have re-branded LG aka ‘Lucky Goldstar’ as ‘Fortunate Quasar’, and I was sorely tempted to go through the entire show calling them that, but 20 minutes is not enough time to think up alternate names for all the other chaebol, so the whole thing felt rather forced in the end for me. Well that’s live radio for you – next time I hope to be better prepared.

It’s fair enough that Busan e-FM doesn’t want to mention brands, but I have no such restriction here, so here it is, Week 18 – Uncut.

Introduction

So this week is about another very important aspect of life in Korea – shopping. I used to think we had quite a consumer-oriented culture in England, but it’s nothing compared to Korea.

The differences

There are a lot of differences between the UK and Korea when it comes to shopping. In the UK our shops are mainly in the city centres rather than everywhere you look, and we also have big ‘out of town’ retail centres – whereas here you don’t really have ‘out of town’ stores because there is no ‘out of town’ - everything is the town in a big city like Busan [seriously, it’s like Logan’s Run here]. And we have a lot of big brands in England, but here it often feels like a constant choice between LG and Samsung [or in the radio version – between a company beginning with ‘L’ and a company beginning with ‘S’ - see why it fell flat?]

I expected there to be a bigger variety of brands, and I actually thought there were at first, but then I found out that brands like Xcanvas, PAVV, Zippel and Hauzen belong to LG and Samsung. I suppose that’s the nature of the chaebol system, which of course we don’t have in England [unless you count the multi-branded tentacles of the government] – where almost all our products are made overseas anyway.

I found chaebol brands quite odd. For example, Daelim seem to make toilets and motorbikes. In England, the last car I owned was a Ford. But how would I have felt if my toilet was made by Ford as well? But I guess people here feel that the brand is more important than the object it’s attached to.

Purchases and consumer protection

In fact, the first thing I bought in Korea was a Korean keyboard for my laptop computer – it was made by a major Korean chaebol – but the quality was really poor. I admit, I realised later it was really cheap [I had no idea about the relative value of things here at first], but it made me think these companies will sometimes put their names on anything.

My experience with subsequent purchases has been mixed. My wife and I buy a lot of things from the Internet, but Internet shopping here is quite different. We have eBay in the UK, but most people choose to order from established online retailers like Amazon. Here, Gmarket and Auction – which are both owned by eBay – seem to be one of the main ways of buying online. So it feels riskier but from very small companies and individuals.

I also think we have much stricter consumer protection laws in the UK than the ones which exist in Korea. For example, we bought an aquarium online that was supposed to be 35cm deep, but it was shorter when we got it. The seller said it was because they had the wrong picture on their page, but they didn’t seem particularly sorry about it. Online prices are good though, so maybe you just have to take the risk.

Expensive item risk

But this means that it’s difficult to justify buying certain things online. When we bought a TV, the prices were much cheaper on the Internet, but we felt we couldn’t risk buying such an expensive item that way, so we bought it from Tesco Homeplus [declaration – I’m a shareholder] in the end. It’s the same with the DSLR I bought – I got it from Hi-Mart because it seemed too risky online. That’s different to the UK where you have big online companies that you can trust. And of course, it’s also difficult for me to shop online, because I don’t understand Korean.

Online and offline shopping

There are good things about shopping online. I love how deliveries are so fast compared to England, and you get these text messages telling you about when things have been dispatched – it’s really efficient. It’s just a pity I can’t browse through the Korean Internet to shop for things. That said, I’m not one of those foreigners who seems to think that Korean shopping sites should be available in English as well. I think if you want to shop in English, go home – this is Korea. If I can’t use Korean Internet sites, that’s my problem, not Korean people’s. I have to work on my Korean language skills.

So I find myself shopping offline a lot. Buying things from local shops here is also quite different from the experience in England – the opening hours are much longer here for one thing, and there’s an assumption that everything will be delivered, whereas in England you normally have to work that out yourself. Plus, if something needs installing, that will be done for you here as part of the service, even if it’s just a small aquarium from a local store.

The customer service is almost too good sometimes. For example, I bought a printer from a store, and because we lived around the corner and didn’t have a car, one of the staff insisted on carrying it to our apartment – which was a bit embarrassing [still, thanks Hi-Mart]. But on the other hand I find all the special cards which exist rather confusing - my wife has a special card holder just for all the extra points cards she carries.

The price is right

And prices are confusing, because I often can’t really work out what the prices in stores are supposed to be. This is partly because I have to convert them into my own currency to work them out, and partly because the ticket prices and the real prices are sometimes two entirely different things.

For example, when we were shopping for a TV, it became quite common for us to walk into a store, and immediately be offered 30% off the price of a TV we were looking at – and that’s before trying to haggle. In England, haggling isn’t as common, and you might get 5 or 10% off, but here we can haggle a price down 40% sometimes.

Ajumma rental servicet

Actually, my mother-in-law’s haggling skills are legendary – so we always take her with us when buying something expensive. She saves us a lot of money. Once we got a couch so cheap through haggling that when she told the store owner we’d come back later to buy bookcases, he actually said “Please don’t!” - and from the pained look on his face I think he really meant it too. [Shortly afterwards he moved his business away from our district shortly afterwards and in my mind it was just to avoid her].

What else you can’t buy here - drugs

There are things you can’t buy in Korea that I wish I could. I used to take drugs [no, not that kind] to control my Meniere’s Disease in England, but when I came to Korea I discovered that they aren’t available here, and there isn’t any alternative. That’s a huge problem for me, and I was really worried when my pills ran out.

I started taking various vitamins and herbal supplements instead - because some people believe they help – but the cost can be very high here. You can get them a bit cheaper online, but I don’t really want to buy vitamins from individuals on auction websites. And some items just aren’t available, so I have to import them from the U.S.

Free trade and other myths

Importing things into Korea from overseas really isn’t easy. With vitamins for example, you can only import a maximum of six items – not more than two of one item within that six – and the customs limit is around $130, including the postage, which is usually $40. So in other words, the postage is around a third of the whole cost. And yet... often buying things this way is still cheaper than the prices in Korea, which makes me think that Korean prices are a rip-off. That’s really unfortunate because people have a right to their health, and somehow – because of the way the market is here – Korean people are potentially suffering.

So there’s no easy solution to my vitamin problem. In fact – my wife and I even looked at setting up our own company just to import vitamins for our own use, but the rules are horrendous. It’s a shame, because there’s a famous cosmetic product in England for example, that I think Koreans would love if they could get it here [it’s Boots’ – ‘No. 7’ brand]. Sometimes locally-made products are not always the best choices, and they shouldn’t be the only choices.

But I’m hopeful that the free trade agreements Korea’s signed recently with the U.S. and E.U. might change things.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-02-23 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 17: Health

2011-04-17T19:30:00.000+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Sometimes it feels like I’ve visited a lot of hospitals and dentists while I’ve been here, so today I’m talking about some of my health-related experiences in Korea.

The first hospital by comparison

My first experience was only two weeks after coming here, but it was for my brother-in-law, not me. He wasn’t feeling well, so we decided to take him to a hospital. That was a big surprise in itself, because in England you have to phone for an appointment with your doctor, and then you maybe get one with seven days. So often you think there’s no point, because by the time you see the doctor, you’ll probably be feeling better, whereas in Korea you just go straight there. I know Koreans must take this for granted, but for me it was amazing.

What’s more, British doctors have offices, but there’s generally nothing to treat you there – it isn’t a hospital. You might get a prescription for drugs, but if you need further diagnosis like an x-ray, or treatment, you’ll have to join a waiting list for an appointment at the main city hospital – which is like the large university or government hospitals in Korea. In other words, diagnosis and treatment can be a very slow process in England.

I wonder how quickly they diagnose Meniere’s Disease in Korea?

For example, I became really ill with attacks of dizziness and sickness in the UK six years ago, but I still waited a week for a doctor’s appointment. Then I got some pills for an ear infection I didn’t have, went back a month later and got some more pills, waited a couple of weeks for an x-ray, waited another couple of weeks for the results, and another week for the doctor’s appointment where he told me they couldn’t find anything and I should just wait and see if it got better or worse.

Two months later they agreed to send me for hearing and balance tests, two months after that I actually had those tests, and then I waited another two months for the results. Then I got tired of all this waiting around and paid around 500,000 won [~£282/$460] to see a specialist consultant privately for thirty minutes. He recommended an MRI to look for brain tumours – but because the cost of 1.3 million won [~£733/$1,200] I waited two months to have it done through the national health system [NHS] which was free, and then I waited a long six weeks for the results of that. The results were negative and so I had to wait another five weeks to see the consultant again, and that’s when I was finally diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease.

So it was thirteen months from my first Meniere’s attack in December 2004 to my diagnosis in January 2006. If it had been a brain tumour, the delay might have been the difference between life and death, which really makes you think how good the system is in Korea.

And here’s my first proof

When I developed neck pain a few months after arriving here, I went to a specialised local orthopaedic hospital. Five minutes after arriving I’d already had two x-rays, and five minutes later I was seeing an orthopaedic professor. So after ten minutes I was seeing the kind of professional it had taken me nine months to see in England. Fifteen minutes later I was starting treatment for the problem, and it was really cheap because the whole visit cost 32,000 won – even though I didn’t have national insurance at the time. It would have only been 13,200 if I had.

Treatment differences and a lingering question

The treatment was not really similar to the kind you get in England. I had massage pads put on me which left these large ugly bloody circles on my neck – I’ve never seen anything like that in England – and I even had acupuncture later. All the nurses gather to watch when that happened because they’d never seen a Westerner having acupuncture before. But actually, this was the easy option, because the doctor recommended physiotherapy and acupuncture as the second choice – the first was multiple neck injections and surgery. I wasn’t keen on that, and the doctor laughed because apparently Westerners never are.

I got better despite not opting for the surgery, so how necessary was it? I started off thinking that the Korean health system was great, but I began to see a downside, which is over-treatment – doing tests and getting treatment that maybe isn’t necessary.

In fact, I had more experience with this because I had some chest pains last year, and the professor I ended up seeing recommended a heart CT scan, but later I read that there’s a 1 in 600 chance of that procedure actually causing cancer, and personally I don’t like those odds. I know it’s a risk, but all the other tests seemed to say I was OK, so I decided the CT scan was a step too far. And I got better, so it probably was.

Actually, the interesting thing about that experience was that the professor spoke perfect English, so it was the first time I had a proper conversation about a problem rather than having everything translated through my wife. Language is a big problem when seeing doctors and dentists – it’s quite frustrating.

Dentists and the veneer begins to wear off

The dental system is bad in England as well; I used to have to book appointments up to two months in advance with my dentist. But you tend to have check-ups there every six months, whereas I gather that in Korea people often only go when they have a problem.

I found it’s more high-tech here, so there are screens above the chair where you can see your x-rays, or a video of the work being done, but I was a bit shocked at the lack of glove usage. When I went to the dentist here, I hadn’t expected to end up with a 20-something woman’s unprotected fingers deep in my mouth. And when they found a problem with an existing filling, they said it couldn’t be fixed and I had to have the tooth out. A second dentist said the same. But when I went back to England they fixed it and it’s still fine two years later, so even though treatment is much cheaper here, especially now I have private insurance, maybe you don’t always get better results.

Private insurance or signing your soul away

Even though medical costs seem relatively low here, I still bought private insurance, but it was very complicated to understand. The cost is about the same as in the UK, but I’m only paying for twenty years and then it’s supposed to all be free after that [i.e. pyramid-scheme alert], which sounds like a bad deal for the company. And when I agreed I had to sign around ten documents which were all in Korean and I didn’t understand what I was signing.

But on balance

Generally I’m a big fan of the Korean health system though. Treatment is fast and it’s relatively cheap [although not for everyone]. There are downsides – such as the potential for over-treatment, and the way doctors sometimes go on strike here, which never happens in England, or the way hospitals are closed for long periods over holidays such as Seollal. But I think if British people could experience this system we’d want to switch over to it in the UK immediately. I think it’s one of the best things about Korea, and as someone who’s had a couple of medical problems in the last few years – and now that I also have my son’s health to worry about as well – it’s one of the reasons I really like living here.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-02-16 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 16: Technology

2011-04-16T19:30:00.002+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Today I wanted to talk about technology in Korea. I graduated from university with a degree in Computer Science, and then worked for many years as a software engineer, so it’s a subject which is very close to my heart. I’m a technology geek... or ex-geek anyway.

Korea ubiquitous technology hub

Korea is famous for its technology – so I was excited to come here because of that. I pictured it as a land of cheap gadgets and super-fast Internet connections. Actually though, I found there’s a huge difference in how people in England view Korea. I think a lot of older British people see Korea as being full of rice paddies and villages, so it would conjure up an image of me going to the stream every morning for water. I’m not sure even my mother expected it to look like it did – of course once I started taking photos of the city, the subway and all the stores, I think she began to see Korea differently.

I’m sure younger people don’t see Korea the same way as the older generation do. We watch British TV programmes such as The Gadget Show which often covers Korean technology from LG and Samsung, and the Internet speeds, which are a big issue in the UK because so many connections are relatively slow.

Not so fast

But once I came to Korea my hopes of a faster Internet connection were dashed. As a financial trader, I need a fast Internet connection, but because the first apartment we lived in was old, the maximum speed we could get was 10 megabits. This was quite disappointing after hearing about all the 100 megabit connections here. In fact, 10 megabits is the same speed I had in England, although that was the fastest available there, whereas in Korea it was maybe one of the slowest. And it wasn’t all disappointing because it was half the price in Korea – so much cheaper in other words – but there were some problems with it.

I couldn’t access the website of one of my stockbrokers, which was a huge problem. When I got here I quickly discovered that some websites are blocked. Now, that’s really shocking to me coming from a Western democracy, and I don’t think Barclays Bank is particularly known for its pro-North Korean views, but anyway apparently it was blocked and nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it. So I ended up having to get a second 10 megabit connection because that company didn’t block Barclays. I really loved Korea though at that point, because I could have two 10 megabit connections for the same price as one 10 megabit connection back in England.

How to destroy an Internet economy

But then I soon discovered another issue here – the Korean Internet Explorer problem. Some websites need Internet Explorer to work properly. This was also shocking because it basically means you have to be a Windows user. So, in Korea I had to use Windows and Internet Explorer to do any online banking. In England, where many people use Apple computers and even Linux with browsers such as Firefox, you just couldn’t imagine that in a country like Korea companies could be stuck in the 1990s, especially when you start to understand just how few people really use anti-virus and anti-spyware software.

I think people here are worrying more about hacking and cyber-warfare now, but when I first got here I couldn’t believe how complacent people were about Internet security. Many Western governments in the last few years have told their citizens not to use Internet Explorer because it’s too dangerous, but in Korea it’s still required by so many websites.

In some ways I’m not sure that knowledge of Internet security is improving in Korea either. We just got an Internet phone from our provider for free, because apparently we spend so much money on our TV and Internet package, and it works using wireless networking with basically a four character password... which can’t be changed. It’s just stupid, because if we use it now our whole network is vulnerable because of this one weak point. I think it shows that some people still aren’t thinking about Internet security here. But that said, I actually do think things are generally getting better, and big changes are happening in Korea.

Changes

I think the success of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are making people here see that there are alternatives to Windows, and probably over time companies will stop forcing people to use only one type of software. And you know, that’s really important for Korea, because for years Korea has made great technology – great hardware – but the world is increasingly software driven.

People used to choose whether to buy a Nokia phone or Sony Ericsson, but now people talk about whether to buy an iPhone or Android phone – it’s really the software they are buying rather than the hardware, because most of the hardware is pretty similar, and it’s the software that makes the difference. I think the same thing is happening in Korea, and I’ve been reading a lot of articles in the newspapers recently talking about the need for Korea to become a software innovator to compete with cheap Chinese hardware in future.

Smartbomb

When I went looking for a smartphone in 2009 there really wasn’t a lot of choice at all. That’s one of the biggest differences between my own country and Korea. Because of its high-tech image, I thought there were going to be a lot of choices here – with phones, mobile service providers, TVs, Internet connections and so on – but I guess because of the chaebol system there really isn’t. For example, I wanted a smartphone with a keyboard, and in England I had twenty different choices – in Korea there were three. Korea’s phone market has the image of being very advanced, so in some ways the lack of choice is surprising.

I eventually did by a smartphone, but at first when I started looking for my first Korean phone I thought I would be roaming around accessing the Internet using it. Then I found out about the data costs – which I thought were very high at the time, certainly high than in England. So that was hugely disappointing, and really very surprising. The contracts were really complicated to understand as well, so by the time we got one, I felt like all the joy had gone out of the experience. I’m probably going to buy a new smartphone this year, so I hope things have improved.

The Rise of Asia and Decline of the West

Overall, despite some disappointments, I’d say my technology experiences in Korea have been positive. It’s probably just because Korea has such a strong technology image that I didn’t expect there to be any problems at all, and I suppose that was unrealistic.

Overall, this is still a high-tech heaven for someone with a technology background like me. There’s a growing anti-fact and anti-science movement in some Western countries these days, and I want to live somewhere that embraces science and technology, not rejects it. I hope Korea continues to keep pushing forward in the areas of technology and science, so that the future here is even better.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-02-09 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 15: Lunar New Year

2011-04-15T19:30:00.010+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

This week’s subject is Lunar New Year. We don’t use a lunar calendar in Western countries, so when I came here it was new to me in some ways, although I had to adjust to the notion of lunar years a long time before.

Family

When I arrived for my first day of studying Computer Science at university I ended up joining the wrong queue – I nearly became an archaeologist – and the Chinese guy in front of me was also a Computer Scientist in the wrong queue. We became friends and I spent most of my university life mixing with the Chinese community – so I became quite familiar with lunar new year celebrations, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating sometimes because it’s a very family oriented time, and it reminds me that my family are over 5,000 miles away.

I read in a Korean newspaper that 15 million people here are going home for ‘설날’ [Seolnal/Seollal – the Lunar New Year], and it reminds me that – as a foreigner in Korea, married to a Korean – I’m spending my holidays with someone else’s family. Actually, my mother is over 70 now and she’s beginning to think that if I go back every two years she might only see me another three or four times. That’s hard to hear – and I think of that a lot now when we have these regular Korean family gatherings.

But you have to choose to live in one country or the other, and Lunar New Year isn’t as bad as Christmas because it’s just a normal working day in England – I’m not missing out on gift-giving or anything like that. Actually in Korea, 설날 gifts are one of the strange things that I didn’t expect.

Gifts

It’s not that I didn’t expect people to be giving each other gifts, but it’s the type of gifts. For example, before 설날 a couple of years ago, a huge amount of frozen fish turned up in a box at our mother-in-law’s apartment, so it’s not quite like Christmas in England, where you’d never give someone fish or fruit. But in some ways the strangest gifts are the ones in the stores, I have to admit that I find them quite bizarre sometimes.

Part of it is a cultural thing. Here I see big gift boxes of SPAM for example, and in England SPAM was traditionally viewed as a rather low-class meat product. I suppose you might describe it as ubiquitous – but not everything which is ubiquitous is good – the ‘flu virus is ubiquitous but it doesn’t mean you want to have it. [I admit – I’m sick of hearing the popular Korean-English marketing word ‘ubiquitous’ here and now I’m just getting my own back.] In fact, one of the reasons junk email is called spam is because of a British comedy sketch [Monty Python of course - video] which just repeats the word “spam” over and over annoyingly. So you don’t buy people gift boxes of SPAM in England. The other gift that really sticks in my mind is the bulk anti-calculus [you read that right] toothpaste box. If someone bought me toothpaste for a gift, I might think it meant my breath smells.

Various Lunar New Years

One Lunar New Year here, we had a very long day. We started out with the special New Year’s breakfast of rice soup (떡국) – I was told it was at this point my Korean age advanced by one year. I find this whole business of lunar ages really confusing as well, and Korean ages always seem to make me older than I actually am and that’s just not good news, is it? Then we went out, and even though I’d read foreigners warning each other to stock up on food before 설날 because all the shops would be shut, I still found the fact that all the stores really were closed surprising, considering how everything’s open every other day of the year. It really tells you what a big event it is. Anyway, we went out to hike up a mountain to a series of temples to make offerings. As a non-Buddhist, visiting temples is an interesting experience, but it’s not a religious obligation for me, although I seem to end up participating in the rituals, which is quite strange.

After visiting the temples, usually there’s some time then before the family gathering in the evening, although one year we spent the afternoon with my mother-in-law’s sister. She’s a Buddhist fortune teller so I call her my ‘psychic aunt’. She performed some Buddhist new year rituals, including chanting in front of the shrine in her house. It was quite beautiful actually. And then she read our fortunes, which was quite frightening in a way because – apparently – she is very, very good. Even though I’m not a Buddhist, I’ve heard enough to not completely dismiss the power of her fortune telling.

Seollal

So my mother-in-law usually hosts the family gatherings in the evening, which means my wife often helps her mother prepare food – and I don’t – so I feel like I’ve slipped into a typical Korean husband’s role sometimes. Of course, we have all the big bows to go through to show respect to our elders, and the money gifts along with the ‘imparting of wisdom’ speech or ‘advice’ afterwards, which is quite strange when you’re in your thirties. Nothing quite like that happens in England, although I guess parents still lecture you – it’s just that there’s not a specific date they do it on.

I think there can be a general atmosphere of tension on 설날, especially in our mixed Christian and Buddhist family. My wife’s uncle, who’s a Christian pastor, said he tries to celebrate 설날 is a ‘Christian way’, but I’m not sure what that means. I’ve also leaned though how food can really bring people of different backgrounds together over the dinner table. Of course, food is so important in Korea, so I soon discovered that on the 15th day after the start of the new year there’s another special breakfast for Jeongwol Daeboreum (정월대보름), and a special festival - ‘The Burning of the Moon House’ - 달집태우기 – on Dadaepo Beach here in Busan.

The Burning of the Moon House and Audience

I went to the Burning of the Moon House last year. I understood that the 15th day is traditionally when evil spirits are cast out. I find it odd though that the new beginning can’t just begin on the first day like it does with a Western new year.

I gathered that it’s important that the bonfire burns all the way through, because if it does this indicates a good harvest, and if it doesn’t then there won’t be one. But maybe that makes people a little too enthusiastic about designing them to burn ferociously. We weren’t that close to the fire, but before long burning ash and rubbish started falling quite heavily on us, and the organisers were rather urgently shouting over the speakers “Move away! Move away!” It was quite chaotic but it certainly did help chase me away – so I guess it really does cast out evil spirits.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-02-02 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 14: The Baby Experience

2011-04-14T19:30:00.011+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Another important event in my life was the birth of my baby son four months ago. Actually, our plan to have a baby was one of the reasons we returned to Korea.

Hospitals

I though it would be better to have a baby in Korea rather than in England. We have our National Health Service, so the cost is very low, but sometimes the service is quite basic as well. Korea is more expensive, but there are many hospitals and treatment options to choose from. In the city I’m from there’s one really large city hospital which covers everything – including delivering babies – so this means if you choose to have your baby in a hospital rather than a home, that’s where you have to go, whereas in Korea our first task was to choose a hospital.

In a way it wasn’t a difficult choice. There are different options but we wanted to choose one close to our apartment because we don’t have a car, so that really limited our choice. Actually, one of the major differences between England and Korea is the 산후조리원 [sanhujoriwon] system – we don’t have that in my country, we just have midwives who visit new mothers regularly after they’ve given birth. In fact, I know Koreans find this a bit shocking, but the average length of stay in a British hospital for a woman who gives birth is just six hours. So when my wife wanted to stay in the 산후조리원 for two weeks, I was the one who was shocked.

And some more surprises

So at first I thought she’d give birth and come home shortly afterwards. If there are no complications that’s the way it works in England. It’s probably too short really, but then two weeks or more seems very long. Of course, then I learned how there’s a belief in Korea that women’s bodies are ‘shattered’ once they’ve given birth, and they are so delicate they aren’t even allowed to shower or bathe for a week because of the belief that it will leave them vulnerable to the cold in winter.

Looking back, I had a lot of surprises even before our son was born. Normally in England I think a woman only gets two ultrasounds during her pregnancy, if everything seems normal. Here, we went to the hospital every two or three weeks, and had an ultrasound scan every time. And every time they burned the scan to a DVD so we could watch it at home. At least, until about half-way through when the system changed – then they uploaded them to an Internet account instead. So the regular scans were a really positive difference.

Another big surprise was when my wife said “we have to choose whether we want to buy a stem cell package”. That’s not really common in England, so the whole process of going and meeting various stem cell companies at the BEXCO baby fair, and evaluating their packages, was not something I’d expected to be doing.

I didn’t cope well with the language barrier, and it was was of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in Korea. My wife’s pregnancy didn’t go completely smoothly at first, so every time we saw the doctor I was really desperate to understand what he was saying, but of course, I couldn’t.

The birth

The birth itself was also quite different from what I expected. My wife’s water broke late on Saturday evening, so by the time we got to the maternity room it was 11pm. That’s when I realised that the problem with giving birth in a small hospital – especially at night at the weekend – is that there aren’t many staff around. In fact, until the doctor came at 4.25am, there was only one nurse on duty and that’s the only person we saw – the rest of the floor was deserted, whereas in a large British hospital there are hundreds of doctors, which means that if something unexpected happens, there’s always going to be an appropriate specialist around.

Of course I couldn’t understand what the nurse was talking about, but having said that, at one point towards the end – after the nurse had made a series of calls – I sure she was saying on the phone “where’s the doctor, where’s the doctor?” So it wasn’t a happy experience.

But in the end it all went relatively smoothly. Our son was born at 04.57am, and I cut the umbilical cord – that’s another thing I had to do in Korea that I wasn’t expecting.

No contact rules

Then, after 30 seconds with his mother, he was rushed off to the maternity unit, and that’s the last time she saw him for 24 hours, which also shocked me. And then – this is not so much shocking as annoying – they wouldn’t let me hold my son. I really wanted to hold him, but he’d been rushed off to the maternity unit and the hospital had a ‘no contact’ rule for fathers. When we asked when I could hold him they said “in two weeks when he comes home”. It was a bit upsetting really at the time. In fact, there were really limited visiting times, and when you went the staff would show you your baby for between two to five minutes, then that was it. So in the first two weeks I think I saw my son for a total of 50 minutes despite twice-daily visits to the hospital, and of course there was no physical contact.

So in some ways the hospital was really strict. But in other ways, not so much; they let photographers from an external company into the maternity unit – but just not fathers. In fact the hospital was a bit of a disaster anyway. I was just before Chuseok, so a lot of women had chosen to be induced over the holiday. The hospital had basically taken the business, but then didn’t really have much room for the mothers afterwards. And despite this they gave their cleaning staff the week off, so you can imagine – the place was like hell after a few days. In fact, the woman in the next room had a big plumbing problem in her bathroom, and when she complained to the hospital boss, rather than doing anything about it, he just gave her a tool to fix the problem herself, even though she’d just had an operation.

Baby naming

So we were glad to get home, but it’s not as though the problems stopped there. Then there was the whole baby naming business afterwards.

Naming a fusion baby can be a difficult issue. We decided to compromise by having a Korean first name, and my Western surname. I thought we might be able to choose the Korean name, and I had an idea about naming him after a famous Korean physicist because it’s something to aspire to. But then I learned that what usually happens, is the fortune tellers recommend a list based on the parents’ times of birth and the baby’s. We had to wait until after my wife had left the hospital to consult the fortune tellers – so for the first three weeks of his life he didn’t have a name, which to me seemed really odd.

So my son was named by a fortune teller in the end. A fortune teller my father-in-law knew gave us a recommendation, but it was only one name when I thought we’d have more choices. We went to another fortune teller and got another ten choices, but finally we chose the first one we’d been given. It was a hard process because I wanted it to be a name that would be easily pronounceable for my family back in England, and it had to sound right in English.

Of course, being a former police officer, my father-in-law knows some... interesting people. So I sort of jokingly asked – he’s not a former criminal is he? And sure enough, that is how my father-in-law knew him. So that’s how my son ended up being named by a convicted fraudster. I just have to hope he’s good at reading fortunes.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-01-26 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 13: Weddings and Honeymoons

2011-04-13T19:30:00.000+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

One of the most important events in my life was my wedding, and it happened only a few weeks after I came to Korea – in fact, that’s why I came, to marry my Korean girlfriend here.

Fortune tellers

The Korean wedding experience is quite different from an English one. For example, the first thing I discovered was that in Korea, you don’t really choose a date which is convenient for you – instead a fortune teller picks a wedding date they believe is the most fortuitous based on your dates of births and so on. But the second shock was something I only found out about once I was here – which is that whatever the wedding date is, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s not the same day you sign the official legal documents at the local district office. And of course, it’s the legal documents that really mark the official marriage date. That’s different from England, where you either get married in a local registry office, which is a bit like a district office for weddings, or you get married in a place of worship such as a church, mosque, temple or synagogue. Then, straight after the local official or religious person – such as a priest marries you in the ceremony, you go into an office and sign the marriage register, and that’s when you’re really legally married.

Marriage dates

So my wedding ceremony and district office dates are completely different. In fact, because I only had a three month visa at the time, we signed our legal papers at the district office almost a month earlier. But some friends of ours actually signed their papers after returning from their honeymoon, which is really surprising for a Westerner. I think in our culture we have a long tradition of changing our minds at the last minute and not going through with a wedding – like in the movies. But in Korea it’s not uncommon to sign the legal papers after returning from the honeymoon, and probably – like we did – people get their official wedding photos done a month before the ceremony, so it seems there’s a belief in Korea that once a marriage is planned, it will definitely go ahead. I suppose there’s a lot of social pressure.

Photo shoots and other surprises

We spent an entire day at the studio for the photo shoot, changing outfits and scenery, and I had to wear a traditional Korean costume, so that was a really interesting experience.

Other things about the wedding were surprising as well. For example, in England the bride and groom often organise a lot of the wedding themselves, for example – who to invite, what food to have and so on. In Korea, it’s usually the parents who do it, and it seems as though they invite who they like, and that’s who comes. So, it felt like the wedding ceremony was really for their friends more than ours. I soon learned that because of the whole culture and gift money business, it’s a case of needing to invite people who have invited you to their family weddings before, or might do in future, to recover the monetary loss.

The wedding

We had both types of ceremony – a Western-style one which all the ajummas and ajeossis attended, and then a Korean one with just close family. I had to stand with my father-in-law and shake all the guests hands, I had no idea who they were and I couldn’t really speak Korean at all, so I had no idea once I’d met them either. It was chaos really, and the ceremony was equally chaotic, because it didn’t quite feel real to me – it was more like a fake wedding for the cameras.

Of course, we were already legally married by this point, so in that sense it felt like more of an act that a wedding in England would have been. Then, as we waited to walk down the aisle, all the ajummas and ajeossis at the back were pushing us around, and when we walked down the aisle, the music played briefly and then just suddenly stopped in the middle, so it felt quite rough – you know, as if people didn’t really care about the experience so much as just getting through it as quickly as possible. It was at a wedding hall as well, rather than a church, so it already felt like some kind of commercialised nightmare to me. And as soon as the ceremony began, lots of the adjummas and ajeossis rushed out. Afterwards I found out about the whole buffet voucher thing, and the fact that some people just come out of social obligation and for the free food, and they need to get an early start so they can eat a lot of food to break even on the gift money.

I found it a bit disheartening. Coming here to get married as a foreigner can be tough I think. I didn’t understand anything that was happening, and it was too far for my family to come which was sad. That works both ways as well – last year my sister got married and I couldn’t really go to that. Whichever country you marry in, someone loses. Anyway, I didn’t have any friends or family at the wedding, so it was an oddly lonely experience. They didn’t even get my name completely right. I was 짐 영국 [Kim Yeonggug - Yeonggug meaning England but also occasionally being a Korean male name I gather] on the sign at the buffet. OK, I can see how that happened, and I thought it was funny.

I liked the Korean ceremony – it was quite intimate, and as a foreigner the experience was really interesting. But the Western wedding hall ceremony was really soulless and I’m not sure I’d do it again. Perhaps Korean people don’t mind the fake Western experience, but as a Westerner I did. In retrospect I would have preferred just a larger Korean ceremony.

The honeymoon

I was relieved when it was all over, but afterwards we got straight into a specially hired taxi and went down to Gyeongju for our honeymoon, so the hectic schedule didn’t stop.

We stayed in a ‘pension’ [Korean holiday villa], and you know... one of the top-ten things you don’t want to hear when you arrive is “oh yes, we know about the problem with the sewage smell”. So now every time I smell sewage in Busan – which is quite a lot – I’m reminded of my honeymoon. Looking back, the experience was like a comedy. As part of the wedding package the ‘pension’ offered an evening barbecue with wine, but because of the smell in our room we decided to go through with it, even though it was January. So we drank wine and ate barbecued food outside, in the dark, in temperatures around minus five degrees.

While we were there we hired a taxi for two days to drive us from place to place – mainly cultural sites, museums and temples around Gyeongju such as Bulguksa, but it was hard for me to understand some of what I was seeing because the tourist explanations were only in Korean in some places. If I’d just been a tourist in Korea on holiday, I think I might have been a little disappointed. There weren’t many people around because it was winter – so it was a strange experience, because with the taxi driver it felt like there were basically three of us sharing a honeymoon. But I have to admit, the taxi was a good way of getting around. Still, winter isn’t a good time to get married really. But that’s when the fortune teller set a date. Sometimes I feel that my life in Korea is secretly run by fortune tellers.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-01-19 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 12: The Safety Experience

2011-04-12T19:30:00.001+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

This week’s subject is safety. Perhaps when people think about this country and its culture, they think about the places, the festivals, the food and things like that, and not necessarily the issue of safety, but safety was one of the first things I thought about in Korea.

Some of it is politics

On my third day in Korea I was walking to... well, I didn’t know where we were going actually – that’s what life is like sometimes as a foreigner living with a Korean family here – and the civil defence sirens went off.

Nobody had warned me about this, so it came as a complete surprise. I grew up about a mile away from the centre of the city I lived in, which would have been a Soviet nuclear target. It was still the Cold War and sometimes the sirens went off accidentally – so hearing them again brought back some bad memories and nervous feelings.

It doesn’t really bother me any more – the threat of war. I grew up with it I suppose, so I’ve lived with it before and now I’m living with it again. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived in Seoul. You know, I think there’s a lot less crime here than where I’m from, so Korea has its advantages, but the political situation isn’t really one of them, and it’s not the only unsafe thing here.

Taxis and zero gravity

Another early experience that felt unsafe was the taxi ride from the station on my first day. In fact, all the other taxi rides I’ve taken felt unsafe as well.

It’s partly the speed, but it’s also the general chaos. When I learned to drive in England I was taught the importance of staying in your lane, not swerving around the road, giving other drivers space – you know, all the things that don’t seem to happen on the streets of Busan. I’ve driven a lot in my life, but so often here drivers seem to go through the narrowest of gaps at quite fast speeds, and I just find it amazing. I think Koreans must make great fighter pilots. Actually, I’ve felt like some of the taxi drivers I’ve ridden with must have been ex-fighter pilots. And certainly I’ve experienced zero gravity in the back of their cars. Despite that, I must have got used to it because I stopped wearing seatbelts.

Normally I wear seatbelts in British taxis. Partly because the taxi drivers where I’m from aren’t that great either, although it’s nothing compared to Busan, but partly because it’s actually the law in England – you have to wear seatbelts, even in he back of the car. But when I first came to Busan, of course I’d look for the seatbelt and the taxi drivers used to laugh at me. Usually I couldn’t find them either because they were hidden under the seat or they didn’t work. So I gave up, and I don’t think about putting a seatbelt on any more.

Two-speed buses

Sometimes I still wish they had seatbelts in buses though. Taxis speed up and slow down, but buses only seem to have two speeds – fast and stop – with nothing in-between. Why is it that buses have to accelerate towards a bus stop and then apply full brakes when they reach it? Honestly – I’m not joking when I say this – there have been morning I’ve woken up after a bus ride the day before, when my arm muscles have ached from gripping one of those hanging handles to try and stay on my feet.

I haven’t been injured yet, but last time I came back from Incheon Airport the bus driver braked so suddenly, that I fell over and my notebook computer casing broke as we both hit the floor. Welcome back to Korea. Seriously, I don’t think it creates a good image with tourists.

Getting run over on the pavement

In England, people aren’t allowed to ride motorbikes on the pavements – the sidewalks – so that was a real shock when I came to Korea. Actually, sometimes it makes me really angry – when my wife was heavily pregnant suddenly she was roughly pushed out of the way on the pavement and when I looked it was someone on a bike trying to get past her. I think riding motorbikes on sidewalks is the kind of behaviour you expect in a third-world country. I know it probably gets me my pizza faster, but I’d accept slower deliveries if I felt safer as a pedestrian. I think it would be better for the delivery riders as well, because I read that a lot of them have accidents.

I’ve seen the accident statistics for bike riders in Korea and they are frightening. But I’ve seen some people doing stupid things on bikes. Bikers use the road outside my apartment as a racetrack. Seeing three people on a small moped isn’t unusual, but twice I’ve seen four. One of those times it was a man weaving around the road with three small children on the bike with him – one clinging to his back, one clinging to his front, and one crouching down hear his feet. I’d been in Korea almost three years by then, so less and less shocks me – but that still did.

Walking

So walking isn’t always safe, and sometimes cars drive straight through crossings – I always wait for other people to start to cross first. And a couple of times a new building was being constructed on the street, and I looked up and saw men passing steel bars and other construction materials to each other. If they had dropped, it could have been straight onto someone’s head.

And speaking of unsafe buildings

We used to go to DVD bangs but then there was that fire a couple of years ago in Busan at the shooting club [several Japanese tourists died], and I started looking more carefully at some of the DVD bangs and there were bars across the windows. People probably smoke in them as well, so there’s no way out if something happens. I think a lot of places are like that.

I’m not sure apartments are always a lot better. For example, when we first moved into our one-room apartment I was surprised at the gas pipe hanging down from the ceiling very close to the gas hobs. Then one time our Internet failed and we went to the roof to see if there were any obvious problems with the wires. It turned out the roof was covered in all kinds of wiring – some in bad condition. A few days earlier, we were walking down the street nearby and there was a huge flash of light – the pole with all the wires next to our building had blown up – I mean that literally – there were steaming lumps of wreckage on the ground when we got there.

Flying into the Busan e-FM control room

I’m not sure that Korea is becoming a more safety conscious country either as each year passes. For example, Busan e-FM has just moved into newly-built studios, and the door to the control room has this four centimetre frame around it, including at the bottom, so it’s really easy to trip over if you forget it’s there. I’m waiting for the day I finally forget and enter the room head-first as I fall towards the floor.

Actually, when I first came to Korea my wife said to me that there used to be a kind of attitude here, that if something happens to you it’s probably your fault for not being more careful. So perhaps it’s just a cultural difference I have to get used to.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-01-12 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 11: Apartment Experiences

2011-04-11T19:30:00.006+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

For this week on Inside Out Busan, I thought I’d talk about something that’s quite significant in this country, which is where you live, and I’ll also talk about some of my Korean property experiences.

The differences between Korea and England

The types of properties are generally different in England to those you find in Korea. In England we tend to live in houses rather than apartments – that’s the first major difference. The second is that English cities tend to have a ‘city centre’, and then we have vast areas of suburbs, which we sometimes call ‘suburbia’, where there really aren’t a lot of shops and it’s just street after street of residential housing. Of course in Korea, most people live in cities, and many people in the cities live in apartment blocks rather than houses.

Generally English people prefer living in houses to apartment blocks, and I think there’s a bit of history to this. During the Second World War some of the houses in the English cities had been destroyed by bombing, and even those that hadn’t were very old, and there were many so-called slums. So after the war people really wanted social changes, they voted out the right-wing Winston Churchill and elected the first left-wing Labour Party government. The new government wanted to build new homes for poor people, so they planned large numbers of apartment buildings called tower blocks, but they were a disaster. The building quality was really bad, so before long even poor people didn’t want to live there. They ended up being called ‘high-rise slums’, there was a lot of crime in them, and about 25 years later they pulled most of them down and built houses again instead. The other thing is, I think English people really like having their own gardens, and that’s not really possible in an apartment.

About 15 years ago after people’s memories had faded a little, a city living trend began, where middle-class people bought expensive apartments in city centres – and these apartments were nice – but they were generally aimed at young professionals, so you couldn’t easily live there if you had children because the apartments were too small. It’s quite different from Korea.

Korean apartment living

Now I’m in Korea, I live in an apartment. At first I lived in a small ‘one-room’ with my wife, which was directly above a mart. I used to be woken up early in the morning by them opening the store shutters, and generally from the noise in the street – beeping horns and salt-sellers yelling through the loudspeakers on their vans at 5.30am in the morning. The apartment would flash yellow on and off at night because we had one of those traffic lights outside. My wife said that the place was really basic, but I really loved it – I felt it was a very Korean experience.

Actually the reason why we lived there is because of a big difference between England and Korea – the 전세 [jeonse] system; we didn’t a large amount of cash for a deposit so we paid a monthly rent.

I didn’t know about the 전세 system before I came to Korea, and I just could not understand it at first. Or rather, I understood the principle of it, but it didn’t make any logical sense to me at all. It seemed immediately obvious that this could only work in a rising property or investment market, so I thought it sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. And the idea of sometimes giving almost the whole value of a property – maybe $200,000 – to someone and hoping you’ll get it back at the end of the contract... well I couldn’t understand that either. I mean, why not just buy a place with the same money? Really, I found the whole thing completely mind-blowing. I still think it’s madness. That’s why we had the one-room place – it was 월세 [weolse – monthly rent based].

Property ladders and bubbles

If I get my own place again, I’d like to buy it; prices just seem to keep rising all the time, so I feel that paying 전세 means that by the time I get the deposit back, the type of place I will be able to buy with the money will be even more basic. So I feel I have to be on the property ladder – as we call it in English. If you’re not on the property ladder, you’re just going to get left behind. But I still feel it’s all going to end badly with these rising property prices.

One of the reasons I can’t understand it is that I keep reading in the news that property prices in Korea are constantly going up [recently, this began to reverse], but the low birth rate means that the population in Korea will peak in 2025 – 14 years from now – and then start to decline rapidly. I read that Busan’s population is already falling, and yet everywhere I look there seem to be new apartment blocks being built here, even though there already seem to be plenty. Like in the U.S., we had a massive property bubble in England during the last ten years – the value of my house doubled in the six years before I sold it – but a lot of people who bought when prices are high, are now stuck where they are. They can’t sell because their mortgages are much higher than the value of their houses, and they would end up owing lots of money to the bank. So I’m very worried that I’ll buy a place in Korea and then watch it plunge in value, and be stuck in it.

But I still want to buy my own place. The problem with the ‘property ladder’ is how long do you wait because you think prices will fall, and how far do they rise in the meantime? My mother-in-law bought an apartment last year and apparently it’s increased by 10% in value since then, even though the place is a bit of a disaster.

Building quality

My mother-in-law’s apartment block was only built in 2003, but shortly after we moved in there was an announcement on the apartment speaker. It said that all the apartment owners participating in the lawsuit against the construction company should prepare their paperwork by the end of the week. So it turned out that the building had lots of problems and they were suing the construction company. I have to admit, the outside of the building looked terrible; all the paint and plaster was coming off so it looked like something out of Beirut in the 1980s – bomb damaged. There were lots of other problems inside as well.

They won the lawsuit, so workers have been fixing the problems this summer, although most of that seemed to involve painting the outside of the building, and I’m not sure how long that’s going to last. I have to admit, I’m a bit dubious about construction standards here, especially after the fire at the Golden Suites apartments in Haeundae last year. In my mother-in-law’s previous apartment, a large part of the plastering over the entrance came away, and guess what was underneath it? Well it looked like foam packaging material - it was just getting blown away by the wind. So I really wonder – if I finally get my own place [there was a song link here but the station didn’t have it] – what problems will it have? Anyway, despite that we might be buying somewhere this year.

Centum City

So the question is whether to stay in the same area or move somewhere else. As much as I enjoy my view of the mountains on the western edge of Busan, I keep hearing that Centum City is the new multicultural heart of Busan [or so Busan e-FM’s new slogan kept repeating after they moved there], so maybe I’ll give up living where I am and finally make the move to the Haeundae area... while I can still afford it.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-01-05 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 10: 2010 Review

2011-04-10T19:30:00.019+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

There’s an old saying ‘do someone a favour it becomes your job’. Having shown willing to veer away from the original schedule and do a Christmas segment, then I was asked to do a review of 2010.

Introduction

Now we’ve reached the end of 2010, I thought that today I should do a bit of a review of my latest year in Korea.

But first – the burning issue of my wife’s Christmas present

Right after leaving the station last week I went to the nearby Lotte Department Store here in Centum City – and they were closing it, at 8pm(!), so I couldn’t get in. Maybe it’s a sign that I’ve been in Korea too long, because I’ve started to really believe that stores are open all the time – or at least – really long hours.

My Christmas experience highlights one of my biggest problems in Korea – I can’t really function independently. I actually wanted to buy an Android phone for my wife, but with my limited level of Korean language ability it’s completely impossible. So I made a gift voucher for her instead, saying that I would buy her a phone – but obviously, we’d have to go to the store together after Christmas.

Eventually I spent many hours walking around Nampodong on Christmas Eve trying to find a token present – a snow globe – which my wife really wanted I think, but I didn’t see one – not even a cheap plastic one. I gave up and bought her some tea. I know that doesn’t sound like much but I think it was more expensive by the gram than crack cocaine [this wasn’t a joke] – it wasn’t some kind of 5,000 won box from a mart. Even so, the whole tea-buying experience was still very frustrating. I guess the ajumma was trying to tell me about all the types of teas using body language, which doesn’t really work.

Christmas Day and Babies

Christmas Day was a bit of a write-off. We’d planned to go out for something to eat, but our baby was sick, so he cried almost all day and we had to take care of him. The next day – which is also a British holiday called ‘Boxing Day’ - was better, but then the day after that we had to take him to the hospital. He’s on some medicine now, which unfortunately he keeps throwing up. I’ve been working very long hours in the last few months, so I’d really been looking forward to having a holiday, but it didn’t happen. I suppose that’s the way things are when you have a baby.

But having a baby was one of the highlights of my year. Of course, it’s a huge event in our lives. But it’s also been a really tough experience for me – it’s meant a lot more work and a lot less sleep. He was born in September, but even before that there was quite a lot to do, so it’s really been this year’s biggest theme for me. It’s such a big subject I should probably come in here one week and just talk about the whole fusion baby experience. [Four weeks later, I did.]

These are the toughest times and I’m sure it will get easier as he gets older, but certainly one of the downsides for me has been that because of this we don’t go out much now. So it has changed the nature of my life in Korea. Before he was born I still felt a little like a tourist – going out to lots of places, and having lots of experiences, but since his birth I haven’t been able to get out much, so now it feels like I actually live here.

I work from home, so many days can go by without me even leaving the apartment. The baby also changed my job a lot because my wife is a financial trader like me, so we used to work together, but now I just work alone, and it’s quite a solitary experience.

Busan e-FM

This is one of the reasons I decided to accept the invitation to come on Busan e-FM – I needed to get out more and do something new. And it’s certainly been one of my more memorable experiences of 2010. It’s actually interesting because it’s my first experience of dealing with Korean people professionally, and I think that’s part of the learning process as a foreigner here.

Memories of 2010

When I looked back at my blog I seem to have been to quite a few festivals and performances in the first half of the year. The Haeundae Sand Festival and Dadaepo Beach Kite Festival were quite memorable – I saw snow in Busan for the first time in March, and during the summer we spent a weekend at a friend’s summer house near Daegu, where we helped dig a foundation for a small building, and harvested some of his crop of vegetables.

Then there’s all the things that were happening in Korea – Kim Yu-na skating for gold in Vancouver, the World Cup, and of course the sad things as well – the attacks on the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong Island. It was local news, but the fire at the Golden Suites building in Haeundae was quite shocking too – it really makes you think about living in high-rise apartments in Korea.

And plans for 2011

I usually don’t think about making New Year resolutions, but then every year, once Christmas is over, I have a habit of dwelling over the previous year, and thinking about how to improve things in the next 12 months, so I suppose I do make plans.

I expect I will be staying in Korea, although I will return to England for a few weeks; my family haven’t seen our baby yet and my mother is anxious to see him. It’s a long journey for a baby though, which means it’s not an easy trip to make at all.

As for other plans, I’m not learning Korean very quickly, so if I still can’t function here by the end of 2011, I think it’s time for me to leave Korea and live somewhere else. I really do like Korea, but as time goes on I’m beginning to realise that if I can’t speak Korean well enough I really don’t like my life here. As each year passes the pressure to become fluent gets stronger, and if it doesn’t happen it just creates more psychological pressure, which makes the learning process even less fun. I want to have fun, and the more studying becomes work the less motivated I feel about it.

I think so many people in Korea are used to the very long hours involved in studying that it can be difficult for me to say, but there are other things I want to do with my time. I’ve got a pile of books I want to read, and during the last few months I’ve been writing automated foreign exchange trading programs, and I’d like to continue doing that. I used to work as a software developer, but this recent project made me realise that my skills are becoming a bit outdated.

Actually, one of the advantages of learning a language such as Korean is that there’s no Version 2, whereas in the computer industry there’s always a new version of a programming langauge. Anyway, there are a couple of programs I want to write for my job, and there are a couple of websites I want to create. One is actually Korean-related and the other is specifically for Busan. I think building things is fun – and that’s why I want to do them – but I can’t really justify doing any work on them until my Korean language is better. I feel the rest of my life is on hold until I’ve learned Korean.

So 2011 is Korean language year. My goal is to be able to learn enough Korean to easily buy my wife a present next Christmas.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-29 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 9: Christmas/Festivus

2011-04-09T19:30:00.017+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

Oh the Christmas magic. I hadn’t originally planned to talk about this happy time of year, but as the day rapidly approached it seemed odd to be talking about my apartment experiences as originally intended on the 22nd December. So I volunteered to veer off course and tackle a topical subject. I wasn’t particularly well at the time though, so fed up as I was I seriously considered telling the listeners how I celebrated Festivus back home. But finally I decided that could be a bit mean, or maybe the Christmas spirit did finally get to me. I turned up at the station wearing a Santa hat with flashing lights, which nicely distracted everyone from the Meniere’s-related spaced out look in my eyes and inability to focus. Happy Christmas!

Introduction

Since it’s Christmas, I thought I’d talk about my Christmas experiences in Korea, and how they differ from Christmases back in England.

Giant dancing monster

I wasn’t expecting as much of a celebration of Christmas before I came to Korea, because I really didn’t associate it in my mind as a heavily Christian country, although yes, in reality a significant percentage of the population are Christians. But if nothing else, I should have realised that – like in England – Christmas is a commercial opportunity even without its religious element.

The first year I was here I saw a Christmas show on TV, but alongside the dancing Santa there was a dancing monster [OK – I said monster on the radio – let’s face it though, it was a giant dancing turd - no joke] and another dancer in a skeleton costume. I think it adds to the feeling that there might be a Christmas in Korea – it’s just not quite the Christmas you expect.

I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas

The weather in Korea at Christmas is quite different than in England. We get a reasonable amount of snow there because England has four seasons [see what I did there?] - so there’s at least a chance of having what we call a ‘White Christmas’ - snow falling on Christmas Day, or at least some snow on the ground. Even if we don’t get snow on the ground, it’s often could enough that when you wake up, the trees, the ground and the windows will be white with frost, so it feels more festive.

The problem with the weather in Busan is that it’s hardly ever snowed while I’ve been here, and there’s hardly ever any frost. Sometimes it’s cold enough to freeze water on the ground, but you usually don’t see the trees and everything else go white with the ice. It seems to snow a lot in the rest of the country - and certainly that’s to be expected further north – so maybe I’ve just been unlucky in the three Christmases I’ve already had here, or maybe this is the way it’s always going to be. But in my first year year – on Christmas Day – it was 15 degrees Celsius, so it really didn’t even feel like winter, let alone Christmas.

My first Korean Christmas

For my first Korean Christmas, we couldn’t find a tree to buy, but my wife found some Russian-made Christmas lights, and a bit of tinsel, and hung it around the apartment.

My wife’s uncle is a Christian pastor, and he insisted we visit his church for the Christmas Eve service. I was raised a Catholic although I don’t go to church any more, but I was so desperate to make things feel like Christmas I agreed. I didn’t get much out of it though, because it was all in Korean and I didn’t understand.

Then on Christmas Day we went out with my mother-in-law. She’s a Buddhist, so Christmas means nothing to her really, but she knew it was significant for me, and maybe a little for my wife as well because we always celebrated Christmas in England. So she took us out for a meal. I suppose you’d say that was my first Christmas lunch in Korea. Of course, it’s really a tradition in England to have a big lunch with your family.

Lunch was... mandu. So that really wasn’t like an English Christmas lunch, because in comparison it was quite basic. I guess Western Christmas lunches in general are very big affairs – turkey, potatoes, lots of vegetables and so on. A lot of fuss is made over it, so in a way it’s a bit like Chuseok dinners in Korea, including the tension.

I did enjoy the mandu, but I sort of felt a bit sad at the same time because it didn’t really feel like Christmas; we ate a a small shopping centre where the stores were open as though it were a normal day, and we shopped for clothes afterwards. There was one very lonely Christmas tree outside one of the shops, and a girl dancing in a Santa costume – well, the kind of costume Santa would wear if he dressed in mini-skirts anyway. In England all the stores are closed on Christmas Day – really everything is shut down – whereas in Korea it can feel like just another day.

Culture Shock

I suppose you could say it was a bit of a culture shock – I think as a foreigner who celebrates Christmas, it’s hard not to miss home on December 25th. In fact, it’s probably a little different for British people compared to Americans, because we don’t have Thanksgiving, so Christmas is our one big day of the year. It’s hard in a lot of ways – missing family, missing the snow and the Christmas food – but also because being a foreigner can make buying presents for people back home a lot more difficult.

I’ve tried to find Korean presents to send to people back home, but there’s only so much you can send through the post and the cost is so high I feel like I’m really giving the Korean Post Office the biggest present of Christmas. Last year I bought things from the Internet in England for my family rather than sending presents from Korea – but it’s very impersonal. Then there’s the huge problem of finding something to buy for people in Korea, especially my wife. I can’t really shop on the Internet because I don’t understand the language, and the stores aren’t much better. I find any kind of shopping in Korea completely overwhelming, and very stressful. Worrying about these things isn’t a great way to spend Christmas.

So that first Christmas felt like a bit of an empty experience, but I appreciated the effort my mother-in-law made. In the evening though we went to a café near us – it was called December and it had an all-year-round December theme – fake icicles, snow and so on – and that felt better.

Christmases since then have improved. The second year we planned things out a bit more, and went to Kosin University for the Christmas Tree Festival – that’s basically lots of trees lit up by Christmas lights, but it was nice – it made the day feel more special. There were some other cultural events going on in a theatre on the campus, such as Korean drumming and a religious show put on by some African students. And then we went to Nampodong, where we had a late Christmas lunch – pizza – but it had a hair baked into it so it wasn’t so nice. The streets were crowded with shoppers. I suppose I knew it would be like that with the stores open – but it was still a shock to see.

Christmas Day Shopping

Last year – my third Christmas here – I actually spent a large part of the day at Lotte Department Store. In fact, Nampodong has its Christmas Tree Culture Festival so we’d already been there to see that, and it was nice because it feels like shopping in the evening just before Christmas in England, with all the streets lit up by lights and trees. But the department store was hell – there were so many people you could hardly move sometimes. I’m not quite sure I’d do it again. And Christmas lunch that year was a Mexican tortilla.

This Year’s Plans

So this year I’ve put up our Christmas tree, but our Russian Christmas lights quickly stopped working. You know, having cheap Christmas lights stop working is very much part of the Western Christmas tradition so that reminded me of home. Anyway, I found that one of the wires had come loose, and it needs soldering. So I guess I’m going to have to learn the Korean for soldering iron and do some shopping. Other than that, I’m going to a Christmas party with friends tomorrow, but I don’t have any plans for Christmas Day yet. And now I have just over 24 hours left to find a present to buy my wife, which means even more Korean Christmas shopping pressure.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-22 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 8: Korean Food and Pizza

2011-04-08T19:30:00.008+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

There’s no avoiding it – I’m finally going to talk about some of my food experiences in Korea. So today’s topic is Korean food... and pizza.

Pizza

While I’ve been here I might have eaten Korean food, but I’ve also been on a quest to find good pizza – and it’s difficult. Basically pizza is meant to be like the three colours of the Italian flag – white cheese, red sauce, and green herbs. Most of the pizzas I seem to get are just the white cheese with toppings – the sauce is this millimetre thick layer of watery liquid, if it exists at all, and forget about the herbs.

My wife explained to me that this is how Koreans like it, but it’s a shame for me. It’s like garlic bread from shops – it’s not really real garlic bread, but the Korean version of it – which is always sweet and surgery. I think for some foreigners like me pizza is quite important – it’s our equivalent of kimchi. Well, my equivalent anyway.

Kimchi

I’m going to be honest about this, even if they take my visa away. I don’t really like kimchi. I’ll tell you what it is. When I was really young, we had school dinners. Times were pretty hard – the UK had just had an IMF bailout and people were only working three days a week. So they fed us a lot of cabbage, which I guess was cheap. I got really sick of it, and the smell. Now I know that kimchi made with cabbage is only one type, but every time I see it, it reminds me of those awful lunches at school.

In fact I find Korean food smells radically different to what I’m used to in England. Sometimes I just hide in my room. The first time my wife bought kimchi back in England from a Korean store... well, I opened the fridge the next day and it just hit me – I was so shocked. I couldn’t believe anything could smell that strongly. That was my first introduction to Korean food. But I learned that, compared to food in England, people in Korea like strong smells and flavours.

Versus bland English food

English food is traditionally blander, but food in England has become quite multicultural, especially in the last thirty years. We have a lot of Italian influences in our diet such as pizza, pasta and risotto, Chinese food is very common, and the city where I grew up is famous for its curries because of the large South Asian population. Not all of it is bland, but often it’s about appreciating more subtle flavours.

I’ve found that when a lot of Koreans try that sort of food, they say it has no taste at all. I think that’s why almost every pizza restaurant I’ve ever been to in Korea feels the need to have Tobasco Sauce on their tables. I love ham and pineapple pizza, but when my brother-in-law tried it he said it had no taste. There are some Korean noodles in a packet, and they are just about the hottest things I can eat, but my brother-in-law says they aren’t hot or spicy at all.

Versus Mike

I eat some Korean food. I think that for me it’s an acquired taste, and I’m still acquiring it. But in one way Korean food is always going to be difficult for me, because I have a medical condition – Meniere’s Disease – which means I have to eat a low-sodium diet. In other words, I can’t really eat too many salty foods.

I just read in the 조선일보 [Chosun Ilbo] the other day that according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Koreans consume three times more salt in their diets than is recommended. Of course, you have to have some salt in your diet, but if I were eating that much, the chances are I’d be really unwell a lot of the time. So the reality is, I’ll never really have a typical Korean diet, if that means eating a lot of salt.

So what I eat here is a fusion of Western, Korean, Chinese and other food. When we go out I’ll usually eat at one of those large foreign restaurant chains, American fast-food places, Korean 식당 [small diners/restaurants] like Gimbab Nara, Chinese and Japanese restaurants, that sort of thing - but not so much those big Korean family restaurants, which serve more traditional food, because I still find those difficult.

Eating culture

The eating culture here is quite different from England. I was quite surprised at first by the shared dishes in the middle of the table, because it didn’t seem that hygienic. As a foreigner, I’m more used to just having my food on one plate in front of me. And I find there’s a lot of etiquette involved with food too. For example, once I made a terrible cultural mistake with chicken.

You see, English people really value chicken breasts – the darker meat on the legs and elsewhere is less valued. So when I was eating chicken with friends a few months after I came here, I kept picking out the legs thinking I was leaving the best meat for everyone else. Then, afterwards, I found out that it’s the other way round with Koreans. So there I was, taking all the best meat, which must have seemed very rude. It’s a shame I didn’t become a vegetarian before coming here, which I was thinking of, but it just seems impossible in Korea.

Fish heads and live food

I’m not really a big fan of eating meat these days, and like a lot of English people I don’t really like food that looks obviously dead either, and really not things that are so fresh they are still moving on the table. Actually, even if there are just fish-heads staring at me on the table, or a food smell I find unpleasant, I find it difficult to eat my own food, which is a problem here.

I find dead fish staring at me all the time – in the sink, in pans, in the freezer. Once I even found them in some nuts I was eating in the dark. I was pretty horrified that I’d been eating them. I thought now that we’ve got lots of pet fish it might be different, but when I asked my wife about the little dead fish on the dinner table and their similarity to the the contents of our aqariums she was horrified - “But this is food and those are pets!” she said. I’m kind of surprised at the ethical side of eating food here.

You see, a lot of people – like my wife and mother-in-law – are Buddhists. I suppose I was strong, but I always believed that meant not harming living things. But, for example, when my brother-in-law caught a big fish and brought it home, my mother-in-law was going to cook it alive, and I can’t understand that. As it happens, she eventually decided not to because she was going to a big temple the next day, so she just let it died in the bowl instead. I suppose that’s better, but it’s not what I expected of Buddhists when I came here. I see these fish and crabs packed into these little bowls or tanks on the street, and that makes me sad, although at least I’ve seen the crabs defend themselves.

The food fights back

I haven’t been the victim of an aggressive crab attack. But my mother-in-law had bought crabs so fresh that they were still moving in the sink as she was pulling them apart. Then she shouted for me in a panic – one of the crabs bit her finger and wouldn’t let go. I’m afraid I looked at her as if to say “Well, what do you expect me to do about it?”; I have no experience with crabs. She managed to get it off and the cut wasn’t too bad, but yes, I learned in Korea you have to be careful, because sometimes the food fights back...

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-15 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 7: Pets and Pet Rescues

2011-04-07T19:30:00.011+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

For this week on Busan e-FM, I thought I’d talk about how I ended up becoming a serial pet owner in Korea, even though I never intended to. So this is all about pets – and pet rescues.

Snakes...

My brother-in-law owned a snake – I’m not going to end up finishing this story as a snake-owner by the way – so he went away for a job, and that left my mother-in-law feeding it... with hamsters. But while cleaning the room she’d unplugged the snake’s tank, and the cold made it very sick, so it stopped eating – leaving the last two hamsters running around over it. I gathered this was bad, because it’s an ancient Korean belief that snakes sort of protect the places they live in.

But, in the end my brother-in-law said we should give it away to a specialist who could nurse it back to health. So I carried it... on the subway... in a bucket covered by newspapers, but it was still visible in people actually looked. It wasn’t exactly a small snake either – it was a bull python.

I imagine the other passengers were a little surprised. You know, I feel I play the role of the strange foreigner here, but sometimes I get to be even stranger than that. I’m honestly not sure if people just look at me and think “Well, he’s a foreigner.” Does that make it OK? Or is it worse? I don’t know.

...and Hamsters

So once the snake was gone, I was left with its food – the hamsters. And it turned into a major operation – buying separate cages because they fought each other, two lots of bedding and everything they needed. We tried our best but one died six months later, and the other died while we were back in England. But by this time we had another pet – a dog – and that was also unintended, because it was sort of a rescue situation.

The dog rescue

Some friends of ours got a puppy. It was separated from its mother after 15 days. My family always had a pet dog when I was growing up, and I thought that was really terrible – the recommendation in England is around 10 weeks as a minimum. Maybe it’s different in Korea though. Anyway, he was five months old when we saw him, and it was clear he had serious behavioural problems. Our friends were busy with their jobs, and it was their first dog so they didn’t really know how to cope with him, and he wasn’t house-trained.

I wondered if that was more common in Korea than England; there isn’t such a long history of having pet dogs here, so people don’t know what to do. Our friends wanted to give their dog away, but we weren’t really interested because we were planning to go back to England – although we had wondered about getting a dog for my mother-in-law to keep her company. But, after we saw our friends’ dog, we had to take him with us immediately.

This came as a surprise to my mother-in-law

I don’t know what we would have done if my mother-in-law hadn’t liked him, but she did. So then we had a dog. He was a real nightmare at first – he bit me a couple of times, and once bit my mother-in-law quite badly – she had to go to hospital. Fortunately she still wanted him, so when we left Korea she was happy to keep him, despite his problems.

He’d improved when we got back, but his temperament isn’t perfect and I think we have to accept that it never will be. Personally, I don’t think you can separate puppies from their mothers at 15 days and not not expect long-lasting trauma from that, but maybe that was always going to be the way he is.

Another dog rescue

Then there was a second dog rescue. One day I was sat at my desk, and cars kept sounding their horns outside. This went on for several minutes. So I looked out, and even though I was 15 floors up, I could see there was what looked like a cat walking around the six-lane highway below us. Cars were weaving around it, doing sudden stops – it was chaos. I watched for about a minute, and nobody seemed to be doing anything, so I rushed down, and when I got down to the road I saw it was actually a dog. But how do you rescue a dog from the middle of a busy highway, you know – in Busan – where the way people drive is always very... exciting.

Apparently the way to do it is that you risk your life, run out into the middle of the road, and try to grab the dog in as friendly way as possible while cars speed by you on the road.

This didn’t work. He growled at me, and after being bitten by the first dog we’d rescued, I was a bit more cautious than I used to be. I gave up, and finished up following him down the road for about half a mile looking for a better opportunity. I wondered if people were thinking ‘that crazy foreigner has lost his dog’, and someone even asked “is he yours?” So I felt like the police were going to tell me off if they turned up. But by this time my mother-in-law had arrived, so I told her to phone the police – I figured that the dog was a danger to traffic, so they should get involved.

119 is the Korean emergency number

But the police weren’t called. This highlights one of those language problems I have. I kept saying to he ‘경찰. 전화.’ [Police. Phone]. Finally I thought she’d understood – but then she said “일 – 일 – 구. 일 – 일 – 구.” [1-1-9. 1-1-9.] I just looked at her so then she made the numbers with her fingers. Then I had to tell her “한국말 못합니다.” [“I can’t speak Korean”]. I can’t phone the police... obviously. Then she understood – but she still didn’t call them. It was incredibly frustrating.

Fortunately we did manage to rescue the dog in the end. He came off the road and we cornered him in an alleyway, made friends, and took him to a local vet where the owner found him. So the the story had a happy ending, and we didn’t have to take in another dog.

And after the snake, hamsters and dogs...

And then there were the fish. That’s another aspect of Korean culture. We’d bought insurance and the agent – who is a friend of my mother-in-law – gave her some fish with the words “I hope you can bring me some more clients”.

I find there’s often this blurred line between friendship and business here. So she had to take the fish, although she liked the idea of having them. But because of another language misunderstanding, she gave them to me because she thought I wanted them – which I didn’t. The fish bred quickly before we learned how to separate them, so now I have three fish tanks, and my mother-in-law has a fourth. It’s incredibly time-consuming looking after them.

So I really don’t want to gain any more pets in future. Of course, next time I see a dog running around on the highway outside, I’ll be out there again trying to rescue it – and if we don’t find the owner, what can I do? Perhaps it’s my fate in Korea to accumulate pets.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-08 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 6: Busan Festivals, Events and Places

2011-04-06T19:30:00.005+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

By the time I reached my sixth week at Busan e-FM, they’d moved from the centrally-based Yeonsan-dong KNN building to Centum City in Haeundae, in the increasingly fashionable Eastern fringe of the city, where KNN are building their monstrous new headquarters.

Introduction

As everyone knows, there’s certainly always a lot happening in Busan, so for my sixth week on Inside Out Busan at Busan e-FM, I thought I’d talk about some of my experiences visiting festivals, and going out to various events and places here in the city.

Busan Fireworks Festival

My first festival was the Busan Fireworks Festival in 2006 – I think it was only the second year they’d held it then. I remember when we reached the nearby subway station many people rushed off the train and walked fast – or even ran – towards the beach. It gave me a real sense that something exciting was about to take place.

And it was exciting. Sometimes it feels that Korea is a little too obsessed with Seoul, but Busan has the sea and its beaches, and you can’t get that in the capital. It was a bit cold, and sitting on pebbles for three hours isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world – but that was the point I thought that maybe Busan was a better city to live in. Actually I was listening to ‘What’s Popin Busan’ on Busan e-FM a few weeks ago, and the Fireworks Festival sounds even better now. Also, showing movies afterwards is good – when we went it just ended and everyone headed off the beach at the same time. There was a crush and it was a little worrying.

I haven’t been again since. I live in Saha-gu so coming to events in Haeundae can mean two to three hours of travelling. I have to admit, it does put me off sometimes. But it wasn’t long before I was back in the Haeundae area for the New Year’s Sunrise Festival.

Being on the beach at 6am

So the Sunrise Festival meant being on the beach at 6am. We don’t have this culture of watching sunrises in England, so I was really surprised at just how many people were there – tens of thousands I’m sure. Unfortunately it was cloudy. Eventually we saw the sun about forty minutes after it rose. And there wasn’t much to do except stand and wait. I’m glad we did it though – it’s certainly an interesting way to start the year. But of course, you can’t predict the weather.

And many other places

Actually, it could have been worse. Last year I went to the Last Sunset Festival on Dadaepo Beach – it was about minus ten degrees and my hands were shaking so much I could hardly take photos properly. It was the same with the Pusan International Film Festival – we saw a movie outside but it was a bit too cold to enjoy it that year. I think PIFF has been held a bit earlier in the last couple of years.

It certainly feels like I’ve been to a lot of festivals in Busan during my time here. I try to get out and do things. Of course, it’s not just about festivals, becase there are a lot of shows and concerts going on. Maybe compared to Seoul, Busan doesn’t have a big reputation as a cultural centre, but I think that’s unfair because there seems to be far more happening here than I’d ever find it possible to experience.

Although there is the language barrier problem

The language barrier presents problems though. Sometimes there isn’t any information in English, even at visiting foreign exhibitions such as those held at the Busan Museum of Modern Art. I’ve been to performances such as the famous Nanta because it’s non-verbal, but I can’t go and watch a Korean stage play, or anything in the Korean language. That works both ways – because when foreign actos come over here, it really has to be for non-verbal performances too. And I’ve seen how that can be a problem.

I’ve seen foreign performers have difficulties here. I attended a French stage play by a famous choreographer as part of the Busan Intenational Performing Arts Festival – it was called 'Comédie!' There was a question and answer session afterwards with the performers, and the first person to stand up basically said "the performance is called Comedy and it’s pitched as a comedy... but it didn’t seem funny." It was really rather awkward. On the other hand, I was quite nervous when the famous British-based mime artist Nola Rae did a performance at Kyungsung University, but the audience seemed to like that.

Music concerts are sometimes easier in terms of language. I’ve seen Jeon Jeduk and Malo here, but I got the impression – from what’s been said – that quite a few famous entertainers from Seoul don’t often come down to Busan, because they don’t feel the need to, which is a real shame if that’s true.

I think – quite often – the costs of these events can be quite high, but actually one of the best performances I attended was by a choir – the Busan Metropolitan City Chorus – and the tickets were only 1,000 won. I think the local government subsidised that.

Sport

Baseball is another cheap recommendation. I went to a baseball game – the Lotte Giants at Sajik Stadium – and it only cost 6,000 won. We don’t play baseball in England, so that was a really amazing experience, especially because of the noisy crowd. A few years ago I watched a movie called Mr. Baseball about an ex-New York Yankee playing in Japan, and it really seemed to capture the atmosphere of Japanese baseball. I kind of hoped that Korean baseball would be the same – and it really was. They have people in the crowd encouraging them to be noisy, it was great. It’s a shame I don’t really understand the game very well, but if I ever get the time I could see myself really getting into it.

I’ve also been to see KT Sonicboom. Basketball’s not popular in England either, so that was the first time I’d seen a game. I expected it to be a bit quieter – but they still had a guy in front of us encouraging the crowd, so it was noisy. I’m not so sure about having very young cheerleaders dancing right in front of me though. That was a bit much. I could see myself developing a taste for basketball though. I guess that as an English person living in Korea, I have to accept becoming more Americanised when it comes to sport, because sports which are popular in England, such as football, really aren’t that popular here – except when the national team plays.

Favourite places

Because I live in the west of Busan, I spend a lot of time in Nampodong. It’s mainly about shopping and eating there, but it has two large cinemas opposite each other, and one of those rare independent cinemas showing more obscure foreign films a little further up.

Bosudong Book Street is nearby, with dozens of book stores and all its cultural heritage. Because of technology, I fear we might be seeing the end of an era there. And despite the distance, I do like Haeundae; it’s nice to eat of drink with a view of the sea – and of course, it’s an advantage Busan has over Seoul.

Then another thing, although I haven’t done it too much, is climbing mountains at night such as Hwangryeongsan, to take photos of the city, because there really are some spectacular views of Busan to be found.

So I can’t see that I’ll ever get bored here. Maybe this isn’t Seoul, but I think the authorities in Busan seem to be trying really hard to make this a culturally interesting city. I honestly feel overwhelmed sometimes by how much there is to see and do.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-01 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 5: Learning Korean

2011-04-05T19:30:00.005+09:00

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

There’s a bit of a background story to this. I was originally scheduled to talk about Festivals in Busan, but then the North Koreans attacked Yeonpyeong Island the day before the show, and suddenly I had to find something more depressing to talk about. So I chose learning Korean.

Introduction

For my fifth week on Busan e-FM’s “Inside Out Busan” show, I thought I'd talk about something that perhaps is my biggest problem in Korea – and that’s the Korean language.

2007

I didn’t begin learning Korean properly until 2007, even though my wife and I started dating in 1999. Sometimes I think because I met her in England, and we spent our first few years together there, I didn’t really have the incentive to learn Korean that I might have had if I’d met her in Korea, because I didn’t have to speak Korean with her.

More than that, I think if I’d met her here, I would have started socialising with her friends, and eventually met her parents, and this would have provided a very powerful motivation to learn the language in order to create a good impression. Instead, by the time I got to Korea our wedding was only a few weeks away, and in so many ways it was a done deal whether I spoke Korean or not; everyone was stuck with me.

Slow progress

Of course I have made progress in the last three years since I started learning Korean, but it feels like that progress has been painfully slow. And honestly, I can’t help thinking that everyone else is thinking the same thing – that I should be a lot better by now.

If I could turn the clock back, and know in 2007 what I know now, I’d have quit my job and studied full time. But back then, I wasn’t expecting to stay in Korea for very long, and as a financial trader I became quite immersed in the Credit Crisis, and so my job took up a lot of time. And actually the older I got, the harder it got. Also I see now that I made mistakes in my approach to learning Korean.

How not to learn Korean

I learned a lot of vocabulary. I thought then I could make myself understood. When I studied Japanese part-time I learned about 1,200 words in a year, and it really just felt it was all coming together when I stopped. But that didn’t really work with Korean – even now my Korean vocabulary is only about 800 words. I really needed to get out and speak Korean more, but actually because I work for myself it’s easy for me to spend a lot of time at home. So in fact on many days, it’s like I don’t even live in Korea. Sometimes I think it’s harder to study Korean in the Internet age than when I studied Japanese before the Internet really became popular.

The Internet is destroying the ability to concentrate and learn

Back then – in 1996 – I used to read the experiences of people who’d been in Japan for ten or twenty years, and they were often totally isolated, so they had to learn the language. Now I can live in Korea, but spend all my time during the week on the English Internet and then watch American TV on Hulu at the weekend, in addition to the TV channels showing English programmes.

We think the Internet is this great thing because it brings people together and makes us less isolated, but sometimes I think it’s a curse when learning Korean – for precisely that reason. The Internet makes it easier to keep living your old life now, even if you move countries.

Creating a more immersive environment

I should try and create a more immersive environment for studying, but I’m afraid I’m really too busy with my job to be properly motivated. I tried to do little things like use a Korean version of Windows, but most of the time I get my wife to read the error messages and ignore everything else. My smartphone is Korean language only, so I just don’t use it fully – it doesn’t really help me learn. I should probably switch off all the technology and stop watching things on Hulu.

Doesn’t living with a Korean family help?

Living with a Korean family doesn’t help much. They speak in a local dialect, and because my Korean is poor it really throws me off. For example, instead of 왜 my mother-in-law says 와, she asks me if I’d like 사가 and I think... what is that? And even if I can remember that 사가 is 사과 [apple], there are so many other words and pronunciations that confuse me. It’s actually really discouraging because the more I try and communicate with her, the more problems we seem to have, over really basic things. And then there’s the ‘I-told-you-this-once’ problem.

The ‘I-told-you-this-once’ problem

I’m surrounded by Korean family or friends, and someone says something – in Korean – which later they assume I know, because I was there when they said it. But being there is not a guarantee of understanding. And when you ask about it later they say “I told you this once”. Anyway, the main problem is that I feel like some kind of 5 year-old child who doesn’t understand what the adults are talking about.

Making mistakes and levels of politeness

The other problem with living with a family is remembering the levels of politeness. They confuse me, I make mistakes, and I end up discouraged. People don’t mind if I make a mistake, but in English there’s basically one way to say hello and one way to say goodbye. Here, it depends on whether you’re speaking to a superior, an equal, or a junior – so there are at least six ways to say hello and goodbye – maybe more – and several ways to say everything else. It seems I’m often too polite and ‘respectful’ to my juniors, so apparently I lose face and then people maybe don’t treat me with as much respect – so I’m told. I really hate all this hierarchical stuff.

The perils of learning Korean with your spouse

I don’t really practice Korean with my wife. I think a lot of people who aren’t married think that if they marry someone who speaks a language they are learning, it will really help them with that language – but actually I think the typical experience is that it really doesn’t. Good teachers are good diplomats – and diplomacy is usually the first casualty of marriage.

Where do I go from here?

I’ve looked into attending Korean classes – or doing something more formal – but it never really fit in with my job. Sometimes I get letters from the local immigration office for programmes, but they’re only written in Korean, which means I just get the executive summary from my wife, because she’s very busy as well.

I think the government is trying to help immigrants, but I think generally we fall into three distinct groups – migrant workers, imported Asian wives, and Westerners. Once I was sent an invite for an online forum, but after I did a lot of translation work to register for it, I found it was almost all Asian women who’d married Korean men and were learning how to cook Korean food. So I gave up on that.

I’m going to keep working on my Korean. I have to. Last year I was at the Immigration Office to extend my visa, and they said it was better to have language skills if I wanted to extend if for longer. So you know, it made me feel like the Korean government were getting a little bit impatient with me. And I’d like to work my way onto an F-5 visa – permanent residence – but I think there’s going to be a language requirement for that. I don’t blame them though – I have very strong views about ‘multiculturalism’, so I think if I can’t learn Korean soon then I should leave Korea.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-11-24 @ ~19:30