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Korean Job Discussion Forums
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PatrickGHBusan
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: Busan (1997-2008) Canada 2008 -
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 Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2012 5:49 am Post subject: |
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| About appartments, in Busan they have done a lot of improvements in design. Take a walk trough Centum City, some of the appartment towers are pretty great. Gone are the days of concrete slabs and in came designs with glass, steel and on angles. Seriously, well worth the look! |
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mayorgc
Joined: 19 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2012 10:52 am Post subject: |
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Korea Vs China
Seoul is decades ahead of China in terms of manners and "western" etiquette. Coming from Canada, Korea at first seemed to me a little bit backwards. Then after visiting China and observing the local barbarians, I'll have to give lots of credit to the Koreans. |
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Weigookin74
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
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skookum
Joined: 11 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 12:36 am Post subject: |
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I've been in and out of Korea since 1997. But none of the changes in that time amount to much compared to my first trip back in 1975. Korea was a real adventure in those days. Of course I knew very little about the country then, could count to five or six and that was about it. Went to the island just south of Pusan (Yangdo, was it?) - now all high-rises, then it was just shanties - kids threw rocks at us... We hitch-hiked from Pusan to Seoul via Gwangju and it was one wild incident after another. It was mostly a way third-world place then, though there was the start of modernization - the Seoul subway was then operating - but only one line with 6 or 10 stations around Myeongdong. Yeogwans were about two or three bucks a night. Food was unsanitary but delicious - I brought back a couple kgs of kimchi to Japan and ate it all in a coupla weeks.... Some folks were real friendly but it was a poor country and I'd often have a struggle just to get my change back when I made a purchase. It was 22 years before I returned, and found it a more-or-less modern country.
In 1975 there were two expressways in the country. Then again, I've read of the Korean war era where the main road south from Seoul was a dirt track.... |
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Julius
Joined: 27 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 4:45 am Post subject: |
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| skookum wrote: |
I've been in and out of Korea since 1997. But none of the changes in that time amount to much compared to my first trip back in 1975. Korea was a real adventure in those days. Of course I knew very little about the country then, could count to five or six and that was about it. Went to the island just south of Pusan (Yangdo, was it?) - now all high-rises, then it was just shanties - kids threw rocks at us... We hitch-hiked from Pusan to Seoul via Gwangju and it was one wild incident after another. It was mostly a way third-world place then, though there was the start of modernization - the Seoul subway was then operating - but only one line with 6 or 10 stations around Myeongdong. Yeogwans were about two or three bucks a night. Food was unsanitary but delicious - I brought back a couple kgs of kimchi to Japan and ate it all in a coupla weeks.... Some folks were real friendly but it was a poor country and I'd often have a struggle just to get my change back when I made a purchase. It was 22 years before I returned, and found it a more-or-less modern country.
In 1975 there were two expressways in the country. Then again, I've read of the Korean war era where the main road south from Seoul was a dirt track.... |
Fascinating. I'd love to have visited Korea in the time that you mention.
Nowadays its lost a lot of its charm I think. Too much infrastructure. The cities stink.
Is the island south of busan you remember Goje? |
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myenglishisno
Joined: 08 Mar 2011
Location: Geumchon
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 6:02 am Post subject: |
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| Julius wrote: |
| skookum wrote: |
I've been in and out of Korea since 1997. But none of the changes in that time amount to much compared to my first trip back in 1975. Korea was a real adventure in those days. Of course I knew very little about the country then, could count to five or six and that was about it. Went to the island just south of Pusan (Yangdo, was it?) - now all high-rises, then it was just shanties - kids threw rocks at us... We hitch-hiked from Pusan to Seoul via Gwangju and it was one wild incident after another. It was mostly a way third-world place then, though there was the start of modernization - the Seoul subway was then operating - but only one line with 6 or 10 stations around Myeongdong. Yeogwans were about two or three bucks a night. Food was unsanitary but delicious - I brought back a couple kgs of kimchi to Japan and ate it all in a coupla weeks.... Some folks were real friendly but it was a poor country and I'd often have a struggle just to get my change back when I made a purchase. It was 22 years before I returned, and found it a more-or-less modern country.
In 1975 there were two expressways in the country. Then again, I've read of the Korean war era where the main road south from Seoul was a dirt track.... |
Fascinating. I'd love to have visited Korea in the time that you mention.
Nowadays its lost a lot of its charm I think. Too much infrastructure. The cities stink.
Is the island south of busan you remember Goje? |
I desperately want to see film and audio from that period. |
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madoka
Joined: 27 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 1:16 pm Post subject: |
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| Julius wrote: |
| Nowadays its lost a lot of its charm I think. Too much infrastructure. The cities stink. |
Having been here during that time period, I can attest that it stunk way, way more back then. That unique Korean garbage smell was near omnipresent back then.
There was a lot less need for roads because there weren't that many cars in the late 70s. I remember a LOT more dirt roads back then. Hell, even in 1990, the top of the pecking order in Korea was the Hyundai Grandeur. You were considered wealthy if you drove around in one of those.
In terms of lost charm . . .
There used to be women in hanboks who would bow at you as you entered an escalator and another would bow when you exited.
There were well-dressed women who acted as elevator operators in department stores.
There were uniformed young women who would be on every bus using their arms out of windows to signal turns. They looked somewhat like this:
http://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/news/110420_p03_photo.jpg
The rumor was that several women every year lost their arms in traffic accidents. Completely believable given the crazy driving back then.
I guess as wages and opportunities increased, you stopped seeing such employees. They were quaint though.
You also saw large numbers of kids playing out in the streets. Back then, all the playgrounds were in good use. Now they are all in hagwons or hunched in front of a computer. One of the popular past times was catching dragonflies in the summers. Stores sold little plastic cages and nets and kids would catch as many as they could. Can't remember seeing any dragonflies anyway anymore. At the same time, the numbers of mosquitoes has died down tremendously. |
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ThingsComeAround
Joined: 07 Nov 2008
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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| madoka wrote: |
You also saw large numbers of kids playing out in the streets. Back then, all the playgrounds were in good use. Now they are all in hagwons or hunched in front of a computer. One of the popular past times was catching dragonflies in the summers. Stores sold little plastic cages and nets and kids would catch as many as they could. Can't remember seeing any dragonflies anyway anymore. At the same time, the numbers of mosquitoes has died down tremendously. |
I remember seeing this! And my students sometimes caught snails and took them into class... this was back in Incheon in '07. Haven't seen it since coming to Ilsan, unfortunately...  |
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motiontodismiss
Joined: 18 Dec 2011
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 5:20 pm Post subject: |
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| PatrickGHBusan wrote: |
| About appartments, in Busan they have done a lot of improvements in design. Take a walk trough Centum City, some of the appartment towers are pretty great. Gone are the days of concrete slabs and in came designs with glass, steel and on angles. Seriously, well worth the look! |
IMO they're still apartments and they're ghastly when all the lights are off (as they were in the summer post-blackout). And I'd still never live in them-I don't care if you plaster the walls in gold, Donald Trump-style, it's still a concrete box 300 feet up in the air. And they still don't compare to the NYC skyline or the beautifully manicured lawns of Westchester.
As for food, I've had better Korean food in LA/NY Koreatown than I've ever had in Korea. Yes, the ingredients are that much better. |
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spaceman82
Joined: 01 Dec 2009
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 6:35 pm Post subject: |
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| skookum wrote: |
| We hitch-hiked from Pusan to Seoul via Gwangju and it was one wild incident after another. |
Would you be willing to share more details about this? I think it'd be really interesting... |
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Captain Corea
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 7:09 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, guys, please share more. This is one of the best threads I've read on here in months.
(ok, the adoption one might be better. But this one is solid!) |
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Yaya
Joined: 25 Feb 2003
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 10:22 pm Post subject: |
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Let's see, 2001, far fewer subway stations and few places to get decent Western food. Fewer Koreans who had lived abroad and such.
I was in my early 30s then and still high on Korea. |
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madoka
Joined: 27 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 11:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Yaya wrote: |
| Let's see, 2001, far fewer subway stations and few places to get decent Western food. Fewer Koreans who had lived abroad and such. |
Ah, you made me flashback to the early nineties. TGIF had just opened its first restaurant in Korea. I forget where it was, but I remember it was a bit of a trip for me to get there. IIRC, I went there just after it opened and the food was quite decent (though like most western restaurants, it was on the pricey side). Now I look at TGIF's menu and it is too Koreanized for my tastes.
Here's some other rambling memories:
I remember the first time I went to Itaewon in 1988. Counterfeit merchandise was openly sold. I mean, way, way out in the open and in massive quantities. Now I can't seem to find much at all in the open. You have to go into the basement or back room. The quality was horrific for fake shoes, but it was pretty good for a lot of leather goods. My fake Dunhill wallet ($10) lasted over ten years whereas a typical $150 Coach wallet lasts me about five. In fact, the saleswoman at Coach was surprised that it lasted even five. She said they should wear out around two.  Perhaps that speaks more towards the poor quality of Coach merchandise.
If you snuck a peek in the back room, you'd often see workers making the fake items. I suppose they didn't have cheap Chinese labor back then, so the made some of the stuff on the premises.
I remember the first Denny's I went to (Itaewon, summer 1988). There were about a dozen of us in the party. We sat down, looked at the menu prices, and several said that they couldn't afford it, so we had to leave. Very embarrassing. But it speaks to how expensive western food was back then.
I remember eating my first pizza in Korea. I had ordered a pepperoni to split with a friend. They gave us a cheese by mistake. When we complained, I saw him take it back, put a handful of raw pepperoni on top and immediately give it right back to us. But we still ate it. Back then beggars couldn't be choosers.
I remember going to some road side restaurant. The owner was busy making hamburgers. That consisted of opening one cardboard box that was shipped to him and filled with buns and another that was filled with brown patties. He'd slap the patties into the buns and put it under a heat lamp. I can't begin to imagine the kind of meat that could come pre-cooked and left to sit for days as it was shipped. That's what passed for a hamburger back then in some places. Consequently, Wendy's was a freakin' godsend back then when it opened. I remember going to the one in Olympic Village in Jamsil quite frequently.
Everyone was a LOT shorter back then, so as a foreigner, you'd stick out a whole helluva lot more. No one was openly disrespectful to you. They were too much in awe of seeing someone different. I remember people turning to AFN channel and asking if I understood what they were saying. They were always amazed that I did. There were only a handful of channels back then and AFN must have seemed like such a mystery to most Koreans. I did meet one adjumma whose English was pretty decent. She said that she learned it all from watching AFN. Back then, 20% of the AFN programming consisted of public service announcements, so her vocabulary was probably somewhat limited. Since they played the same PSAs over and over again, I could probably recite several of them by heart back then. There was no internet, so your entertainment options was limited to AFN.
I did get the "watch out for AIDS" speech from an adjumma back in 1992. |
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PatrickGHBusan
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: Busan (1997-2008) Canada 2008 -
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| Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2012 4:32 am Post subject: |
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| motiontodismiss wrote: |
| PatrickGHBusan wrote: |
| About appartments, in Busan they have done a lot of improvements in design. Take a walk trough Centum City, some of the appartment towers are pretty great. Gone are the days of concrete slabs and in came designs with glass, steel and on angles. Seriously, well worth the look! |
IMO they're still apartments and they're ghastly when all the lights are off (as they were in the summer post-blackout). And I'd still never live in them-I don't care if you plaster the walls in gold, Donald Trump-style, it's still a concrete box 300 feet up in the air. And they still don't compare to the NYC skyline or the beautifully manicured lawns of Westchester.
As for food, I've had better Korean food in LA/NY Koreatown than I've ever had in Korea. Yes, the ingredients are that much better. |
Well then off to NYC with you then! 
To each his own. I can tell you one thing, our appartment in Centum City is pretty darn nice as far as design is concerned (inside). It has an ocean view. We are renting it now but we visited it before buying and had an inspection done. Seriously the building is nice and full of convenient services and I for one do not mind living in a condo-building and even prefer it to a house for example.
As for food, well thats your preference but seriously, KOREAN food is better in KOREA for the obvious reasons, much like ITALIAN food is better in ITALY....but once again to each his own!
As for Korea back then...well I arrived in 1997 and back then Busan was far more chaotic than it is now. It had a wild east feeling to it. It had just the one subway line, far fewer western resources and goods. Beaches were less developed, lots of areas were not as developed as they are today.
It has changed in leaps and bounds! |
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denverdeath
Joined: 21 May 2005
Location: Boo-sahn
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| Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2012 5:39 am Post subject: |
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| Julius wrote: |
| skookum wrote: |
I've been in and out of Korea since 1997. But none of the changes in that time amount to much compared to my first trip back in 1975. Korea was a real adventure in those days. Of course I knew very little about the country then, could count to five or six and that was about it. Went to the island just south of Pusan (Yangdo, was it?) - now all high-rises, then it was just shanties - kids threw rocks at us... We hitch-hiked from Pusan to Seoul via Gwangju and it was one wild incident after another. It was mostly a way third-world place then, though there was the start of modernization - the Seoul subway was then operating - but only one line with 6 or 10 stations around Myeongdong. Yeogwans were about two or three bucks a night. Food was unsanitary but delicious - I brought back a couple kgs of kimchi to Japan and ate it all in a coupla weeks.... Some folks were real friendly but it was a poor country and I'd often have a struggle just to get my change back when I made a purchase. It was 22 years before I returned, and found it a more-or-less modern country.
In 1975 there were two expressways in the country. Then again, I've read of the Korean war era where the main road south from Seoul was a dirt track.... |
Fascinating. I'd love to have visited Korea in the time that you mention.
Nowadays its lost a lot of its charm I think. Too much infrastructure. The cities stink.
Is the island south of busan you remember Goje? |
Think he means Youngdo, not far from Nampodong. |
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