Korean Job Discussion Forums

[markness]

[Xanetos]

[andrewchon]

[farfromhome]

[chrisblank]

M*A*S*H

[silkhighway]

Two memories. The 88 Olympics, my first introduction to South Korea. I didn't pick up much about it other than the Olympic coverage.

My second memory is a couple years later as a grade 7 student, and for some reason, I heard about people teaching English in Korea, but I don't remember where I heard about this. I had a mental image of people living in tall buildings, which didn't turn out to be too far from the truth when I arrived in Korea to teach English myself at least a dozen years later. It may have been from my Grade 7 homeroom teacher, because after the school-year was over, she and her husband moved to Thailand to teach at an international school. This is in the early 90's.

[Threequalseven]

[Seoulman69]

[hiamnotcool]

A good friend of mine was Korean American, and he would never shut up about how awesome Korea was. It worked though, I ended up coming here out of curiosity. He pretty much exaggerated the good and bad things about Korea, but overall he gave a pretty accurate depiction of what it would be like to live here.

[Zyzyfer]

When I was a teen, one of the neighboring families in our apartment complex was a retired Air Force guy I believe, his Korean wife, and their two sons. I was pretty good friends with the two sons for a while, but I remember how everyone in the complex was kind of weirded out by the mother. She didn't really speak English and had a rocky relationship with her husband - they were separated but still lived together - so she came off as very eccentric. I feel bad now when I think back on how isolated she must have felt, since her kids didn't even really seem to speak Korean, and all of the other people living in the complex were not even of Asian descent, let alone Korean.

Later on, after I had decided to come work in Korea, this one very odd guy that I knew found out where I was going. I guess he had spent some time long ago in Korea? Anyway he started talking about how random old dudes would be walking up to me on the street and offering me their daughter's hand in marriage, and how slighted they would be if I refused. I assume now that he was just ribbing me a bit, but at the time I was caught off guard.

[Squire]

Earliest impressions were South Korea being a playable country in football games, the 02 world cup, Park Ji Seong, Korea being a scientific (lol) and commercial civilization in Civ 3 and the general impression that South Korea and Japan were more or less the same. Much of my ideas of South Korea were based on what I knew of Japan. I associated the countries in the same way I associated India and Pakistan, Australia and NZ, Iran and Iraq, Sweden and Norway, Russia and the former USSR countries etc. Naturally I knew something of North Korea but they were always completely distinct in my mind

What I had no awareness of at all before the prospect of living here came up were Korean food, K-pop, K-dramas and the breathtaking notion that it has four seasons.

Really Korea had no impact on my life at all. It was a country I had some very basic knowledge of, but that was as far as it went. To my knowledge I never met a Korean before coming here

[Newbie]

When I was really young, about 5 or 6, I had a "Memory" board game in which all the tiles you had to match were the flags of different countries. I remember thinking the South Korean flag was really cool. That and Kenya. For some reason though, often when I told this story to Koreans they got all excited about me thinking they're flag was cool, but when I mentioned i also thought Kenyan flag was cool they'd give me a disgusted "ayisshhh" with a head shake and "no-no" hand wave. (ok, sure, that only happened with 3 or 4 different guys. But it's fun to tell the story as if every single Korean was disgusted by having their flag held in the same esteem as an African flag!)

[Newbie]

[robbie_davies]

[Seoulman69]