Korean Job Discussion Forums

[PGF]

If you are a moron.--> you might be stuck in Korea with 10, 000 W.

If you do not have any friends--> you might be stuck in korea with only 10,000 won.

If you do not speak English or Korean---> you might be stuck in korea with 10,000 won



anyone else?

[eamo]

You might be taking jokey threads on Dave's too seriously.

[regicide]

[tomwaits]

It's a bit of hubris to say that. I , for example , was robbed once in Korea and had no won. And I was unemployed. Luckily I had both a friend and access to cash to wire to myself.

If this had happened when I arrived--don't want to think about it. I'm willing to bet it's happened to many.

[JongnoGuru]

I've been down that low a number of times in my first years here. Always found ways to keep my head above water, thankfully.

They used to have paper tickets for the 좌석 buses that came in these long strips of 10, and you'd get a small discount for buying a whole sheet. They also had little coin-like bus tokens with holes in them for the 시내 buses. Don't remember if those ones always gave you a discount, but they were tidier than carrying around whatever goofy fraction of 100W the bus fares happened to be at a given time.

So I'd always have a stash of these tickets & tokens on hand, and when things got desperate I could usually find some girl at the little supermarket who'd let me buy ramyon or a piece of fruit with them (she'd buy the tickets/tokens from me for her own use and I'd spend the money at the shop).

For bigger expenses, like a hot date, I'd lug something -- my walkman, even my TV, whatever I could carry -- down to one of the nearby pawnshops (전당포, the most crucial word in my early vocabulary). I'd get 25,000 won for the walkman and 50,000 won for the TV, and I'd pay another 3,000 to 5,000 won when I collected them. Those pawnshop owners got more use out of my consumer electronics than I did. One of them ended up buying my walkman.