Cultural Learnings Blah Blah Blah Part 2

originally posted on 1/30/07

On goodbye, so far as I can tell, Koreans don't say it when talking on their cell phones. Granted, my Korean vocabulary is lower than your average local dog, but of the many times I've witnessed Koreans on their cells, it seems from their diction that they are in mid-thought or mid-sentence when they suddenly hang up. Nothing in their body language or tonality indicated that the conversation is wrapping up, it just ends.

There are no street names here. That one I still can't get my head around. Maybe it's the map nerd in me, but it makes no sense. It's impossible to find anything by address. There is no way to figure out how to get anywhere you haven't been before without at least 2 phone calls, unless it's some sort of major landmark. I'm convinced this system was invented by chicks, because only chick directions work to get anywhere. "Go down the big street, turn left at that one kimbap place with the orange sign, then right at the 7-11. Go to the green place on the left, then call us again." Fucking hell.

I noticed another funny Korean thing while having a couple beers at a nearby bar called the #10 Bar. It's a "punk" – "alt" type of bar, so all of the staff wear "alt" "punk" clothes. But, they are all dressed in the exact same "alt" "punk" gear, so it's institutionalized, mandated free-thinking uniformity, so really, it is so very Korean.

Other random funny things – it is uncouth to blow your nose in public here, even when that public is Korean co-workers that you see every day . Yet, it is completely socially acceptable to hock up the biggest of loogies and spit when walking on the street filled with hundreds of strangers. Half a gram of pot results in jail time, long jail time, yet one can walk down the street at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday openly drinking absinthe and nobody cares. There are no strip clubs and no porn racier than your average Maxim, but brothels on every block.

I've learned to love Korean commercials. On Korean TV, commercials during shows are rare, and then there's a huge block of them. For example, on Fox Korea, at 9 p.m. they generally show some awesome trash like wildest police chase videos or something awesome like that, but since there's almost no commercials during the show, the show ends at like 9:47. Then, since the Simpsons is on at 10, just like god intended, I generally keep Fox on during the 13 minute downtime, and there's like 4 or 5 commercials, run over and over again. Probably my favorite is for a check cashing place called "Rush Cash," but because Koreans always finish their words with a vowel sound, the jingle is an upbeat "rush-y and cash-y!" That, and virtually every Korean commercial features the product converting from bad to good to the tune of a brrrriiiing bell tone, a-la every 80's infomercial.

A girl sitting next to me at the time I wrote the rough draft of this offered and then insisted that I eat some of the food she had ordered. That's another thing that is completely Korean. She wasn't offering leftovers, it was fresh, new food, and not an appetizer, but some sort of beef dish. I've been to a million bars in a million towns in 20 different countries, and this would simply not happen anywhere else. I've also had bar bills picked up by Korean people that I had known for 5 minutes. I don't know where I'm taking this blog, other than into the ground, but I don't think I've ever been anywhere else where people are so shockingly and apparently naturally nice