South Korea Fun Fact #3: Spit
Korean guys LOVE to spit. It's fucking disgusting. When I'm walking to and from work, I have to dodge spit pile after spit pile...not only stepping in it, but avoiding my crutches in the spit piles as well - spit is slippery! Seriously, it's nasty. Just this morning, I was waiting for the elevator in my apartment building when I heard a guy coming down the corridor, he hacked and spit a loogie...IN THE APARTMENT CORRIDOR!! Then he joined me on the elevator. Ugh!!
South Korea Fun Fact #4: Hair perms
It's almost like South Korea never advanced from the 80's with regards to hair perms. They're so popular here...and not really in a good way. They're so popular that when I go from having a straight-hair week to letting my hair go naturally curly, staff and students at my school always ask me if I've had a perm.
South Korea Fun Fact #5: Car Lemmings
South Koreans are notorious for not embracing individuality. They generally try to look the same (Korea is the country to come to if you're looking for plastic surgery); they rarely try to stand out in a crowd. This even includes the color of their cars. I would say about 85-90% of Korean's cars are either white, black, or silver. If they're not white, black, or silver, they don't stray too far from those colors...maybe cream or gold. Rarely do you see red cars, blue cars, green cars. I knew my Korean co-teacher was a badass the moment I saw her car: sparkly orange. Hers is the only car of that color that I've seen in Korea.
South Korea Fun Fact #6: Hello? Is It Me You're Looking For?
Because South Korea is a relatively small country with a relatively high population, it's built towards the sky. The cities and suburbs are full of high rises which are full of intercoms. This includes apartments. Every apartment comes with it's own intercom speaker that, every now and then, likes to wake you up at 7am on a Saturday or Sunday morning with an important Korean announcement. I just hope they're not announcing the apocalypse...I wouldn't understand a word of what was being said, therefore having no time to get my zombie apocalypse plan set in motion. I'd be fucked.
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| The high rises of Hwajeong |
South Korea Fun Fact #7: Smelly Kimchi
I'm not the biggest fan of Korean food. It's either too spicy, too pickled, too bland, or too sweet for my taste. But Koreans loooooooove their kimchi. Spicy, garlicky, fermented cabbage. They even have special refrigerators for it. And it stinks. When Koreans eat a lot of kimchi, which is pretty much all the time, the smell just flows from their pores and is gag-worthy. Especially the older generation, I'm sorry to say they reek of smelly kimchi. There's nothing worse than stepping onto a stuffy subway car crammed with older folks who smell like kimchi. I need to invent something to insert up my nose to block out the smell of kimchi.
South Korea Fun Fact #8: You Can't Sit Here (said in the voices of the kids on the school bus in Forrest Gump)
Koreans generally don't like sitting next to me on the subway (I don't really like to sit next to them because of SKFF #7...). If the subway car seats are full when I am sitting and a spot opens up at the next stop, nine times out of ten, Koreans who sit next to me will get up and move to the other open seat. At first, I was slightly offended, and wondered if I have a weird American smell that they don't like. But after a while (and when I realized they do this to my foreign friends as well), I didn't mind...actually, I was kind of grateful that I could stretch out a bit. When I was coming back from the doctor last week, there was an open seat next to me. Two ladies, not together, one by one stepped onto the subway, looked at me, looked at the seat, then walked to the next subway car were there were more open seats without any foreigners. Whatever...more room for my ass!
And finally...
South Korea Fun Fact #9: An Endangered Species: The Book Reader
Koreans love technology. It's the most connected nation in the world. I read a percentage, which actually seemed quite low - and I can't remember the percentage, maybe 60%, of the amount of Koreans that have smart phones. Even some of my students, who are like, 8 years old, have iPhone's or Samsung Galaxy's. Sure, they're probably recycled from the parent's, but still! When you step on the subway or bus, 95% of the people on it have their heads down in their smart phones playing games. They even carry around extra batteries for their phones. A rare occasion indeed is seeing someone with an actual, real, page-turning book on the subway. When you see it, you have to document it. It's like seeing an endangered animal in the wild. Does it really exist? Absolutely...and I only believe it because I photographed it.
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| An endangered species: The Subway Book-Reader |
For South Korea Fun Fact #1, check out Doctor, my eyes... and you can learn about Fan Death.
For South Korea Fun Fact #2, check out It's a nice day, for a...white wedding and you can learn about smoking.
Happy Trails!
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