A Letter

Dear Korean Business Owner,

Thank you for opening your (insert franchise name here) store in my neighbourhood, despite there already being three branches within a 50 metre radius. I especially enjoyed the display of flowers set up for your "Grand Open" and the dancing girls and arch made of balloons was a nice touch too. I like how you handed out discount coupons to everyone except me while playing the same five loud pop songs at max volume on your cheap amp.

I noticed that you have a big shiny new sign. The colours are vivid and clear, and the light shines through evenly at night. It must have cost a lot of money, and gives a very positive impression. As you live in Seoul and are Korean, you must be familiar with the high levels of dirt in the air. This dirt settles on top of things, and then when it rains, the run-off leaves black water trails all over walls, the sides of buildings, windows, and, yes, signs. In fact, after 6 months, your sign will look absolutely filthy. This will confirm to everyone how your franchise is, in fact, nothing but garbage packaged in a cheap but shiny exterior. Please do me, and anybody else who cares, a favour and clean your sign on a regular basis.

Send your son/daughter/nephew/niece who slaves away all day for you for no pay outside with a mop once in a while and scrub the damn thing down. The difference will be amazing. Then when I look at your shop, I might actually believe that you won't go out of business in six months, only to be replaced by another over-represented chain of rip-off merchants.

Yours sincerely,

Sam

Slow Month of June...

I think this June might have been the slowest ever month of this blog, but not for lack of things to write about.

I have lots of things I want to write about, including how to find, or how not to find, a place in Seoul, my new apartment and how awesome it is, the internet and how awesome it is for shopping, and other related topics.

Anyway, that's all for now, and I'll see some of you in Sydney in a couple of days!

Apartment Hell

Much of Seoul is made up of apartment complexes. Although these are getting better, they are usually, in my opinion, soulless, characterless, badly-designed places where every building is the same as the one next to it. The buildings generally have numbers rather than names, and every apartment has the same floor plan as all the others. The larger complexes often have a commercial zone containing services such as supermarkets and banks.



I would hate to live in one of these concrete monstrosities, mainly for the reasons above. Also, despite being fairly high density, they lack the convenience of living in a high-density neighbourhood made up of individual buildings and being of mixed residential and commercial use. For example, where I am living now and where I have lived in the past, if I need to buy milk I walk to the lift, go outside, and there is a convenience store right there. There are probably ten others as well as three decent sized supermarkets within ten minutes walk. If I lived on the same floor of Samsung Apartment 101 I would need to wait longer for the elevator, then walk out of the complex and probably cross a road to find the nearest place to buy milk. In some places this ends up being a 20 minute round trip. I may as well live in a suburb, in a house, and actually have some room to move, some privacy, and not hear stomping from the family living above me 24/7.



Although these complexes are safe, they are also quite eerie to walk around at night, and aesthetics leave much to be desired. The basic design that seems to have been in favour for the last 30 years resembles a basic Lego structure that I might have been disgusted with and smashed on the floor when I was six. An elevator shaft and then two identical mirror-image apartments on each floor is pretty standard. Sometimes they stick two such structures together in a variety of ways, again reminding me of Lego. The whole building usually makes either a) a square, b) a rectangle, or c) an L-shape. If the team of architects has been feeling adventurous you might get an E-shape.



The outside of the building will probably be bare on two sides, with "windows" on the other sides. The bottom three floors will get bars on theirs'. I put "windows" in inverted commas because this is the name for an area inside the apartment which is wide enough to hang laundry, or maybe put a small table and chairs. It will have a waist-high metal railing and be glassed-off on both sides. I still wonder why they don't design buildings with real actual balconies that protrude from the side of the building and which could be functional places to enjoy the view of neighbouring apartment complexes and polluted skies. I suspect it's because winters are too cold, and the balcony serves as insulation, and as a buffer against the black dust that settles on everything. It also seems that Koreans are yet to discover the concept of the view.



The windowless side of the building will be decorated with the logo of the construction company which built it and the number of the building in big block letters. Sometimes you get a snappy marketing slogan too. The bottom floor will often contain a nursery for young children, which must be the only kind of commercial premises allowed in these buildings because I've never seen anything else. Parking is usually underground, accessible by ramp and elevator, and each building will have its very own grumpy security guard who sleeps on and off all day while watching Manchester United's latest game and yelling at people for not sorting their garbage properly.

Criticism of the Seoul skyline's many crimes against architecture must be filtering down because there have been laws passed recently saying that apartment complex designers must make each building slightly different. This is evident in the designs of the newer complexes which are much nicer to look at - some of the buildings are different heights, and are at different angles to one another, a radical departure from the good old ten-buildings-in-a-straight-line design favoured in the past. I've even seen both square and rectangular shaped buildings side by side in the same development!



I have the pleasure of visiting some of my students at their homes on a weekly basis. These kids are from families who are living the dream of being able to say that they live in an "apartu" rather than a lowly villa or jutaek. I took the photos at the Parkrio Jamsil complex at the 성내역 Seongnae Station end. As you can see from the photo of the map, this complex is massive, and quite new - it didn't exist when I first arrived in Seoul. It's one of many new developments which line the Han River from Asan Hospital all the way to Jamsil which were all built at roughly the same time. It only opened about six months ago, and about half of the commercial premises are still for lease, although a new one seems to have opened every week.

It is one of the nicest apartment complexes I've seen, and the areas between the buildings are beautifully landscaped with trees and flower gardens. There are lots of playgrounds for the kids and exercise areas for the ajummas, and the place has quite a pleasant atmosphere. It would probably be a nice place to live if you had the truckload of money needed to afford it, but lacked the imagination necessary to find somewhere else to live.

High-class Office Girl

I'm used to seeing hooker cards and brothel discount coupons scattered all over the street outside, but I'd never seen one like this before until I found it in the elevator.





The front says:

USA Canada

30,000,000won/month Guaranteed!!

Manager Charlie
011-

The back says:

*700,000 to 1,000,000won/day, paid daily*

*20,000 dollars a month guaranteed(20,000 a month + a)* (I don't know what the "a" means, maybe extra?)

*High-class apartment with Internet use*

*Safe and family-style atmosphere*

*Located within Downtown Vancouver*

We only make promises we can keep!!

Who knew office jobs paid so well? I guess North America really is the promised land...

The Kim Distribution

I've always been interested in Korean last names, and how so many people can share the same last name.

Picture downloaded from here.

I was writing my report cards and since I had a list of 118 Korean names in front of me, I decided to see how my students measure up to the statistics.

After a bit of maths, I found that there are:

30 Kims 김 (35.4%)
21 Lees 이 (24.8%)
10 Parks 박 (11.8%)
8 Jeongs 정 (9.4%)
5 Chois 최 (5.9%)
4 Ohs 오 and Yoos 유
3 Jangs 장, Seos 서, Hongs 홍, Lims 임 and Yoons 윤
2 Jus 주, Shins 신, Gus 구, Moons 문, Heos 허
and one each of Ji 지, Yang 양, Roh 노, Jo 조, Seong 성, Kang 강, Song 송, Gwak 곽, Ryu 류, Jin 진 and Jeon 전. (51.9% for all the rest of the names after the top five)

Predictable stuff from the top three, but Jeong manages to overtake Choi for 4th place.

As far as the romanisation goes, I just used what I think is the most common romanisation for each name, or if I didn't know I used the Revised Romanisation which is the official one used by the government. Apologies if I butchered your name. Regardless, I have written the names in Korean too to avoid confusion, eg. is 전 Jeon, Jun, or Chun?

Best ESL Journals

I just looked at the front page of my blog and realised I've only posted twice this month. Oops. Also, to the person who wanted me to write about "home-made recipes" I ask, recipes for what?

Those who are interested should check out my friend Nick's new(ish) blog Best ESL Journals where he posts pieces of writing done by his students, most from one girl in particular I think. It's the funniest thing I've read in ages.

뭐라고?

It used to really annoy me when there were lines in a movie in a foreign language, with no subtitles, or non-English words in a novel with no translation provided by the author. It used to frustrate me no end and have me pausing and rewinding the movie again to watch with the English subtitles for the hearing impaired turned on to see if there was a translation provided, or in the case of novels, trying to look up the words I didn't understand.

I don't know why I had a need to know exactly what was being said at all times, but thankfully I've been cured. I think it was watching so many DVDs produced for non-English-speaking regions which don't have hard-coded English subs, and therefore no subtitles in the foreign language parts. These days most movies seem to have their actors learn some lines in the language they are supposed to be speaking, rather than just putting on a bad accent like in Valkyrie or The Reader.

Regardless, after wasting countless minutes turning subtitles on and off, or having to find a subtitle file on the Internet because the DVD didn't come with English subs, only to find that they deliberately didn't translate it anyway, I realised that it almost never affects my understanding or enjoyment of the movie and usually the break in flow caused by my agitation at not knowing what is being said has a much worse effect.

읽어셔서 고맙습니다

(no title)

Struggling to come up with anything to write about lately, so if anyone has any ideas, let me know.

The only things I can really think of to put down here are complaining rants about unremarkable occurences like being invited by my hiardresser friend to come to his new salon, only to be charged triple what I usually pay for a haircut, or about how I hate the hot weather. Pretty mindnumbing stuff.