while searching for a dance studio to attend for the duration of my stay (with help from my mother who is not a "she" and totally lovely)
i stumbled upon a website called Life After Cubes. It is the couple's: Jason Demant & Sharon Duckworth's accounts on living a life abroad in Asia. With a little searching, I found out that they infact have spent time living in South Korea. When looking through the articles tagged, I saw this little gem entitled:
9 things Koreans do that make me laugh.
obviously, i clicked it.
here is an excerpt from it. click the link below to read the entire article and have a great laugh.
{ everything below is credited to life.after.cubes }
i stumbled upon a website called Life After Cubes. It is the couple's: Jason Demant & Sharon Duckworth's accounts on living a life abroad in Asia. With a little searching, I found out that they infact have spent time living in South Korea. When looking through the articles tagged, I saw this little gem entitled:
9 things Koreans do that make me laugh.
obviously, i clicked it.
here is an excerpt from it. click the link below to read the entire article and have a great laugh.
{ everything below is credited to life.after.cubes }
Wear Shirts with Ridiculous English Phrases – It’s my understanding that most Koreans are able to read English and if that’s the case then many Koreans are hopefully also laughing at the ridiculous shirts people wear. My two favorite examples – 1) An older woman (age 60’s – 70’s) was wearing a shirt that said “Who the fuck is Mick Jagger?”. 2) A roughly 15-year old girl (could have been 10 or could have been 30) was wearing a shirt that said “Cum again”. I really hope they have no clue what their shirts mean.
Couples wear the same clothing together -- couples will literally wear the same obnoxious t-shirt, shoes, pants, or all of the above and then go out in public together.
When I don’t understand what they’re saying in Korean, they will just yell it louder… in Korean -- Sometimes they even start yelling it slower, as if enunciating another language will suddenly make me understand it.
Men carry their girlfriends purse – I won’t begin to guess why men do this (but, Sharon has), all I know is seeing a semi-masculine dude carrying a pink lacey handbag is ridiculous looking.
Korean “exercises” – At all of these workout parks, you’ll find Korean men and women sitting down and swinging their legs back and forth, standing up and doing shoulder circles, or just plain swinging their arms around the air every which way. This apparently is what they constitute as “exercise”.
ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE.
IT IS SO ACCURATE.
thanks for the totally honest account of living in asia, jason and sharon!
and thanks for being awesome, mother. love you.
Flew out of Incheon airport on Arbour Day one time and noticed so many couples in matching Hawaiian shirts and both wearing foundation. Turned out it was a popular time for honeymoons. Due to the importance of the wedding photos, both in the couple wear make-up. Have you seen the older people in the forests banging their mid-sections against trees? This is related to the idea of 단전호흡, or having an energy centre in one's navel area.
ReplyDeleteThe yelling at foreigners thing is something that English speakers are far more famous for, though generally in their own countries. More typical of Koreans is the refusal to say anything at all, under the assumption that Whitey won't understand. What I find annoying is that when I ask for clarification, people will often isolate and repeat or even translate only the key nouns in a sentence: as if, comprehension of a sentence like "why is your left eye bigger than your right?" could be enhanced by subsequently chanting "Eyes! Eyes!"