In the last few weeks or so, I've alluded to a few of the cultural differences here in Korea.  I've mostly mentioned them in passing on my FB account, but I think it might be a good time to group some of them up and try to make a little sense out of it; or at least it will allow me to kind of sum up a set of pros and cons on the subject.

There is an overly developed sense of honor in Korea.  It stems from the Confucianism traditions of the country that basically state you should never insult someone, especially if they are an elder.  The age thing gets to taken to ridiculous levels, in my opinion.  If someone is older than me, I am supposed to turn away from them when I drink alcohol.  Now, I'm not talking about a 60 year old being my elder.  I'm 32 and I completely agree that a level of respect is owed to my elders, but a 33 year old is not my elder, they are my equal.  Not in Korea.  Any minor difference in age here changes how I'm supposed to act around them, even down to how I'm supposed to address them in a conversation.  It's a small part of why speaking Korean can be difficult. 


That same sense of honor can cause some interesting confrontations when one person feels slighted.  On FB last weekend, I mentioned that there was a yelling match in front of my apartment around midnight Saturday night, a yelling match that would've come to some sort of blows in the US.  It ended with my landlord and boss being led away by the police.  I found out later that there had been some sort of dispute between him and our neighbor.  Apparently, my neighbor's AC is also too loud and my boss wrote him a letter saying that it needed to be fixed.  (Never mind that I don't even have an AC yet).  The neighbor also runs a small restaurant downstairs that was mentioned due to the smell coming from the kitchen.  (This entire country is full of questionable aromas; you can smell the sewage running just below your feet, but the shabu-shabu is an issue for him.)  The response to this letter was for the owner and his wife to scream at my boss from across a small four foot wall.  This happened around midnight.  My boss, his wife, and another neighbor of course screamed back.  When I say "screamed", I mean there was venom dripping from their words.  I'm honestly surprised that the police did not show up quicker.  Of course, when they actually did arrive, the only thing they did was scream back at both parties... it was weird.  The yelling was okay with everyone involved, I think; the owner next door took offense to my boss insinuating his restaurant was in disrepair.  His honor had been challenged in some way, by my boss writing a letter.  I don't get it.  No handcuffs ever came out from the cops, everyone just yelled at each other and then my boss was lead away by the police, not in cuffs, but as if they were having a casual stroll to the pokie.  Korea....


In cops defense, though, crime does not exist in Korea, not in the way that we are used to hearing about in the United States.  On top of that, most of the police are 18 year old boys.  They're given the choice of police or military for two years when they hit eighteen.  You can probably guess what type of kids the police side ends up with receiving... not exactly Dirty Harry's.  There isn't any real danger for these kindercops, though, because gun ownership is illegal in here.  American's can say what they want about our right to bear arms, but the truth is, many of us kill people with those "arms".  Before writing this blog, I asked one of my coworkers to make sure that I understood the law, and their reaction was surprising to me.  She got an almost surprised look on her face and asked if I had ever actually fired a gun.  It caught me off guard.  It was almost a nervous question, like she was embarrassed to say it out loud.  I guess when you live through a civil war that killed an estimated two million people, you might change your opinion a bit on guns.  By comparison, the American Civil War killed 650,000 and no one's alive anymore to remember it... we lost 58k in Vietnam.  The other side to that argument is that Korea's been the whipping boy for most of history in this part of the world.  A few firearms in the hands of citizens might have helped discourage those occupations in the past, but who knows?  Gun violence isn't the only thing missing her, though.  Stealing, at least in my part of the country, is also non existent. 

The city I live in is larger than Chicago.  How long would a bike with no lock last anywhere in Cook County?  Not long.  I had someone chase me down the street because they saw 1000 won fall out of my pocket  (about one dollar).  It's mind boggling to me.  At this stage, you have to lock your door to run inside and pay for your gas in the US.  And forget about not locking up when you go to sleep or leave the house.  It's just a lot different here.  Not all places are safe, I'm sure, but most are.  There are still issues in some areas, but those aren't the norm.  And I think I'm pretty safe from the targets in this article.