Life In Korea (한국의 삶)
What to know about life in Korea from the places to shop to being pregnant in Korea. Here is everything you need to know to live in Korea. (쇼핑하는 곳부터 임신하는 곳까지 한국 생활에 대해 알아야 할 것. 여기 당신이 한국에서 살기 위해 알아야 할 모든 것이 있다.)
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11 Things You Can Only Do In The Winter in Korea
There are a lot of lists of things to do in the winter in Korea that are just the same lists as normal things to do in Korea but they have pictures of Korea with snow. This list is NOT that. This list is an actual list of things to do in the winter in Korea that you CANNOT do the rest of the year, in any other season of the year. There are a lot of things to do in the winter in Korea. From indoors fun if your prone to chills, to ski slopes, and ice skating and even strawberry picking! When it’s cold in Korea, find something…
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My First Press Tour
I’m pretty jazzed about my first press tour experience: two days all expenses paid down to two places in Korea I hadn’t been to yet with reporters from Russia, China and Korea traveling with diplomats from Venezuela, the Czech Republic, Russia and the head of the Korean Tourism Organization, Charm Lee. The other reporters weren’t the competitive paparazzi type, but low key, eager to share their stories and contact information type and the diplomats were important political types but with down to earth smiles and were clearly used to and even gracious with so many people taking their pictures at every stop we went to. I hadn’t realized we’d be…
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What do we really know about North Korea?
It’s that time of year again, spring in Korea, when the US and South Korea team up to practice their stealthy abilities thereby inciting North Korea to raise the threat level which leads the US media to spout propaganda about going to war inevitably scaring the living daylights out of my grandmother. It’s been a long month and a half and these war games still have another couple weeks to go and I imagine all of the news coverage, or really lack there-of because absolutely nothing is happening as usual, will continue until then. Am I scared? Not really. Do my South Korean friends seem nervous? No. Do any of…
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A Typhoon Hits Seoul… sort of
This week there was a typhoon warning and schools were cancelled in Seoul, Korea. Looking outside my window I didn’t see much rain or winds and wondered what it looked like down on the Han River. Schools in Korea hardly ever get cancelled and if they were cancelled I imagined the worst, but wasn’t seeing it. A friend and I decided to head to the river and at the first entrance were turned away by some sort of Han River guard on his bike. We decided to go down further and try entering down there. It couldn’t be that dangerous afterall, right? Luckily, there were no guards further up and…
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Getting My F6 Visa In Korea… The End
Take two. I’m going through the process to get my F6 visa here in Korea. Up until this point, I had gathered my passport, my Korean marriage certificate and through a slight debacle hadn’t yet gotten it translated, notarized and authenticated at the US embassy. So, here we are… After going home to the States and coming back at the end of January, I wrote the addresses of the two nearest offices that could translate and notarize our Korean marriage certificate for us once more for Jae-oo. Since I was still on vacation from school I went with him this time to make sure the translation and notarizing was done…
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Getting My F6 Visa… The Beginning
After two wedding ceremonies and a month vacation in the States, we finally made it back to Korea and after a week of resting from the vacation got our rears in gear to get everything filed for the F6 visa. We had started the process a few months ago, but after Jae-oo inadvertently made me make an unecessary trip to the American Embassy, I pushed everything aside until we were definitely ready to get serious about it. At the start, those months back, I had scoured the internet for information on what was necessary and what to expect of the process, but came to the conclusion that it all depended…
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The Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul: How to Attend the Comfort Women Protest
Every Wednesday at noon, near the site of the former Japanese Embassy in central Seoul, a crowd gathers. Some weeks it’s a couple dozen people. Some weeks it’s a hundred or more. All of them are there for the same reason: to demand that Japan formally acknowledge and take legal responsibility for its WWII military sexual slavery system, commonly known by the euphemism “comfort women.” These are the Wednesday Demonstrations (수요시위), and they’ve been happening continuously since January 8, 1992, making them one of the longest-running weekly protests in the world. If you’ve read my piece on the Statue of Peace, you already know some of this history. This article…
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Air Raid Sirens in South Korea: What They Mean and When They Happen
The first time you hear an air raid siren in South Korea, it’s disorienting. Public address systems blast a long, rising-and-falling tone, civil defense personnel appear on the street directing people toward shelters, and traffic stops dead in its tracks. If you don’t know what’s happening, it can definitely be alarming for a few minutes… until you look around and notice locals going about their business as usual, then you might have some questions. It’s a drill. Specifically, it’s part of Korea’s nationwide civil defense exercise, and once you understand the pattern, it stops being unsettling and just becomes one of those things you adjust to living here, or visiting…
