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I almost went to North Korea in 2002, while living in South Korea. Pyongyang stopped issuing visas to US citizens, which put the kibosh on my plans to see a Stalinist theme park. I actually stepped across the border at the conference room in Panmunjeom, but that doesn't really count. Koryeo Tours in Beijing is the only outfitter for Nork tourism. Your gateway is Beijing, and the tour is essentially a "take it or leave it" kind of deal. Tours are tightly supervised, and you are confined to a hotel on an island, segregated from the rest of Pyongyang. They are also rather spendy - I seem to remember just over $1000/week, all included, per person. You don't get to interact with ordinary Norks, and are subject to heavy propaganda from your guides. I know a few people who have done the trip - they say the Korean food is pretty good, and there's a lot of soju drinking in the evenings at the hotel. Obviously there's no Internet or cell phones or foreign media.
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Oct 13, 2014 08:00
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My Imaginary GF posted:While getting drunk as gently caress in NK does sound fun, I'd rather get drunk as gently caress in SK. Kind of hard to avoid that in South Korea. Soju is cheaper than Coca-Cola there. It's bad manners not to get wasted with your boss when he invites you out - can be perilous. I once saw a couple of wasted and besuited men screaming and slap-fighting each other outside a bar in Hongdae. When I asked my host what they were screaming at each other about, he said that one of them had wanted to stop drinking, precipitating the fight.
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Oct 13, 2014 10:09
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Cuatal posted:If Korea's drinking culture is anything like China's, everyone' favorite game is "Get the Foreigner Shitfaced" and you'll have people paying for all of your drinks. It's bad manners to pour drinks for yourself while out drinking with Koreans, and it's also rude to refuse a drink someone has poured for you. The result is that the biggest lush at the table determines how much everyone will drink, as he continues pouring soju for the gathering. Anyone ever been out for mak chang? That was always a favorite for Koreans to introduce to waegukin. Sit around a boozy restaurant grilling your own cow and pig intestines and eating banchan.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:44
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I wouldn't assume that all factions in a Nork breakdown would be pro-Chinese.
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Oct 15, 2014 14:59
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DarkCrawler posted:Pretty sure South Koreans are big enough fans of their democracy and human rights that they'd rather not unify at all then have some weird inferior part in their nation. I don't know why there couldn't be a transitional period of decade or two where NK is still a separate entity under international observation during which US/China/SK bring it up to bare minimum of infrastructure/economy for it to actually be a viable other half of unification. You clearly know nothing about South Koreans if you think this. The jaebeols would be delighted to have a cheap labor colony of 22-odd million to exploit.
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Oct 16, 2014 04:30
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Halloween Jack posted:You're talking about a serious drain on the South Korean economy that will last at least a couple decades. The notion of South Korean businesses making big profits by exploiting cheap labour is as fanciful as it is cynical. Chronic starvation is, quite literally, a severe handicap to the North Korean workforce, and its infrastructure has been crumbling for decades due to a lack of basic maintenance and replacement parts. Right. South Koreans will not tolerate a significant drop in living standards. There are significant numbers of South Koreans alive who remember when their living standards were on par with Bangladesh. Many in older generations are stunted due to childhood malnutrition, while teenagers today have problems with obesity. South Korea is a very materialistic society. Disagree with the bit about jaebeol though. South Korean business culture is as cutthroat and exploitative as I've seen in the developed world. There's no way they wouldn't see a highly-literate, Korean-speaking, and docile population a short distance from Seoul as ripe for exploitation. One of the biggest issues Korean business has with competitiveness is lack of language ability. North and South Korean have diverged somewhat since 1948, but are still very mutually intelligible.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:04
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Koramei posted:say what I taught English to teenagers in South Korea, 2002-3. It's really striking to compare the average physique across generations in South Korea. Grandparents at the time were very short and gaunt. Grandmothers would often be stooped over due to childhood malnutrition, especially calcium deficiency. Parents were comparable to what I saw their contemporaries Japan, if a bit more robust. (Koreans tend to be relatively robust (big-boned and busty, not fat) for Northeast Asians.) The teenagers I taught, many were obese. They've grown up on pizza, McDonald's/Lotteria (local equivalent to McDo's), and other Western-style junk food. Koreans will tell you all kinds of crazy things about Korea. I remember hearing that homosexuality doesn't exist in Korea, that Korean food is the healthiest in the world (the high rate of stomach cancer belies this), that Koreans have different respiratory systems and are subject to "fan death"*, etc. etc. *Fan death is the belief that sleeping in an enclosed room with a fan on will kill you. Korean newspapers report on fan deaths every summer. I taught a private lesson to a Korean doctor who swore that it existed, and that my Western lungs were differently equipped to handle it. A few other expats and I developed the theory that it's a media euphemism for death from alcohol poisoning.
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Oct 16, 2014 07:13
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I recall hearing, I think on these very forums, that it was a euphemism for suicide. Although I suppose one can argue alcohol poisoning is a form of suicide. That's plausible. A while back, someone on one of the Korea megathreads here jumped all over me for being amused by "fan death" and how insistent Koreans can be that it exists.
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Oct 16, 2014 07:39
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Wiki's piece on Fan Death meshes with what I remember.
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Oct 16, 2014 10:39
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Full Battle Rattle posted:Ah, thanks for the clarification. Most sources that I read claim that they never really came back from the 90's famine and it's just been all downhill ever since, but I found that a little hard to believe. There's a lot of space between Just Awful and Losing 10% Of Population From Famine.
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Oct 16, 2014 12:57
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Lawman 0 posted:Isn't Soju like $1 a bottle or something in ROK? The cheapest grade of Cham was about $0.85 for 375mL eleven-twelve years ago. It's only about 22% ABV, but kicks you in the rear end. Two of those bottles would have me flying. Three would have me on the floor. Takes like poo poo, but then again so does Korean beer. Joke was that OB was named after a tampon; (S)Hite had an invisible 's'.
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Oct 16, 2014 13:32
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North Koreans are for all purposes universally literate, in Korean. They are also conditioned to absolute obedience. Provide them a modest increase in standard of living, and you've got the ultimate menial worker. South Korea's economy is based heavily on manufacturing.
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Oct 16, 2014 16:16
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South Korea is definitely worth a visit. Any boozer with a connection in Incheon would be well advised to stretch it out a few days. Seoul isn't cheap, but it's not Tokyo or Shanghai crazy either. Stay in a yeogwan and eat and drink till you forget your flight out. Busan is a loving cool city too, like Chicago to Seoul's New York(Yeouido)-cum-Los Angeles (Teheran-no/Apgujeong/general Gangnam) rolled up in one.
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Oct 16, 2014 20:18
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Nintendo Kid posted:North Korean workers are generally well trained, even if their factory only gets to run twice a week due to resource shortages. Exactly. Even if they are not trained in a particular role, they are eminently trainable. Any assumptions about South Korean intentions about the North need to take into account the role of Korean language. North Korea, for all its shortcomings, has managed to achieve near-universal literacy. This shouldn't be a surprise - softer Marxist regimes like Cuba have managed this as well. South Koreans prefer to work with Korean speakers, just like anyone else. Their monoglotism just happens to be more intense.
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Oct 17, 2014 08:07
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Mightypeon posted:South Korea iirc has an amount of black people due to the amount of US military bases. South Korea is still an outwardly racist society. Many English schools there explicitly state a preference for white ESL teachers (who still face xenophobia in Korea).
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Dec 28, 2014 18:04
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dinoputz posted:I'm disabled (wheelchair) and thought about teaching ESL, and I never even thought that'd be a disqualifier in SK or Japan. drat. Glad things worked out stateside after all... Korea is not very wheelchair friendly in general.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:45
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Nintendo Kid posted:The fact that there's plenty of fatter countries with worse accessibility you moron? E.g., Mexico.
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Dec 29, 2014 20:23
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ChairMaster posted:I'd be curious to see what kind of a source you have for plenty of countries being fatter than the US, I can't find much of anything that would suggest that there's more than one country fatter than America. I'm pretty sure Australia and Kuwait are more obese than the US too.
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Dec 29, 2014 21:38
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ChairMaster posted:I'd be curious to see what kind of a source you have for plenty of countries being fatter than the US, I can't find much of anything that would suggest that there's more than one country fatter than America. Do you have anything beyond popular stereotype that the US is superlatively obese?
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Dec 29, 2014 22:48
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Rent-A-Cop posted:According to the CIA's World Factbook the US is number 18 behind a bunch of Pacific and Caribbean islands, Kuwait, Belize, Qatar, and Egypt. With the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and South/Central America not far behind. Clear Islamophobia, and a sign of Zionist control of the CIA.
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Dec 29, 2014 23:23
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Lord of the Llamas posted:Will the UK and France have to go to war because they both can't have 12 nautical miles from Dover or Calais respectively?!?!?! It kind of helps when the two parties are able to agree on a demarcation.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:04
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