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It's not dumb, Korea does not like giving anesthetics at all. Check first and be prepared to insist.
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Nov 14, 2019 06:26
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There are still goons teaching in Korea but I can't remember the last time there was a new one. Jobs in China pay so much better than Korea, the cost of living is much lower unless you're in Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen, jobs have promotion possibilities, and also come with weird perks like months of paid vacation so that's why people are going there. Living in China sucks but the working environment makes up for that for a lot of people, myself included (for a while, anyway).
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Jun 7, 2020 01:04
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Paperhouse posted:What are the hours typically like for jobs in China these days? Jobs vary too much to say anything general. I've never heard of one with a poo poo ton of hours though. Mine was a standard 40 hours a week deal. Theoretically I could teach up to 22, in reality I don't think I ever went over 20. Also the seniors graduated in April, so May and June I would have like eight classes a week. Two months paid vacation guaranteed, another month possible depending on the July schedule, plus all the Chinese holidays like the week off in October. On the occasion I was asked to teach above/extra I got overtime pay and extra hours off for doing that. They also didn't gently caress with me about things like sick days. I only had the one job, but if other China goons weren't lying mine was actually more work than is typical.
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Jun 8, 2020 16:26
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KirbyKhan posted:I got married because of this thread. An Irish fey poster bartered with me for access to the military base. In exchange I demanded a woman. Last year we got married. I love all of you happy last post before Lowtax nukes the server. Grand Fromage, I'm getting you that Uramagi Vesslekov game. thanks u for the gift goon sire I'm glad we have the Kakao, I made a lot of good friends from this thread and Korea would have sucked without it. I'm still hopeful things will work out with the forums.
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Jun 24, 2020 22:35
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If you don't want the job I'll take it.
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Oct 10, 2020 07:04
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90% of what sucks about Korea is the Korean working environment. If you can be in Korea and not in a Korean job you've won the lottery. So anyway give it to me please.
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Oct 10, 2020 07:51
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AHH F/UGH posted:Holy loving poo poo call your friend tomorrow morning and tell him to set you up with that job immediately. Yeah this. There's no downside to trying. That's an absurd amount of money in Korea and you'll never have to deal with most of the most annoying parts of living there.
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Oct 10, 2020 18:12
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punk rebel ecks posted:What are the annoying parts of living in Korea? There's all kinds of everyday frustrations like any country, but like I said the biggest, by far worst part of Korea is the working environment. The vast majority of teaching jobs in Korea suck. Korean work expectations suck. If you can get any kind of real job where you don't have to do that and get weird perks like good pay or more than three days a year of vacation, you've won Korea.
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Oct 11, 2020 01:19
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punk rebel ecks posted:It shocks me that these things can be worse than America. Vastly worse. The US can only dream of being as out of its mind nationalist as Korea (or its neighbors, to be fair--it's not only Korea). They fortunately don't affect your day to day life that much. The face saving is the biggest problem as that will 100% gently caress your life up at work at some point if you're in a Korean work environment. And if you teach English you eventually come to the existential moment when you realize the entire English education system in Korea is fake and you're just there to be white in public, and you choose whether you're okay with that or not. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Oct 13, 2020 |
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Oct 13, 2020 20:44
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It's not easy to explain without living it for a number of years but try reading something like The Korean Mind by Boye Lafayette de Mente and The Korean Popular Culture Reader by Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe.
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Oct 13, 2020 21:05
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:If you have kids, though, I hear school can be pretty brutal unless you're sending them to one of those foreigner academies. I also hear that's starting to get better, however. My main school was the designated one for foreign/mixed race kids and it was horrifying how they were treated both by the other students and the teachers. I would under no circumstances ever send a non-Korean kid to a Korean school after experiencing that.
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Oct 13, 2020 21:08
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Oh yeah Koreans are generally nice and it's easy to make friends compared to China or Japan. But you will have people you've known for years whip out that "did you know Koreans invented tofu, rice, and also invented writing in the ancient Korean kingdom of Sumeria?" poo poo. Whether you care or not is up to you. E: My formative nationalism experience was I got there a week before the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, and seeing my students and other Koreans celebrating the deaths of thousands of Japanese was ugly and gross and it took a long time to shake that initial negative impression. Living in China definitely changed my perspective on Korea as well. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Oct 13, 2020 |
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Oct 13, 2020 21:44
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punk rebel ecks posted:Do kids get bullied and beat up all the time? All day, every day, with the neglect or active aid of the teachers.
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Oct 13, 2020 21:47
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punk rebel ecks posted:Like my child will be physically assaulted daily? Psychological assault daily, physical not quite as much. Also Korean kids beat each other constantly too, that part wasn't special. Casual physical violence is just kind of a thing in Korea. Fortunately they don't have guns. I'd think my school was unusually brutal but anyone I've ever talked to who had mixed race kids at their schools described the same experience. If it's a job on a US base they probably provide non-Korean schooling though.
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Oct 13, 2020 21:58
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:i forget where i read this but someone said that korea's trump will rise to power on anti-japanese sentiment and it feels pretty true. also, i didn't mean to contradict the poo poo you and your kiddo went through, i'm sorry you experienced that. Yeah that seems possible, or a weird Christian cultist thing. I don't have kids thank christ, but I felt so bad for the "foreign" kids at my school. I tried my best to protect them but since nobody else cared there wasn't much I could do.  PHIZ KALIFA posted:10 years ago corporal punishment was still widely practiced. i had students come to hagwon crying because their school teachers slapped them on the face. They still do it past it being banned. We had one Korean teacher who would make the kid get down on all fours with their back arched, then she would get a running start and kick the kid in the stomach. None of the others were that out of their loving minds but getting slapped was still standard procedure up until I left.
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Oct 13, 2020 22:06
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I hope it's a general improvement. It was a real serious problem everywhere I taught and nobody seemed to care.
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Oct 14, 2020 05:02
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Equally ignorant? I never met a Korean who knew anything about Korean history. Even super recent stuff like Park Chung-hee's administration was just a pack of nationalist nonsense that didn't approach reality. And the further back you went the more wild it got. Being able to name a bunch of UNESCO sites and artifacts isn't the same as understanding history. Though, given how education works in Korea, it 100% tracks to me that people could rattle off a list of historical stuff but not understand anything they're saying.
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Oct 14, 2020 17:16
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I think Hangeul is cool Hangeul is fine for writing Korean. It's just horribly inflexible and doesn't work when it encounters any other language. You can vaguely write other East Asian languages with similarly restrictive syllables in it but even that gets dicey. Roman script has far more flexibility, both because it lacks the restrictions on syllable construction and that languages using Roman letters are willing to change their pronunciation to the sounds of the local language. Where it gets silly is claiming Hangeul is the most "scientific" writing system or it perfectly reflects spoken Korean or any of the other nonsense. It's an alphabet. It works for its language. It has flaws like anything else does. It's truly terrible at trying to write other languages in, but I also don't think you can fault an alphabet too much for being bad at writing languages it was not designed to be used for. Koramei posted:I think a lot of expats have a bit of a warped take on the nationalist stuff though. Just about everyone will react very negatively if you as a foreigner have something bad to say about Korean historical/cultural thing; it doesn't necessarily mean their actual opinion, that they'd share with other Koreans, isn't a lot more nuanced. I would argue the flip out reaction to "a foreigner" saying something negative about your country is very much in line with extreme nationalism and works as part of the definition. Someone who is more secure would be able to admit to fault. You see it in Americans--the nationalists do the LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT poo poo and the non-nationalists will take more of a "yeah, that does suck" angle. The need to reflexively defend everything is a sign of the deep insecurity that underlies a lot of Korean culture. I also found it interesting that a lot of the expats in Korea end up adopting that reflexively defensive posture. I didn't encounter that as much in China (though whoo boy when you meet a real pro-PRC laowai) and even less in my admittedly less extensive time in Japan. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Oct 14, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2020 20:52
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and far better than English's shambolic, schizophrenic frankenstein's monster
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I'd agree about Japan, but in my experience the contempt is much greater in China. Not unjustified, given how deeply hosed a society China is in so many ways. I also found that people who only lived in Seoul were more defensive, and I wonder if some of it wasn't from how insulated you can be from the worse parts of Korea by living there. People in Ulsan were a lot more willing to entertain that Korea might not actually be a perfect land of sparkling magic at all times. Korea has a lot of cool poo poo, but my position about that is they've hosed themselves by lying about it so much. How many times can you build a museum about how Koreans invented whaling 12,000 years ago before everyone just starts rolling their eyes when they see "Korea invented X"? You can't cry Han so much and expect anything different. Though to the initial point of all this, I have my issues with Korea but if there was a button I could push to be living there right and making good money not teaching kids I'd be  ing that thing so hard my hand would go through the desk. If you're a straight white dude there's not a lot in Korea that goes above the level of annoyance.E: It's also sad how all the East Asian countries have held their own history in contempt for so long. It seems like it's changing, which is nice, but thinking of their own histories as backward and primitive must have contributed to the fervent nonsense about all the amazing fake achievements. Also a factor in happily destroying historical sites for the New Modern Progress of Big Ugly Concrete Boxes. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Oct 14, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2020 23:27
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Japan's talking about reopening tourism in April next year. I haven't seen anything from Korea but given that they don't have Olympics pressure, if I were them I'd wait to see how Japan's goes before making a decision.
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Oct 15, 2020 16:44
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Yeah nobody wants reunification except the corps salivating over having access to lots of North Korean slave labor. Nobody cares about or likes North Koreans, and they know how hard German reunification was--and that East Germany was much less hosed up than NK is, so it would be a lot harder for Korea.
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Oct 16, 2020 02:35
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I dunno where you lived, but I spent my whole time in Gyeongsang and while it's a bit off for Seoul dialect, it's much further off for Gyeongsang. We only have six vowels in the good part of Korea. 
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Oct 16, 2020 20:23
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I've never heard of paying rent in advance. If your employer isn't arranging it, you have to pay key money which is basically a deposit (insured by the local government, be sure to get that). Then you pay rent. There are some apartments where this is fixed, and others where the more deposit you pay, the lower your rent is. The key money's going to be at least a few thousand USD but you do get it back when you move out. If you don't have savings for that, there are places like officetels which just rent without the key money. Those are usually shittier studios but not always.
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Mar 29, 2021 21:47
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Yeah, dress code will depend entirely on the field and your specific employer. Probably best to assume it's more formal than you're used to, but there's no way to say.
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Mar 29, 2021 23:08
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If they're hiring people from abroad, they'll almost always either provide you housing or a stipend, and if they do the stipend they may also cover the key money.
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Mar 31, 2021 02:37
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Rent might be higher but the general cost of things in Seoul isn't much different than anywhere else. And no, what makes Seoul special is it has lots of foreign food and such, which if you're just hanging out in Korea you probably don't care about. If you just wanted to chill out in Korea for a little bit I'd probably go to Busan. Maybe Gwangju, or Gyeongju if you wanted somewhere smaller and quiet.
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Sep 16, 2021 17:57
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uguu posted:where it's not too hot. Got some bad news for you about Korea.
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Sep 18, 2021 20:27
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Chimie posted:Please god someone give me a syrup update. It's almost June and I'm loving dying. It is pretty late in the season for an update.
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May 30, 2022 18:22
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You won't have to worry about big city driving because you won't be driving in Seoul, there is absolutely no reason to do that. I dunno about Lyfty stuff but taxis are everywhere and cheap. Have the address of your hotel in a note on your phone and you're good. The only time you'll need a taxi is if you're out after the subway closes, anyway.
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Jan 1, 2023 05:47
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Glad I brought it up before I got caught taxi-less, then.
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Jan 1, 2023 19:03
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I honestly can't remember any point in a Korean airport (arriving, I mean) where I had time to gently caress around on a phone anyway. Gimhae is like 20 minutes from gate to exit even with the stop to pick up a wifi or sim. Incheon's a bit more just because it's bigger but it's not like you're just standing around for an hour desperate to post.
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Jan 2, 2023 03:05
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Yeah if you want to go, go. No one cares. If you're worried about weird, you're already weird by being foreign so adding on to that doesn't matter.
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Mar 15, 2023 08:29
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I was shocked how expensive Seoul is now. You can go to Tokyo for like a third the price and everything is better.
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May 30, 2023 20:00
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Go to 7.8 Makgeolli in Euljiro, good bar food, great selection of makgeolli. That whole area is cool and fairly close to Gwangjang. I would only do one palace, I haven't been to them in ages but my memory is they're all pretty much the same since they're modern reconstructions.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:22
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Yeah I remember them being mostly empty but I dunno if they've added exhibits or anything.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:40
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Noticed the OP here is pretty old. Anyone who's up to date on Korea travel stuff want to volunteer to do a new one? I don't think I've kept up enough to do it myself.
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Feb 10, 2024 18:58
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Rad. New thread is best, going to try to restart some of the older ones with new info.
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Feb 11, 2024 02:14
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 13:54 |
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Bugblatter posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4054344  Thank you for your service.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:30
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