When I told a friend a while ago that myself and Herself (and +1 of course) were aiming to return to Ireland in the future, he was shocked. “Jeez man, I thought you were done with the west. I had you down for a lifer”, he responded in near disappointment. I was kind of struck [...]
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These are the long hot days of Korean summer, and I can picture a few teachers desk-warming and sweating out the whole day with nothing to do at school. Others will be away on vacation and some will be getting ready to go back home never to return to this god-forsaken place ever again. For [...]
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A strange event occurred last week that involved me and got me thinking about how a newbie to Korea might have viewed it and indeed how I judged it. It began while at was working out at the gym. Recently, a Korean girl started coming to the gym who paid particular interest to me, first by [...]
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Being “in between jobs” sucks. A lot. You find yourself at wit’s end and without enough money to drink yourself into oblivion. (Not that I feel a need for that much anymore, anyway.) One thing I’ve been thinking of doing a lot of late is writing a novel based on stuff that happened to me [...]
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I am an Englishman that is currently living in Korea and married to a Korean woman. This has given me first-hand experience of a fairly typical Korean family. This is an experience that has not always been plain sailing and is interesting because the nature of the family here in Korea is completely different to [...]
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“You’re white. You’re English. You can afford it,” she blurted out in frustration at our refusal to fork over the green. We’d seen these same gaudy paintings a few days before. Dragons, tigers, bamboo shoots, old men with droopy white beards and other clichéd depictions of China dangled before us. The petite, professionally dressed and [...]
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Brought together by chance, An encounter not planned or arranged, Never knowing who special next to be met; let alone when and where, Some encounters are fleeting and quickly forgotten, While others enriching, to be cherished and long savoured, But such is the magic and mystery – of these encounters of chance! Varied paths travelled [...]
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I sighed. “It’s terrible. I mean—I can get around and make small talk, but I still can’t have a good conversation.” My friend Shannon and I were at a Korean bathhouse, sprawled on straw floor mats when she asked me about my Korean. “I’m so frustrated lately—and I feel guilty, but I stopped taking classes [...]
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It took me until my baby was 5 months old to realize that the word I had assumed meant “cute” or “adorable” or something of the like, the word that was hurled at me from the mouth of virtually every older Korean woman (and a smattering of older men) I encountered meant “cold”. It began the very first [...]
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For three years, I rode an inner city bus to work every day in the US. And if you have ever done that, you know how many ridiculous things and people you see. It was a total freak show. There were smelly crackheads, sloppy drunks, loud hoodrat kids yelling profanity, and totally crazy characters of [...]
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