Why do Koreans love this kind of tragedy?

After thinking about it for a while, I need to go visit Korea again. Even better, it’d be so awesome if I could move to Korea like for a year and find something to do. Perhaps try to improve deaf awareness or be a Deaf advocate like I notice there was no Asian hockey team participating in the Deaf Winter Olympics.

Obviously inspired by the movie, Joint Security Area, which they created a fake set of the border between North and South Korea.

Looks like North Korea won. The clapping of Kim Jong-Il was funny as hell.

Looks like Barbie is going international as she begins to sport a Korean garb.

This is the first time in Barbie’s 45-year career that she will be getting the Korean treatment. Korean Barbie will be on exhibition in Seoul from Dec. 10 – Jan. 28 at the Seoul Arts Center to mark her 45th birthday. —kineda.com

Here are some pics of my Korean family when I visited in 2001. Cool fact: my sister is deaf.

http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/06/02/korean_bloggers.html

What�s with us, the koreans, that are drawn to blogging? The article says there�s over 5 million korean blogs and one of the commenters think Xanga blog is at least 40% asians. Dammit, I am not fluent enough to be able to read korean blogs. Wonder what do they usually rave/rant on about? Also, this article said Korea has the highest penetration to the high-speed internet with more than 12 million subscribers out of 16 million population or 24.9 people out of every 100 have a broadband connection. That is a LOT.

I remember watching a korean movie about the teacher/student rival (the title name is �Lonely Rivals�). In that movie, one 5th grader brought her cellphone which has a camera inside and her teacher got into a bad mood and hand-slapped one classmate (common sight if you watch a lot of korean movies/dramas). You guess it, ofc, the teacher got videotaped by the cameraphone and that 5th grader went home and released it over the internet. Then, the movie got really interesting. So, that part showed me how tech-saavy their culture is and how young they are doing it. When I was in 5th grade, the only thing I carried was my batman lunch box and internet connection didn�t even exist. Boy, am I sounding like my dad, his I-didn�t-have-what-you-have-now lectures.

I don’t recall Korea being a tech powerhouse a while ago so it’s amazing to me to see how fast Korea is gaining in this trend and is starting to become more competitive with other nations like Japan. I wonder how long before people will stop associating Korea with cheap products like Kia or Hyundai and become into a brand quality like Sony or Honda.

Had my first soju drink. It tasted just like vodka but lighter. You could call it a “Vodka Lite”. It has about 40% proof as opposed to 80% in vodka. Cheers!

See the subject above? I’ve stuffed my stomach with buffet foods (courtesy of Korean foods) in the two days span. One on Friday night and last Sunday. There’s something so American about buffets. If you wanna know why more and more Americans are becoming obese, look no further than buffet places.

We love the idea that we can EAT for all we want and with that psychological effect, we CRAM as much as we can into our stomachs so the money we paid for the buffet would be better spent. We love the word—unlimited—so we have unlimited data plans for our pagers, and remember when AOL starts offering unlimited hours plan? We all jumped on this bandwagon and remain logged till computer monitors get burned.

So, buffets also means unlimited foods and we pretend we have bottomless stomachs and fill them in. As soon as we realize our stomachs are no longer bottomless, we start spitting out comments like “I’m gonna throw up!”, “My stomach is gonna burst open!”, “Oh, I gotta make a dump! Where’s the bathroom!?”. Isn’t that sound sad, doesn’t it?

One pro thing about the buffet, actually two things, is you can try a small portion of the dish and see if you like it or not instead of blind-order the dish and pray that you’ll like the dish. Second thing is that you don’t have to wait for your order to arrive and you can quickly look at all the foods and decide which one you’ll eat first. My dad would often fall victim to a bad dish or wrong order—maybe it wasn’t large enough or it simply tastes awful—and you’re basically stuck with your order unless you’re bold enough and demand another order.

So, what’s my point? While buffets may be a convenient way to “preview” choices of dishes, it lies at the root why Americans are becoming heavier everyday.

Tonight, I gotta hit the gym and burn those buffet calories to avoid becoming into yet another obese American.

Kimchi is the most famous korean food. It takes a role for Korea what Scotch did for Scotland, and what pizza did for Italy. Next to boiled rice(bab), kimchi is the most important component of a Korean meal. It is spicy and fiery, yet earthy and cool.

I realize I haven’t really told about myself as I’m slow (or is it a habit) to complete this website design. I’m 24 years old who shares same birthday as George Washington, currently working for U.S. Dept. of Agriculture as IT specialist. If you think the title is a bit vague, that’s because I do different things around here—from working on a website to making some SQL queries in databases for those managers who want some statistics. As for my own identity, I was born deaf in Korea and obviously, that made me Korean. However, I was adopted at age three by deaf parents—Wayne and Pam. That would make me Korean-American but there’s something wrong with this picture—I was never raised as a Korean-American but as an American solely. I’ve never heard of a Kim-Chi (a very popular spicy side dish in Korea or in other words, you’re not Korean till you eat one) till I was about 18 years old. My very first meal when I got here in America was a happy meal at McDonald’s. I’m dead serious and not kidding you.

A few hundred happy meals, big macs, and quarter-pound cheeseburgers later, I’ve played every sport that is popular in America—football, little league baseball, soccer, basketball, track/field, and ice hockey. That sounds very American, doesn’t it? I went not to a public school but a deaf institution at Jacksonville, IL. I wouldn’t call it a school because I grew up there since I was 4 years old and my parents graduated from there too. I was the only Asian there for the most part of my life, though there were some Asians but weren’t in the same class with me. So, I grew up being American without having an Asian friend till I get into a college…

It so happened that I know a friend named Christine who was a college student working at my institution and she received free board/room in return. She was dating a guy who was a Korean. Yes, a rare occurence when a white girl actually dates an Asian guy, not the other way around. On my long road trip to Washington, DC, I stopped by her place in Columbus, Ohio. It was during that time when she asked me if I ever ate Kim-Chi. When I said “nope, never”, her eyes practically fell out of her sockets and her jaws dropped. She thought I was kidding! Then slowly, she started to realize that it all made sense. She’d meet my parents back at my old deaf school and that I didn’t have a lot of exposure to other cultures, so there wasn’t a reason or even a chance for me to eat kim-chi. So, she took me out to a small Korean grocery store that was near her apartment the first thing we got out of the doors.

When she opened the jar, a strong smell came out of the can that only said one thing: it’s very spicy. I was afraid I wasn’t going to like it, despite I was a Korean myself but Christine assured me to eat it with rice as it helped the taste or at least make it less spicy. I took the bite, chewed, and shallowed it. My first thought was that it was unlike others I had eaten. It doesn’t have the same spiciness that you would find in hot salsa or eat hot buffalo chicken wings. Because it’s served cold, it’s cool to the touch and after you chewed it, it became spicy but not to the point where you have to run for a water foundation. I took another bite, then another bite and before I know it, I was already halfway through the jar. Christine had to laugh at me–I’m not sure if she’s proud cuz she was the first person to introduce me to kimchi or that she can’t believe I was instantly hooked to the dish. When it was time for me to go back on the road, she was kind enough to wrap the jar in plastic and told me to take it. My first kimchi.