Korean's great excuses

Onemount Waterpark Onemount Waterpark is a huge urban water park that offers an array of both indoor and outdoor swimming pool. There are various sizes and designs of swimming pools which covers people of all ages. The water park offers spaces for sun tanning with the natural sunlight. It has nine water amusement facilities including a thrilling water slide reaching 40m in height, a water-play facility, a running-water pool and spa facilities. A huge artificial wave pool also gives you great pleasure.  Address 300 Hallyuworld-ro, Ilsanseo-gu, Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do Homepage www.onemount.co.kr

Paju Book City This huge complex is home to 250 publishers which spreads across 215 acres.It covers the entire process of publishing from printing to distribution. Many books are often sold on the ground floor of publishing companies  but there are also several good used bookstores, at least two of which feature books in languages other than Korean. The city also contains unusual art galleries, book cafes, and specialized exhibition spaces. Aside from bookstores and cafes, Paju Book City also boasts many attractions. There is also a playground for children, as well as an adjacent Premium Shopping Outlet.  Address 145, Hoedong-gil, Paju-si, Gyeonggi-do

Heyri Art Valley in Paju si Lots of Korean artists of various cultural fields such as writers, painters,architects and musicians constructed the cultural town of Heyri and the architects constructed each building with its own unique characteristics. Within this community, there are artistic spaces, work rooms, art galleries and museums.   The major role of Heyri is to be a pleasant residential area for artists and professionals who can concentrate on their work in one place. The works of the resident artists are exhibiting in galleries and show rooms and art festivals and music concerts are continuously taking place in Heyri.   One of the major features about the Heyri is to preserve and maximize the natural surroundings that has applied to all areas, including architecture, road, pavement, and even fence. Another feature is that the aesthetic sense has been considered in all places. All architectures and items are artworks that will surely improve your sense of beauty....

Pain is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (Actually, I want to share every single text of this book in my blog which is impossible, so that I did my best to extract some passage to help you understand why God allow people have pain. I highly recommend you to read the whole book.) Of all evils, pain only is sterilized or disinfected evil. Intellectual evil or error may recur because the cause of the first error (such as fatigue or bad handwriting) continues to operate; but quite apart from that, error in its own right breed error – if the first step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong. Sin may recur because the original temptation continues; but quite apart from that, sin of its very nature breeds sin by strengthening sinful habit and weakening the conscience. Now pain, like the other evils, may of course recur because the cause of the first pain (disease or an enemy) is still operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. Whe...

The Republic of the Workaholic There is no denying that average Korean people are hard workers. In the long-loved sitcom, Modern Family, Alex who is incredibly smart and competitive high school student in episode 5 said to her psychological therapist one day. “Did you have SAT or Asian kids in you school?” It indicates how hard it is for Alex to compete with Asian kids in her school. Korea and other East Asian countries have been accustomed to doing hard work by rice farming, which is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent size corn or wheat field (Ref. Outlier by Malcolm Gladwell p261~275). The heritage of our ancestors’ strong willpower and attitude runs in all Koreans’ veins. This heritage intertwined with Korean people’s desperation not to starve to death after the Korean War and collectivism to reconstruct our country. Our previous generation literally worked their fingers to the bone to feed their family. Working hard has seated on Korean p...

Getting More How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World I like his approach with an underlying premise that people are irrational and impractical. I think his premise is quite right that especially when people get scared, angry, vengeful and fearful, it is impossible to have a rational debate with people and it has nothing to do with how hard you make an effort or how many you have objective data to try to persuade them. He proves how you can get more what you want from illogical and irrational people by showing various experiences his students have had so far. The way this book shows is utterly different from the typical manipulative way which wins others by remarkable logic and outstanding glib. He presents the way of conversation to truly respect and understand people, so that they’d happy to help us voluntarily get what I want. I think I like this book because this book and my view of life are on the same wave length. And yet I can see clearly a lot of ...

Drinking culture in Korea is no joke. Before I post this article, I want to be clear that as a woman and a Christian, I can’t help but  have a negative feeling about Korean drinking culture, although I drink sometimes. According to a 2014 study by Euromonitor, South Koreans drink 13.7 shots of liquor per week on average which is the most in the world which means Koreans drink twice as much liquor as Russians does and more than four times as much as Americans. Drinking culture in South Korea is a big part of life. Many foreigners are surprised to see how incredibly accessible it is to get liquor in Korea and how liberal Korean people are when it comes to drinking liquor in public places. It is very common that a lot of celebrities such as TV and movie stars and famous singers, brag about how many bottles of Soju(Korean popular alcohol) they can drink, regardless of their age in talk shows. Many times they have enormous fun sharing about their particular behavior...

8 ways of torturing Korean. 1. Make them eat ramen without Kimchi. 2. Reduce the internet speed to 10 Mbps. 3. Don't let them drink coffee after a meal. 4. Don't let them eat Samgyupsal(port belly) with Soju(Korean alcohol). 5. Don't let them lick the yogurt lid. 6. Don't let them bring their phone into the bathroom. 7. Don't let them stand up until the bus stops completely. 8. Don't let them push the close button when using elevator.

The shack A movie ‘The Shack’ came out this year. I saw this movie with the great expectation and good feeling that I took from reading ‘The Shack’ several years ago. There might be some doctrinal and controversial issues in this book, but I can feel enough the author’s struggle to understand and describe God in his own way which is praiseworthy. Although many distinguished scholars try to figure out why some things keep going on earth and what things would happen in the future with an objective historical and macro view, it is clear that their viewpoint and conclusions are very limited and biased because it is impossible for humans to have perfect objectivity and knowledge no matter how hard they observe, test, and collect the data and information unless they have supernatural powers and are mortal. The story of this book starts with a man who killed his father by putting some insecticide in his father’s alcohol and ran away because it was unbearable to endure his father...

Hurry hurry culture in Korea Generally, all kinds of things in Korea operate at a faster pace than they do in other countries. You surely have heard of the phrase “ppalli ppalli” which translates to “hurry up, hurry up.” You also probably have seen many Korean people running in the subway station or in the street, especially in the morning time. I dare to say that you will be touched to see how Korean people do their jobs in a fast and efficient manner in the hospital, public office, bank, post office and all kinds of service industries to save customers’ precious time. Koreans believe time is money and it is not too much to say that the way they do is like an art. I think Koreans get this disposition from the rapid economic growth the country went through within such a short period of time after the Korean War. Plus, technology development and a high-speed communication network have instigated this tendency. Thanks to the technology development, you can do anything you ca...

Churches everywhere in Korea You cannot fail to notice the red neon crosses at night sky in Korea. They are almost everywhere on top of buildings. If a church in Korea shares a building space with other tenants, a red neon cross is placed on top of the building which lights up Korea’s night until the midnight or later. There are also many huge scale churches which have their own buildings with an architectural form of a typical church as you can see in Western countries. A lot of foreigners as well as Korean people get annoyed by these light pollution from the neon crosses at big cities in Korea. "Looking from above, the night scene of Seoul looks like that of a graveyard," one Internet user complained in a posting. According to the number of neon crosses, people might think that a lot of Koreans are Christian. Some research show that 35% of the South Koreans are Christian and there are over 50,000 churches around Korea, over 10,000 in Seoul alone. As a Christian, it...

Why Koreans have a xenophobia I admit that some Korean has a touch of xenophobia which comes from the background of Korean history. Korea is one of the most homogeneous nations on earth because of its geographical position. Since the Korean peninsula is surrounded by water on its three sides, going abroad means you must take a ship which was not easy in the past when air planes didn’t exist. Therefore expats can be easily spotted and identified as a foreigner and a curiosity.  Historically, as a small country, Korea has always been suffering from foreign invasions throughout our long history. It is no surprise that Korean people are hostile towards the outsiders once you learn Korean tragic history. It is no exasperation that there hasn’t been a day when Korean people didn’t have to worry about being invaded and looted by other countries in the past. Our fore-bearer's major means of making a living is rice farming that made people settle down in one place for a long ti...

I just embarked on a new journey. I listed my house in Air BnB . I just embarked on a new journey as a host in Air BnB. I hope that I can help foreigners understand the Korean culture and learn other new cultures from other people. My family is Christian. I've been homeschooling my 3 children for 10 years. Our first son who started going to high school from this year is 16, second son is 12 and my daughter is 10 years old. My husband works for Hyundai motor company. The last family member is our dog who is shitzu. My house is located in near Yadang subway station of Geong-ui Jungang Line which gets you to Seoul within 30 minutes. My apartment is a newly-built and a four-storied building that makes it possible to give you cozy and clean room and all brand-new facilities in my house. My house is on fourth floor with a big attic. There is an elevator, which make it easy to carry your big luggage. There are 6 private bedrooms(two as Air BnB rooms), 3 share bathrooms and 2 livi...

Korean’s great obsession of questioning people’s age. As we are learning English and international manners, Koreans find out that asking personal questions may sound rude and make you look nosey. As long as a Korean speaks English, there is no problem with not asking people’s age. However, when it comes to speaking in Korean, it is a different story. Korean is one of the most super hierarchical languages in the world. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of ‘Outliers’ wrote in his book that the Korean language has no fewer than six different levels of conversational address, depending on the relationship between the addressee and addresser : formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain. If we don’t know the other party’s age, it makes us have a difficult time in choosing the level. Mostly, we choose the formal deference level between adults when we don’t know well each other though, asking and knowing people’s age make us feel comfortable which help u...