Ye old trip to Korea version 2.0

April 14, 2004

I got back from Korea the other day. It was hot. I even got a little sun burned. I did a lot of walking and not much drinking. I even took a bunch of pictures which you can look for on my website sometime in June maybe...

Korea is definitely different than Japan. Since I have no creative energy I will just go with a top 10 list of differences, in no particular order. I have to be careful what I say cause I plan to send this to Koreans and Japanese so just to clarify, Canada is better nani nani nani!

There was originally a link support every assertion I made, but by 2024 so twenty years later most of the links were long gone from the Internet, but my humble website remains.

1. Korean high school girls wear their skirts much longer than Japanese High School Girls.
2. The Japanese are more brand conscious.
3. Japanese women are much more obsessed with being thin and take it to a whole 'nother level.
4. Korea has more internet cafes.
5. Japanese use their cell phones more than Koreans.
6. Korea has more food stalls in the streets selling such delicacies as Octopus and Sea Snails
7. Japan is definitely cleaner.
8. The cult of cute and all that it entails is not as prevalent in Korea.
9. Japanese women regardless of age or weather are much more likely to wear skirts. As one of my students told me "skirts and boots are in this year".
10. Japan has more foreigners though both countries have over 40,000 US army personal.

In other news, after I learned my contract would not be renewed/extended I had to scramble a bit to put my grad. school plans into effect. It was also Christmas and there are a myriad of blackout days making it extremely difficult to take a day off to say, go to Tokyo to write the GMAT test, I ultimately ended up applying to only two schools. It took a while for my letters of reference to get written and sent... ...but I did get accepted at both SFU and UBC. So come September or probably a bit earlier than that I will be a full time student at the Sauder School of Business at UBC.

Now I have to type in the 1200 email addresses I need to send this to. Sorry it isn't as long as some of my other trip summaries, but most of them probably ended up in spam filters along with this one.

Keep on rockin' in the free world.

Muskie

PS Birthday shout outs to O-Dawg and Phat Pat, word!

PPS One result of my trip to Korea is I probably will be giving some tours of Vancouver to visiting Koreans in the near future, be sure and join in on the festivities and drinking exploits.

PPPS Ten lucky people will be receiving postcards from fabulous Seoul Korea, the other 1190 people will just have to live with the shame and remorse of not receiving a post card in my lovely handwriting filled with my thoughtful observations. Try to go on living.

PPPPS Underscores in emails still suck when typed on Japanese keyboards!

PPPPPS Lone trailing commas in the CC: field cause havoc with Squirrel Mail.

Return to email collection or read more recent travel blog posts.

Words and Images © Andrew "Muskie" McKay.
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