- Expect a flood of English teachers from Ireland as Seoul and Dublin get ready to pen a final agreement on "working holiday" visas allowing for up to one year worth of work and travel.
- The Ministry of Strategy and Finance (geez, what is up with these goofily wordy ministry names?) will help consumers by posting online the prices of twenty staple items at various major retail outlets.
- The Korea Herald talks about ways to improve the real estate market.
- Kim Daejoong at the Chosun Ilbo talks about why South Korea should not assist North Korea in its economic crisis.
- An American professor visiting the North says that academic exchanges are the way to thaw relations.
- North Korea is showing off brand-spankin'-new apartments in Pyongyang which are part of the drive to build 100,000 new homes by 2012.
- An aging population means an increase in the number of people diagnosed with cancer in 2007.
- Prosectors plan to get tougher on diplomats' legal misconduct (story also here).
- Two hundred scholars have picked "side road, winding road" (旁岐曲逕) as the Chinese idiom of the year.
- South Kyŏngsang Province, Ulsan, and Pusan plan to expand aid to multicultural families.
- The Korea Times has a focus on the online cyber-detectives who make it their business to track down celebrities caught up in scandal. Note the eleven-year-old Mac 500-something used in the picture. Weird.
- The Joongang Daily has a focus on the son of a refugee from Congo, who is getting his bearings living in Korea.
- Will wi-fi equipped phones that allow users to bypass "traditional" cell phone calling spell the end of cellular telecom companies?
- Andy Isaacson of the New York Times takes a journey to the Pamir Valley, "the crossroads of history."
Posts
Question. Will the Irish bitch as much as the typical American, Australian, Kiwi and Canadian?
ReplyDeleteIn my personal experience, the Australians and the New Zealanders teaching English in Korea are almost universally a very non-complaining and adaptive group. Far more willing to get out and do stuff and all that.
ReplyDeleteThen again, most of the American and Canadian English teachers I know are also pretty okay, too. In fact, people I know in person are far less complainy than the English teachers I know online (and even then, not all the NSETs I know online are unreasonably complainy or negative).
In that case all the expats that do unnecessary bitching/moaning/whining online are doing the overall expat community a big disservice... if it is true that the silent majority of expats in Korea generally have a decent time there.
ReplyDeleteWell, I can't exactly say that even the most adaptable are bitching-free. After all, there will always be headaches associated with work, moving to a new place, language barrier, etc. I guess one big difference is that there are fewer "Those Koreans" this "Those Koreans" that type of comments.
ReplyDeleteBut some parts of the online community do serve as a canary-in-the-coalmine role, providing a window into what's wrong. I would definitely take people like Brian in Chŏllanam-do and some of the other bloggers and put them a in a different category from Dave's ESL.
But of course, one of the problems with the online community is that they end up creating a particularly negative narrative that ends up being far removed from what's going on in the real world.
Even though, for example, I think the AES should be dealt with as a hate group, I think the online response has gone off the rails.
Anyway, being an NSET can probably be a bit tough at times, and my hat's off (and my hand is out) to those who are trying to make it better (heck, in my line of work, I've been one of those people trying to make their lives better). But I do recognize that there are those who are just whining and there are those who are actually making things more difficult for themselves and others.