South Korea – Some Things Got Lost in Translation

Different cultures and languages are generally a good thing – my inability to understand them notwithstanding. South Korea was a case in point. It has similarities to Japan – they’re both safe, clean and neat, with structured and rigid social conformity (although not as bad as retired Australian engineers), and they don’t seem to like each other. Like most cultures, South Korea has its own quirks, most of which were opaque to me. The following are random observations which had me confused, amused, or bemused to varying degrees.

While on the surface there is rigid social conformity, underneath it’s not always so. About 20% of the population smoke, and generally there is smoking only in widely-dispersed, small, designated areas. Surprising to me was a fair bit of non-compliance by locals, especially at night.

Pedestrian crossings are common but appear to be treated as just decorative lines on the road. I didn’t see a single vehicle stop at a crossing.  Jaywalking, while not prevalent, is sometimes OK, although on Jeju Island I did get lights and sirens from a passing police car while I innocently flitted like a ghost across a very lightly trafficked four lane road. This is in contrast to Japan, where at five in the morning, with not a car in sight, the only other pedestrian I could see in the postcode would stand at the kerb waiting for a walk signal).

In Seoul, just outside the major tourist attraction of Gyeongbokgung Palace, there is a statue/artwork of five people in a peculiarly puzzling conga line (mainly, their head inserted in the next person’s arse) – I assumed they were Australian politicians. After our local guide explained what it was all about, I was still none the wiser. This is a fine picture for the feature photo for this article.

I only saw the front door of the Brown Dot Hotel in Busan, so I didn’t get to sample what it had to offer. Maybe they were hoping to become competition for the Japanese Route-Inn hotel chain.

A Twosome Place – I sort of got that one, it’s a coffee shop/cafe chain, but I think I hoped for something more.

A vegan restaurant with a life-sized picture of a deer on the outside wall – I assumed that it represented a customer, not a menu item.

There are a number of governmental policy and cultural reasons why I saw only one homeless person. I affectionately named her Three Puffer Beryl as we were nearly besties, sharing the same patch of concrete for a few early mornings outside the Busan railway station. Sadly, I know she wore three puffer jackets (in warm weather) as I witnessed her morning hygiene ritual, which decorum prohibits me from describing in detail. Suffice to say, it involved unzipping three puffers.

Everywhere I looked I saw dong. It primarily means “neighborhood”, refering to a specific administrative and local division within a city or district, and is commonly used in addresses. However, the syllable dong can also mean “east,” “emptiness,” “same,” or “to move” and so there were dong references everywhere. Accordingly, the Dongbang bus was going to a location – it wasn’t transporting a hen’s night on a male strip club crawl. And although it’s located just north of Seoul, I didn’t have time to experience whatever Jail-dong may have had to offer.

My short time in South Korea only gave me limited cultural exposure, and to me the South Koreans remained inscrutable. Despite my efforts, I just couldn’t scrute them.

---