Dear Korean Men

You are not my father.

You are not my husband.

You are not my boyfriend.

You are not my friend.

You are my co-worker.

You may think that because you are my senior, at this company and by age, I should kowtow to you. You would be wrong.

You do not have the right to nag me about anything unrelated to how we work together.

You do not have the right to make my life difficult because you are not paying attention or because you want to throw a hissy fit.

You definitely do not have the right to tell me how to live my life.

You seem to assume that I will do what you want me to do. I won't.

You can go straight to hell if you think I'm going to do anything in your best interest rather than my own.

I am completely and utterly sick of Korean men (not all of them, but a very large proportion of the ones in my life) trying to manipulate me. You are MEN. Stop gossiping and telling people things about me behind my back. It all comes out in the end and it just makes for messy and dramatic episodes that I neither want nor need in my life.

MAN UP ALREADY.

I'm sick of your drama. I'm sick of your rumor-mongering. I'm sick of your double entendres. I'm sick of you as a whole, Korean men.

Read more...

Bangkok

Just got back from a four-day trip to Bangkok for work.

Hot and humid but an interesting place.

More soon!

Read more...

Let's Go to Sokcho

Sorry about the silence on the blog, it's been a difficult couple of weeks.

This past weekend, though, a few of us managed to escape for a couple days of fun.

The preparation for said fun was not without its trials- people that were supposed to come along pulled out at the last moment, we had a little scuffle about where to stay, and we had a little worry about the weather (rain when going to the beach is not a good thing).

In the end, seven of us took one big car (a Kia Carnival), a large whale-shaped floaty, several types of kimchi, an underwater camera kit, a whole bunch of shouty Korean songs, and trekked off to Sokcho, on the east coast of Korea.

A more detailed post will follow (hopefully), but here's the floaty and a shot from the underwater cam:

Of course, after a weekend of fun, the work week cannot begin softly and easily. It's been a bear of a day, and I've got several more hours of work ahead of me at 7 p.m. Memories of the weekend will have to sustain me.

Good news that my mother told me when we talked today- it's a holiday in Korea on Wednesday, hooray! My sense of holidays and days off is totally skewed in Korea because I've only ever worried about American holidays. Korea celebrates Liberation Day on August 15, when Korea was liberated from Japan in 1945. I'm not even going to get into the politics of the holiday, it'll be an endless blog entry.

Oh, I go to Thailand next week for work, so .... probably more silence on the blogging front. To all three of you people reading, sorry!

Read more...