What to expect: First impressions of Korea.

What to expect: First impressions of Korea.

by Korean Junkies

13 topics covered:

be prepared to get lost - to be rich! – food -          Everything is overly cute - OVER crowded-                 neon lights Shopping - coffee shops obsession - alcohol - strong smells .- technology – traffic - super humid

TASK: Listen to the talk and record a 2-minute talk using the parts you may find interesting 
from the transcript offered below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HRYvV-pTOA

ONE -1 

00:21  - So first of all, when you come to Korea be prepared to get lost. Even though it is not difficult to get around the airport after you come out, if you don’t speak Korean

0:32 - all signs are going to be written in some mysterious strange characters that you have no idea what they mean.
0:41  -  In past trips, when I travelled in Europe I was at least able to recognize letters
0:45  - and even figure out some words even if I don’t the language. While in this country you feel just lost when you first arrive. 

0:53  - While people are friendly not many can speak English, so might have  a hard time asking for directions. 

ONE -2 

00:59  - You are going to be rich! 10 thousand, 50 thousand. A thousand won is equivalent to
01:05  - 1 dollar, which means you can be a millionaire in Korea fairly easy. 

ONE -3 

1:10 - Then something we can’t live without, food. Korean food is spicy! I mean really spicy, hot.
1:17  - I remember some people I first met were not able to handle their at all. For me, on the one hand, this
1:26  -is heaven as I love spicy food. And basically have none of it back home.
1:34  - On the other hand though, everything is super sweet! You want to buy some white bread?
1:40  -  Be prepared to taste cotton candy sweetness. Want to eat crisps with while having a beer,
1:46  - yet again cotton candy sweetness. You’ll have to either go to a western market or change
2:01    - your eating habits. Oh, and I don’t expect Koreans really use salt either. 

  ONE -4 

2:03   -  Everything is overly cute. Korea is the land of cuteness. Clothes, accessories, shops,
2:10  --restaurants basically everything in must be cute.
2:14  - Crazy K-pop and Korean drama fever. Honestly, I didn’t even hear about such things as
2:21  -K-pop or K-drama before I came to Korea, but believe me you want it or not if you come
2:28  - here you will come across it! There’s K-pop playing everywhere and people will ask you
2:32  -what’s your favorite artist or band, and you will have no idea what they are talking
2:34  - about and you will get really lost and then at the end you will end up at the same circle  as everyone. 

ONE -5 

2:41  - One of the main features of Korea, which you will notice right away after you leave the
2:46  -airport it is crowded. You may and be really mislead because the airport is really quite
2:49  - and pretty empty, however, just wait until you get to the city. It’s so packed it’s
2:57  - basically impossible find yourself being alone for than couple of minutes. At some extent
3:02  - I love this big city atmosphere but at the same time I hate this. 

ONE -6 

3:09  -When the night comes there are going to be a lot of lights! You will see neon lights
3:15  - all over the place. Especially if you go to a more alive areas you will realize that pretty
3:21  - much all of the lower floors have neon signs on them just popping straight towards you
3:27   - and trying to blind you. 

ONE -7             Shopping. The insane obsession Korea has with
3:39  -shopping. You won’t need to go to shopping districts or actually even exist subway station,
3:44  -as you’ll have shopping right there underground subway station. 

ONE -8    

3:51  - Also, coffee shops obsession. For a long time there was no coffee in Korea, so when it came
3:58  - to this country people went a bit nuts. Consequently, even though it is still pretty difficult to
4:04  - buy coffee in a supermarket there more than necessary coffee shops in Korea. Seoul is
4:08 - actually a city with the highest number of Starbucks coffee shops.

ONE - 9 

4:12  - A thing that I did not really expect was that Koreans consume a lot of alcohol. You are
4:18  - going to see drunken Koreans all over the place. And differently from back home, nobody
4:25  - cares about you being drunk here. 

ONE  -  10 

4:29   - One of my main memories from when I came to Korea was the strange mixture of strong smells.
4:34  -There is a restaurant next to a restaurant next to a restaurant, which makes all of the
4:41  -different mix together. And you’re not really used to Korean food, the smell can a bit funny. 

ONE  - 11 

4:48  - The technology. Honestly, I expected Korea to me more technologically advanced, however,
4:57 - there are going to be many things that you will come across will be just astonished.
5:01 - Also, it’s a country of smartphones, so on the subway you will see at least 90% of
5:08 -the people being on their phone. 

ONE -12 

5:10 - The traffic is going to be hectic. Sorry, but Koreans do not know how to drive. Be very
5:16  - careful not get hit when you just come. There are food delivery motorcycles riding on pedestrian
5:22 - paths all the time. 

ONE  -13 

5:24 - Last but not the least, keep in mind that Korea is super humid. Depending where you are coming
5:29  - from it may be really a shocker for you. From me if it’s 25 degrees Celsius back home
5:32  - it is little hot but still great weather where you don’t sweat much. However, if it’s
5:38  - 25 degrees in Korea you are going to sweat a lot. Humidity really makes the weather much
5:46  - more radical. So, the summers are going to be much hotter and the winters are going to   5:51  -be much colder.

        -CODA 

5:52 - There are so many more things I could talk about, ridiculously expensive fruits, old
5:56  - Korean people, politeness and so, however, I want to keep this video short so I will
6:01 - finish now, as I think gotten a pretty good idea of what you can expect.              

EXpats at SEOUL project. -November 2018

SEOUL project. 

 My other self--  Expats and new City life

Ongoing activity this next month

Develop your 4 skills integrating then in a shared environment

 item #1 

 Make groups of TWO/three to visit    SEOUL   

20 TV  22-minute Episodes -AUDIO

http://ma-serendipity.blogspot.com.es/2015/05/expats-lives-semipermanent-in-seoul.html

Follow the instructions at this ....  WEBquest:

https://sites.google.com/a/xtec.cat/meeting-other-merry-souls-in-seoul/home

 item #2 

Proposed templates to use as a model:

                  1) with Smore  

                 (edit it with this password: projectseoul)

                 https://www.smore.com/7ja25-project-seoul-template

       2) with self-edition pen.io 

      (edit it with this password: projectseoul)   http://projectseoul.pen.io/ 

       3) with  WIX 

      (edit it with this password: projectseoul)  

                       http://mangelcast.wix.com/misitio 

              4) with altavista.org 

     (edit it with this password:   2016SEOUL) 
              http://projectseoul4us.altervista.org/first-post/

Students Product: -END PRODUCT

https://www.smore.com/9g54c

 item #3 

CLASS CONTIBUTIONS

As every TEAM finishes their first 5 entries, show them to the teacher

Episode 1 .Semipermanent Seoul. -ANSWER THESE 12 QUESTIONS ON Erik and Tiffany

Episode 1 .Semipermanent  Seoul.   The expat life 

We introduce Erik and Tiffany and discover a little bit about their story and why they are in Korea.


WATCH THE FIRST 7 MIN AT

https://vimeo.com/53194281 

TIFFANY _  6 Questions (1-6)

1-Where does she come from?

2-What does she think about living abroad?

3-Where is her family from?

4-Does she like conventional life?

5-Is she interested in learning Korean language?

6-What did she think of, at the beginning, when she arrives to Seoul?

ERIK __  2 Questions  (7-8)

7-Where’s he from?

8-What about his previous experience in Canada?

THE COUPLE_TIFFANY AND ERIK  __  2 Questions  (9-12)

9-Where did they develop their first beer?

10-What did they decide to do after listening people’s opinion?

11- When did Tiffany and Eric know Hassan?

12-Which was the reason why Tiffany and Eric conclude to share the company with Hassan?

======= 000======  ======= 000======

CHECK AGAIN:  ANSWER THESE 5 QUESTIONS

Erik and Tiffany

Q1. At the beginning of the video. In which terms are Seoul and Korea described? 

Q2. How does Tiffany feel after being in Seoul for a while?

Q3. Why did Tiffany go to Seoul?

Q4. What was Erik’s job in Canada?

Q5. How did Erik and Tiffany start their beer enterprise?

ARTICLE -racing races and the underdog -CULTURAL DIVIDE

METROPOLITAN -BCN MAGAZINE  -

June 2008

They say a picture paints a thousand words—with so much to say, a single image can be interpreted in ways that are poles apart. A case in point was seen recently in Barcelona: 
between November 2007 and last month, the publicity for the theatre show Cómeme el coco, negro festooned the streets of the city, the sides of buses and walls of metro stations, portraying a cartoonish black face with a wide-mouthed grin and large white lips. The show, by Catalan company La Cubana, was a revival of a production they put on when they formed over 25 years ago.

To the members of the company, the audiences watching night after night and, apparently, many of those who saw this image around them, there was nothing objectionable about it. The director of the show, Jordi Milán, told Metropolitan that he could see nothing wrong with it, that it was a “modern concept”, and he was shocked and angered at the suggestion that it might be offensive.
“It would be a lie to say that Spain isn’t racist, but it’s not this,” he said, questioning why North Americans and Britons should expect other countries to be the same as theirs when it comes to such matters. “The problem isn’t with us, it’s with you.”
Milán said that black people had been to see the show and not had a problem with it (indeed, there is a black person performing in it, taking a role that in the original version was played by a white person with a blacked-up face). However, he also admitted that when the show started he received a letter from a black American woman saying that she felt insulted by La Cubana’s poster.

Concern was also voiced by Ana María Arango, an anthropologist from Colombia who has lived in Barcelona for three years. She wrote in her blog in November 2007 that the image is a characterisation that ridicules the African aesthetic, done by a company that isn’t African. She told Metropolitan, people in Spain don’t think in these terms. “Here, there doesn’t yet exist consciousness about the damage that stereotypes can do in the day-to-day life of people of African descent.”
What has caused this divergence in attitudes? How can certain portrayals of black people be blatant racism in one country and totally matter-of-fact in another? This gulf is something that foreign residents from places including the UK or North America quickly become familiar with in Spain, finding themselves confronted with images that have been socially unacceptable in their home countries for many years. A visit to the local supermarket, for example, brings one face-to-face with tubs of Cola Cao chocolate powder, illustrated by two smiling black people collecting cocoa pods. In the next aisle is the chocolate Conguitos, with a logo of a dark brown pygmy-like character with a perfectly round head, equally round body and (on some products) disproportionately large red lips.

Expatica.com blogger Sal DeTraglia, originally from the US, wrote in 2006 of his “bittersweet love affair” with Conguitos—on the one hand, he couldn’t get enough of the “irresistible chocolate peanuts”, but on the other, while not wanting to pass judgement, DeTraglia expressed his “uneasiness with the branding” (and such uneasiness would -in all likelihood- be much greater had he seen the figure before it was ‘updated’ and his spear removed).
When DeTraglia asked a Spanish friend whether she thought the figure was offensive, she didn’t understand what he meant at first. After some consideration, she told him, “I never really thought about it. The Conguitos cartoon has been around since before I was born.”
Her comment seems to encapsulate Spanish attitudes towards such images and portrayals of African people—they have never challenged or questioned them, but apparently simply take them at face value, denying any racist connotations. “People don’t give it the importance that it deserves because of ‘unawareness’,” Begoña Sánchez, spokeswoman of anti-racism organisation SOS Racisme, told Metropolitan. 

In contrast, those countries that have had a slave trade, colonies and oppressive laws against one part of the population due to racial differences, and where such images were once a common cultural feature, cannot claim unawareness. From the 15th century, when Europeans started exploring African countries, occupying them and trading the locals as slaves, the notion of the indigenous people as ape-like savages needing to be civilised gave rise to ‘darky’ iconography: caricatures with prominent eyes, shiningly white teeth against dark skin, exaggerated lips in terms of both colour and size, and often portrayed naked. These kinds of stereotypes reinforced the idea that people of other races were inferior to Caucasians. In time, the representation of black people came to incorporate not just perceived physical attributes, but also other ethnic stereotypes: slaves in the US were portrayed as lazy, lacking intelligence and less than human. 

Gradually, this has changed. In the States, it did so as a result of the civil rights movement, a gathering wave of protest against those states that had institutionalised the segregation of black people, that became a more general, ongoing striving for real equality. In some European countries, particularly Britain, inhabitants of colonised countries were encouraged to move from their homes to help support the economic rebuilding of nations after the Second World War; they did so in great numbers, settling, raising their families and making those countries home. In the resulting multi-cultural societies, depictions of black people in ways that stereotyped them and identified them with the historical roles they had been forced into, particularly in terms of servitude, became less and less acceptable over the past 20 to 30 years; so when people from those places encounter the images abroad today, they are surprised, to say the least. 

It is clear that the issue of racism in Spain is much larger and more complex than trying to understand why certain portrayals of black people are still common here, but the fact that they are can be seen as representative of the wider issue. On the one hand there is a lack of effort at educating the public, and on the other, there seems to be a fundamental attitude of denial.

The idea of tackling racism (including challenging ethnic stereotypes) is not one that has been seriously embraced by the authorities here. In April, human rights organisation Amnesty International published a report about racism in Spain, entitled ‘Between Lethargy and Invisibility’. It argued that the political and judicial systems are uninterested in dealing with racism in a country that has significant numbers of both new and longer-term immigrants, the latter including a population of gypsies who, despite centuries of living in Spain, are still treated as outsiders by many. And although a bit over 10 percent of the country’s population now comes from abroad, SOS Racisme’s Begoña Sánchez said that change is slow in coming. “The debate here is still, ‘immigration, yes or no?’, when immigration is already here.” 

While Spain does not share the multi-cultural history of the UK, the US or Canada, it is now home to an ever-growing immigrant population and that brings challenges at many levels. Perhaps the best indication of this is the fact that even in those countries where stereotypical images of black people would cause an outcry, racism continues to be a daily issue.

- See more at: http://www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/living/race-relations/#sthash.sSFdsGx0.dpuf




FOLLOW UP:

Did you know....

In the 1940-45 battle for homeland morale, American propaganda makers depicted Germany in a very different light than Japan -link: 

• Germany was seen as a great nation gone mad. The Nazis might have been evil but there was still room for the “Good German.” 

•  Japan, on the other hand, was depicted entirely as a brutal monolith .....   ...  ... US propagandists was to liken the Japanese to animals like snakes and rats.

WRITING  TASK. 


Summarise the article below. (175 words)

For a modern update about 1940 at war... LINK

   ...  US propagandists was to liken the Japanese to animals like snakes and rats.

A Critical Comparison Between Japanese and American 
Propaganda during World War II. 
 Anthony V. Navarro 

    The affects of propaganda, however, last well after treaties are signed and the dusts of war settle. Japan, though defeated, still held inside the same hatred for the United States it had before the war if not more so.  They played the role of defeated foe, smiling to appease their victors on the outside but contemptuous and demoralized on the inside. The United States still often referred to the Japanese as “Japs” or other racially derogatory names.  The words and images left to us by propaganda remain in a nation's collective memory.  They are vestiges of war-time.  However good or bad, those memories linger in culture.  The elements of war are not left on the battle field to wither away with those who perished.  Hate, anger, and contempt are brought home so that “war” becomes no longer a job but a way of life. 

DEBATE_a broken century? - a cup of tea with Jamie Scotmore

His latest video “Welcome to 2018, The Fake Society. The world is dying. This is why humanity is  in an all-out crack has so far been viewed over 1.8 million times on Facebook and 37,072 times on YouTube.

 It’s confronting, highly opinionated, and covers hot topics that are getting people riled up either in agreement or disagreement with James’s views. The Facebook post has been shared over 20,000+ times, liked over 7,500+ times, and has been commented on 620+ times already.

You tube link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFHXDuVA-dk 

What happend to our modern critical thinking citizens?

TASK_ Debate take issues with your world! 1-  LISTEN AND NOTE TAKING   ..................................... 5 min 

2-  Share your notes -- React to content (Group 3-4 people) ....4 min 3.  There are two texts:  (comment 1 ) +  (comments 2) 

   READ your text and find things their authors agree with Mr Scotmore.   And You?  May you agree with your writer on some of his views? 4. in pairs _  DEBATE (9 min) on modern life at this broken century?

 
  COMMENTS 1  

Jamie Scotmore is a 25 year old aspiring Public Figure who is trying to change the world.
Jamie campaigns about political and humanitarian topics by producing and sharing content for his ever-growing social media audience (as of today Jamie has 22,000 Facebook followers, 1,600 Twitter followers, 3,985 Instagram followers, and 11,129 YouTube subscribers). He also travels and has recently been at an orphanage on the Thai / Burmese border.
We’re sharing this because we think he’s worth following. He goes much wider than our predominant areas of sustainability and eco friendly living, but he has the environment’s back. Even if viewers only agree with some of what he says, he’s impressive. He’s passionate. He’s trying to make a change. He speaks to young (and old) people in a way that they can understand. He’s willing to put himself on the digital frontline and argue with thousands of people in his community over very confronting topics. If more 25 year olds do this and can raise awareness with the younger generation about global issues such as global warming, plastic pollution, the meat industry and other environmentally crippling topics, we can be hopeful that the future holds great change.

https://dailycoconut.com.au/ 2018/01/22/welcome-to-2018- the-fake-society-the-world-is- dying-a-video-by-james- scotmore/

 

                      COMMENTS 2   

 This video written and presented by James Scotmore does a fanatic job of highlight and exposing the corrupt nature of capitalism as a system driving the the modern civilization today.  As he writes, “in this society, there are many far reaching ethical implications that come from our actions.”

While I feel this video is very educational and definitely worth watching, it must be mentioned that during the video James refers to religions (including Islam) as “human constructs” and not something to be followed.  He’s right and wrong…definitely some religions and more importantly, what some people throughout history have done with religion, are human constructs.  Just like at how Islam has been used and manipulated in the last 100 years proves his point for sure, BUT Islam the religion, the way of life, the ideology, Islam at it’s core, is NOT a human construct.

We believe and follow Islam because our human mind concludes through sound logic & intelligent that there is a creator, and this creator speak to his creation through the perfect linguistic miracle that is Quran.  The irony is that many, if not all, the problems that this video exposes, Islam has a law/guideline that would eliminate these problems.  But until us Muslims get our intellectual act together, this video will be the new reality of life for a long time.

Please watch and think!

http://islamiclens.com/the-broken-century/

FOLLOW - up:  See Jidienne's comments on the video

https://jidienne.com/post/171929073357/thebrokencentury

UPDATE - (retrieved 10/May/2018)

Readership: Jamie has

29,254 Facebook followers,

1,632 Twitter followers,

3,876 Instagram followers,

11,129 YouTube subscribers)