#kmusings

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[mykoreaexchange]

Korean Postage

Just got back my korea postage today. It took 7 weeks to deliver home from KAIST - I used the slower sea mail option. I was so worried I wouldn’t get to see my stuff again because 6 weeks have passed, thank god it arrived! Kudos to the reliable Korean postal service :)

[mykoreaexchange]

Now that exchange ended, it’s time to revisit the wishlist I have drafted before coming to Korea.

Amazingly, I managed to complete everything on my wishlist except winter sports. On top of that, I got to experience many other things I didn’t expect as well. Just gonna add them to the list here.

Uniquely Korea experience

Watch a live baseball match

Attend spring concerts in universities

Enjoy Music Bank show

Feast on Korean BBQ - cheap and good

Try on traditional hanbok

Do some e-shopping over Gmarket/Auction/Interpark

Hunt around for places that appeared in your favorite k-drama/k-variety

Live in a goshiwon

Go paragliding

Try maekju, makgeolli, soju and some hangover ice cream

[mykoreaexchange]

Food Delivery

There’s a takeout culture in Korean schools. You can find pamphlets sticking around the dorms on all all kinds of korean delicacies - jajangmyeon, naengmyeon, jokbal, fried chicken, etc. It’s all convenient and good but it’s all in Korean. I told myself I will try ordering food once while on my exchange here.

And I did! The Korean classes I took here proved to be useful for times like this. We managed to order the fried chicken that we have been staring at our dorm doors for a good 3 months. What a sense of accomplishment haha. And the chicken tasted damn good too. From then on I think we have been ordering food like almost every other week. It’s really useful during weekends when stalls are closed and you are lazy to walk out to eat. Now wouldn’t it be cool if they have an app for food delivery so foreigners like us don’t have to struggle speaking over the phone. Apparently they have one in Seoul, but not in KAIST. Too bad. You can just see it as a motivation to learn more conversational Korean here.

[mykoreaexchange]

Internet Shopping

So I’ve tried buying things online from gmarket last week - the authentic Korean one, not qoo10. And since most of the stuffs sold on gmarket are domestic - that means no international shopping fees and cheaper price! Delivery of the goods was fast too! I received my cap just 2 days after I ordered it. At this point you might be asking what’s so special about online shopping in Korea. Well, aside from the fact that you can get your goods much cheaper and the cheap thrill of being able to do online shopping by yourself in a foreign land, there’s also the perks of being able to order kpop concert tickets yourself! So Gmarket was just a trial for me (and really because I need a cap) to order concert tickets later, which I did through another online site - Auction.

But before you get to enjoy the fun of online shopping in Korea, you will have to face the trouble of internet banking here. Do a simple lookup on the Internet and you can easily see a trove of complaints on Korea’s internet banking. You will need to set up a local certificate on your device first before you can do Internet Banking. And getting that done is VERY tedious, no thanks to all the instructions being in Korean and the technical complexity of doing so. I made 3 trips down to the bank just to settle my certificate. I never understand why a technologically advanced country like Korea still insist on such backdated systems. In my country, you will just be issued with a OTP token and that’s all you need for internet banking. And isnt OTP more secure than local certificates too? Oh well, I guess Korean banks ain’t keeping up with technologies like the private sector.

[mykoreaexchange]

Hardwork

It’s 2:30 am in the wee hours, but you can still see people awake studying for exams. It is true that Koreans generally work very hard. Not just students. In the streets you see the elderly ahjummas pushing carts and working in the harsh weather. You’ll see people of their kind doing all sorts of jobs - clearing garbage, construction workers, and university graduates serving food. That’s an unusual sight in SIngapore, where usually the locals shun these low level jobs and choose to outsource them to foreign labour instead. There’s a strong stigma against these jobs back in my home, but it seems people don’t discriminate against these jobs here. Hardwork is what the society value, not your line of work. Here, it is customary to greet the cleaning ahjummas or security guard ahjussi out of courtesy. How nice would it be if Singapore can have such culture as well.

I used to think that meritocracy is the root of why we have become an apathetic society in Singapore. But somehow, Korea managed to pursue progress without eroding values. I am still figuring out the difference here. Maybe it’s because of different standards of meritocracy. Koreans do not have an explicit policy on meritocracy, but rather based it on the traditional value of hardwork that is deeply ingrained in the Asian culture. Perhaps it is by falling back to these traditional values that Korea managed to preserve its values while going forward.

[mykoreaexchange]

Business and Technology

Rather than just jotting down my weekend adventures, I thought I should also write down my thoughts during this exchange as well. Afterall SEP isn’t all about travelling only. So just to get started, I’ll start with some observations relating to my major - technology!

Students here in KAIST seem to be more technology savvy than our Singaporean counterparts. I saw many people using Slack and Trello - and it’s not just computing students, I see business students using them too! Frankly, I haven't seen any of the NUS students (outside SoC) using these agile tools yet.

And that brings me to the next point - why? Korean business students don’t just study business course, they call it business and technology management. I attended some business courses and I actually learnt much about latest technological trends - Alipay, mobile payment, cloud computing. Compare that to our business course back in Singapore, I don’t think our business students know these. There’s still a gap to be filled between business and technology in our education. That’s why we don’t see much of our (business) students using Slack and Trello. They are stuck with Excel sheets and Powerpoint - the traditional communication tools. In today’s business environment, business cannot be separated from IT. The fact that our education still segregates business courses from technology courses already put us one step behind our Korean counterparts.

[experiencetheremedy-blog]

would it be better if i was easier to read...?