1) Department store escalators are AMAZING in Korea. Rather than have regular escalators with those weird grocery-cart escalators that make your cart get stuck, they have moving sidewalks that go at an incline. So you push your cart directly onto the same escalator that you are using. The escalator floor is also special, and it has a special way that it grips the wheels of the cart so that you don't even have to hold it in place. It doesn't slide around or anything. So simple. So useful.
2) Spicy food. Most of you probably know that I absolutely hate and essentially refuse to eat most spicy foods back home in the states. However, spicy food here is different, and I eat it by choice all the time. In fact, my favorite food in Korea is a really spicy soup. The difference is that in the U.S. spicy just sets your mouth, lips, tongue and throat on fire without any real benefit. Sure, there is a little extra flavor, but NOTHING compared to the amount of flavor that comes with spicy Korean food. Everything here is so incredibly delicious when it's spicy. I prefer spicy foods to more bland ones here, which is the complete opposite of back home.
3) The postal system. I ordered a camera online, and I received it in the mail two days later. The company didn't ship it four business days after the order and I didn't have to wait two weeks after that for it to get to me. I literally bought it online one afternoon and it was there less than 48 hours later, waiting for me at school. The post office rarely has heinously long lines like back home, and transactions take all of two minutes maximum, even without speaking the language. It's one of the easiest bureaucratic things I've ever done in my life.
4) Restaurant style dining. Everything here is communal, so when you go to a restaurant they bring a bunch of sides and you order for the table. Restaurants are most specialty foods, so there is no long menu. You have about five options, and you just order for the number of people you have, and everyone eats together from the same large dish/frying pan in the middle of the table. They have a lot of different kinds of restaurants, and you have to find the one that serves the food you want. The best thing about it, however, is the price. Korean people eat out pretty often, and it is entirely possible to eat out every night of the week (I pretty much do). Every night my dinner costs between $4 and $7. On top of that, everything is filling and delicious. It is essentially the same cost as buying groceries and cooking for yourself. Added bonus: tipping is actually considered rude here. So when they say something costs 5,000 won (about $4), it already has service fees, tip, and taxes built in. AMAZING.
5) Levels of trust. Parents here sometimes get offended if you aren't affectionate with their children because it means you don't care about them. You don't get yelled at for hugging kids, or letting them snuggle up with you during storytime. You don't get in trouble. Nobody thinks anything evil of you, nobody sues. Parents trust teachers wholeheartedly. It's kind of nice not to have to inwardly chastise myself for holding a kid's hand while I walk them to the bathroom, or for wrestling with them during play time, or for picking them up and carrying them around as a joke. It's really nice to not have to think "Oh god, is that too much touching?" or feel dirty and uncomfortable when there is absolutely nothing dirty about being affection with my kids. Plus my kids are freaking awesome.
Things that are not better.
1) No one speaks a language I speak. This is obviously my fault rather than theirs.
2) They wear some UGLY clothes here. Some of the kids in my class have these weird pants that are jeans in front and sweats in the back. I have no idea what their purpose is. It's literally just pants that are made of denim on the front side and sewed to sweat pant fabric on the backside. Why? Because they like to.
3) Korea makes me hate Americans because I see so many of them act in awful ways toward Koreans and/or each other. Last night in Iteawan (the foreigner section of Seoul) we went to a few Halloween parties. On the way to one of them, there was a young Korean boy riding his bike in front of us. He was twelve, maybe thirteen. He was minding his own business, riding his bike down the sidewalk, and out of nowhere some white guy going the opposite direction reaches out and shoves him over sideways into the wall, knocking him off his bike. The guy didn't even say anything. He just did it, and then laughed and walked away. Foreigners here seem to retain the American superiority complex that we have when we're sitting pretty at home. Somehow they bring it with them, even when they're outnumbered and there are actually faces to put to the people we conceive of as somehow beneath us. I don't understand that mentality. I have absolutely no idea how people can be so ignorant as to come here and honestly expect everyone to speak English, and to call them idiots when they don't. You're in their country, why don't you learn to speak their language? I feel like a jerk for not speaking it better, and I'm trying to learn as much as possible and already know more than a lot of other foreigners. And yet, nearly every time I meet foreigners there is one person in the group who calls Koreans idiots, or says something rude, or treats them with disdain. I am completely at a loss to explain it. I guess this isn't worse in Korea, but just something about being here that annoys me. I can't ignore the ignorance of my own countrymen anymore. My own ignorance was bliss. I kind of understand why people in other countries hate us sometimes, if this is a common way for Americans to behave abroad.
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