Originally published in The Groove, January 2008
A Stark View
By Tracey Stark
My wife complains that I have nothing good to say about Korea. After five years, she says, I should be able to look around and see things I really like about this country. So for this month, if you will indulge me, I am going to come up with things I really am happy with. (This list will NOT include any of the following: spitting, littering, noisy eating, criminally-insane bus drivers, Saturday traffic jams, motorbikes on the sidewalks, the smell of garlic and soju on the subways and public smoking.)
Typically, a “Best of” list contains 10 items. Since I am constrained by both space and the number of things I am actually pleased with here, I am only going to get to five. So, here we go…
1. If you have ever had a conversation similar to the following before, you will know the sinking feeling I had at the beginning and the complete elation I felt by the time the call was over:
“Yoboseyo?”
“Yes, hi. I left my cell phone in your taxi. Can I get it back, please?”
“Yoboseyo?”
“Yes, hello. My hand-u-pone in your tak-shi. Please, I get it back, juseyo?”
“Yoboseyo?”
I don’t speak Korean, so I passed the phone to a Korean friend and let him take care of it. In the end, the taxi driver was willing to drive back to where I was (for a small fee) and return the phone that I had so carelessly left on the seat.
This is not a one-off occurrence. In fact, I have left my phone in taxis five times in five years. I have gotten my phone back four times. It isn’t just phones that I have lost and re-found. I frequently forget to take my pool cue home with me when I leave a bar as well as books, keys, clothing, umbrellas, unpaid bar tabs, my wallet and even my wife. Overall, the odds are 10 to 1 that I get my stuff back (the odds are slightly higher for my wife). Those are much better odds than anywhere I’ve lived in the States.
2. Speaking of taxis, I love the fact that you can catch a cab at any hour and pay a fraction of what it costs in, say, Washington, D.C. or Tokyo. Sure, the doors on the cabs here don’t open automatically for you like in Japan, but I don’t think it’s worth paying a 50 percent premium.
3. Safety. Yes, aside from the fact that motorcycles tear up and down the sidewalks and everybody is talking on their cell phones when they drive, it is still among the safest places I have ever been. I hear stories from time to time about an attack or a burglary, but overall your chances of being a victim of a crime in Korea are pretty slim. There are few neighborhoods in Seoul in which I would be reluctant to walk through in the dead of night. Koreans are, for the most part, respectful of other people’s property and physical well being. If you pass out drunk on the side of the street, you will have your money in your pocket when you wake up. If you leave your keys in your car there is little reason to worry about it getting stolen unless, and this is a sad unless, it is parked in a neighborhood full of foreigners.
4. Deliveries. Let’s set aside the fact that the guys making the deliveries would sooner run you down on their 100cc scooters than swerve to miss you and concentrate on the fact that you can have anything delivered almost anytime. If you order something on the internet from any of the major Korean websites, you can expect to have it within a day. If you order food, you can expect it within an hour. This is something you won’t find anywhere in the West.
5. Finally, I must say something about Korean food. Love it or just merely like it, you won’t get a more filling and cheap meal anywhere. The side dishes alone would cost you $10 in the U.S. Take for example my favorite meal here, Bibimbap. That with four different bowls of, for lack of a better word, side stuff, would run you $15 or $20 in any decent Korean restaurant in the U.S. Here? The equivalent of $5 or less. You can’t beat that.
So there you have it. If I had to give five reasons why I am still here, these are the ones that would mean the most to me. There are other things I like about Korea, but these are the top five. Hopefully my wife will stop referring to me as Mr. Negativity from now on.
Showing posts with label the groove. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the groove. Show all posts
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Cat-Man-Don't!
Originally published in The Groove, December 2007
A Stark View
By Tracey Stark
Cat-Man-Don't!
Whenever I talk about our cats in public, my wife cringes. “Nobody cares about Philly and Max but us,” she says. “Put the pictures away.” But I usually ignore her because I believe you can judge a lot about a person by the way they react when you show them a picture of your child (whether biped, quadruped or moped).
I’ll admit it, I gush about the cats (especially Max, but please don’t tell Philly). They make me laugh and give me unconditional love. In return I give them a bonus can of moist cat food that my wife and I have dubbed “crack” because of the way it sends them bouncing off the walls. You really should see it. See, I’m gushing and telling you things that you don’t really care about.
When I was younger, my mother’s single sister had several cats with names like Mr. Chuckles, Napolean and Lady Kitsy. She had imaginary conversations with them non-stop and became the butt of many jokes in our family – behind her back, of course. To my brother, sisters, and me it appeared she had a mental illness. Years went by and Aunt Marilyn stayed the same, only the rotating population of cats changed.
As children, we had cats. Plenty of them. My sisters and I would test their landing skills from various heights, dress them up in capes and pretend they were superheroes by carrying them around like they were flying. But even then we knew that nobody would be even the slightest bit interested in our cat games.
Then one day, many years later, tragedy struck. When my sister Amy turned 35 she began telling me stories about her cats more and more frequently over the phone. “Dexter was chasing Chairman Meow and ran full speed into the sliding glass door and just shook his head like, ‘I didn’t know that was there…” She spoke in a low, dumb-sounding voice for Dexter. It had finally happened: she had succumbed to Aunt Marilyn’s debilitating illness and had claimed the family title of “cat lady.”
The title cat lady explains why I’m not worried about catching a full-blown case of it. I would be a cat gentleman. And as far as I know, there is no such thing as a cat gentleman.
But allow me to get my train of thought back on track.
When my wife and I are out and the topic of pets comes up (and it comes up surprisingly often these days) I flip open the phone and pull up the photo album. “There’s Max sleeping on his back. Isn’t he cute?” I gush. “There’s Philly as a kitten. Isn’t she the sweetest little thing?” And on it goes. Meanwhile, my wife has taken leave of me to make another trip to the ladies’ room or the bar to privately converse with her beer.
The reactions of our friends differ, as do the levels of our friendships. Close friends who know how much I love my cats will politely take a look, nod appreciatively, and promptly change the subject, vowing to themselves never to let it return to the topic of cats ever again. The few friends of ours who actually like cats will give my pictures a perfunctory gush of their own, scroll through a few more of them and return my phone to me.
Then there are those who don’t know me very well and don’t necessarily like cats. These people are my favorite, though I’m almost certainly not theirs. These are the people who don’t want to offend me by refusing to look at my pictures, but do so in various states of distress ranging from nervously babbling about the virtues of dogs (no offense, they add) to breaking out in hives or a cold sweat.
These reactions are understandable. When confronted with a picture of an ugly baby most people are reluctant to tell the truth. We may temporarily recoil from the sight, but we invariably recover and keep our food down long enough to find something nice to say. So why should the sight of an animal you may be allergic to or who may have scarred your childhood in unspeakable ways be any different? (As a child, my cat Joey liked to spray on the head of any human female who was dumb enough to lay in the grass when he was on the prowl.)
With the knowledge of my inherited condition and the love and understanding of my wife and friends, I know I can pet this problem. I can scratch its tummy and kiss its little nose. Then I can dress it up like Superman and carry it around the room like it’s flying.
A Stark View
By Tracey Stark
Cat-Man-Don't!
Whenever I talk about our cats in public, my wife cringes. “Nobody cares about Philly and Max but us,” she says. “Put the pictures away.” But I usually ignore her because I believe you can judge a lot about a person by the way they react when you show them a picture of your child (whether biped, quadruped or moped).
I’ll admit it, I gush about the cats (especially Max, but please don’t tell Philly). They make me laugh and give me unconditional love. In return I give them a bonus can of moist cat food that my wife and I have dubbed “crack” because of the way it sends them bouncing off the walls. You really should see it. See, I’m gushing and telling you things that you don’t really care about.
When I was younger, my mother’s single sister had several cats with names like Mr. Chuckles, Napolean and Lady Kitsy. She had imaginary conversations with them non-stop and became the butt of many jokes in our family – behind her back, of course. To my brother, sisters, and me it appeared she had a mental illness. Years went by and Aunt Marilyn stayed the same, only the rotating population of cats changed.
As children, we had cats. Plenty of them. My sisters and I would test their landing skills from various heights, dress them up in capes and pretend they were superheroes by carrying them around like they were flying. But even then we knew that nobody would be even the slightest bit interested in our cat games.
Then one day, many years later, tragedy struck. When my sister Amy turned 35 she began telling me stories about her cats more and more frequently over the phone. “Dexter was chasing Chairman Meow and ran full speed into the sliding glass door and just shook his head like, ‘I didn’t know that was there…” She spoke in a low, dumb-sounding voice for Dexter. It had finally happened: she had succumbed to Aunt Marilyn’s debilitating illness and had claimed the family title of “cat lady.”
The title cat lady explains why I’m not worried about catching a full-blown case of it. I would be a cat gentleman. And as far as I know, there is no such thing as a cat gentleman.
But allow me to get my train of thought back on track.
When my wife and I are out and the topic of pets comes up (and it comes up surprisingly often these days) I flip open the phone and pull up the photo album. “There’s Max sleeping on his back. Isn’t he cute?” I gush. “There’s Philly as a kitten. Isn’t she the sweetest little thing?” And on it goes. Meanwhile, my wife has taken leave of me to make another trip to the ladies’ room or the bar to privately converse with her beer.
The reactions of our friends differ, as do the levels of our friendships. Close friends who know how much I love my cats will politely take a look, nod appreciatively, and promptly change the subject, vowing to themselves never to let it return to the topic of cats ever again. The few friends of ours who actually like cats will give my pictures a perfunctory gush of their own, scroll through a few more of them and return my phone to me.
Then there are those who don’t know me very well and don’t necessarily like cats. These people are my favorite, though I’m almost certainly not theirs. These are the people who don’t want to offend me by refusing to look at my pictures, but do so in various states of distress ranging from nervously babbling about the virtues of dogs (no offense, they add) to breaking out in hives or a cold sweat.
These reactions are understandable. When confronted with a picture of an ugly baby most people are reluctant to tell the truth. We may temporarily recoil from the sight, but we invariably recover and keep our food down long enough to find something nice to say. So why should the sight of an animal you may be allergic to or who may have scarred your childhood in unspeakable ways be any different? (As a child, my cat Joey liked to spray on the head of any human female who was dumb enough to lay in the grass when he was on the prowl.)
With the knowledge of my inherited condition and the love and understanding of my wife and friends, I know I can pet this problem. I can scratch its tummy and kiss its little nose. Then I can dress it up like Superman and carry it around the room like it’s flying.
“It says here that you worked at NASA, before serving as a Supreme Court Justice…”
Originally published in The Groove, October 2007
A Stark View
By Tracey Stark
“It says here that you worked at NASA, before serving as a Supreme Court Justice…”
Recently, several high-profile cases have come to light in Korea involving people in important positions who apparently have lied on their resumes. It shouldn’t be shocking that someone would twist a few dates or titles to make them look better to a potential employer. Heck, even I’ve extended my dates of employment to make it look like I’ve never been jobless in my life. But what these recent cases have shown is that there is a right way and a wrong way to fake your resume.
Wrong way: Claim to have graduated from an Ivy League school with a doctorate as well as a bachelor’s and master’s degree from another school, when, in fact, you didn’t go to any university. This is what Shin Jeong-ah did, and with much success for quite a while. With those claims on her resume, she landed work as assistant professor of art history at Seoul’s Dongguk University and named a co-director of the prestigious 2008 Gwangju Biennale. (As of this writing she was being sued by both the school and the Biennale foundation.) When she returned from the U.S. last month after her supposed search for proof to support her claims, she was questioned and then checked in to a hospital for stress, as is the custom here when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
Right way: If you don’t have the gumption to go to university for the long haul and get your degrees fair and square, pick a lesser school, perhaps something in Nunavut or Puerto Rico, and buy some quality forged diplomas and transcripts. These things are available on the internet. If you pick something prestigious, you will end up running in the same circles as people who actually did go to those schools. This will lead to awkward moments and unanswerable questions. You will get caught. The lesser-known the school is, the less likely people will even want to talk about it, for fear of embarrassing you (or themselves, if they, too, claim this school as their alma mater). This is your second best choice next to actually going to school.
Besides educational records, your employment history is the other category in which you can and will get stung if you get too carried away.
Wrong way: Claim you are qualified to coordinate disaster relief for an entire country, when the sum of your actual experience amounts to going to school and being a member of an international Arabian horse club. This person is, of course Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie” Brown, the former head of the U.S. government agency FEMA, whose job it was to save people from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
According to his resume he had been a university professor, an assistant city manager in charge of emergency services, and a director of a nursing home in Oklahoma. As it turns out, Brownie was in fact a student at the university, an intern for the city manager, and a lawyer of whom his boss said “he was not serious and somewhat shallow." Now, had the flooding from Hurricane Katrina been a bit more shallow, and the FEMA response a bit better, then perhaps the stuffing in Brownie’s resume may have stayed intact. Still, had he really done a “heckuva job,” the fame he might have gained as a “hero” would have outed him in the end.
Right way: If the truth about your employment history includes something like “Loading dock worker at The Electronics Depot” then consider it completely okay to change your title to “Logistics Supervisor.” Or, if you were a prep cook at a fast food restaurant, feel free to rewrite it to read “Sous Chef, Burger Barn.” Neither of these lies will raise an eyebrow, but both will add to your overall ‘hire me!’ allure as a potential checkout clerk.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my duties as Chief Domestic Engineer. (My wife gets a bit upset when she comes home to find the dishes unwashed and the cats’ litter box full.)
A Stark View
By Tracey Stark
“It says here that you worked at NASA, before serving as a Supreme Court Justice…”
Recently, several high-profile cases have come to light in Korea involving people in important positions who apparently have lied on their resumes. It shouldn’t be shocking that someone would twist a few dates or titles to make them look better to a potential employer. Heck, even I’ve extended my dates of employment to make it look like I’ve never been jobless in my life. But what these recent cases have shown is that there is a right way and a wrong way to fake your resume.
Wrong way: Claim to have graduated from an Ivy League school with a doctorate as well as a bachelor’s and master’s degree from another school, when, in fact, you didn’t go to any university. This is what Shin Jeong-ah did, and with much success for quite a while. With those claims on her resume, she landed work as assistant professor of art history at Seoul’s Dongguk University and named a co-director of the prestigious 2008 Gwangju Biennale. (As of this writing she was being sued by both the school and the Biennale foundation.) When she returned from the U.S. last month after her supposed search for proof to support her claims, she was questioned and then checked in to a hospital for stress, as is the custom here when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
Right way: If you don’t have the gumption to go to university for the long haul and get your degrees fair and square, pick a lesser school, perhaps something in Nunavut or Puerto Rico, and buy some quality forged diplomas and transcripts. These things are available on the internet. If you pick something prestigious, you will end up running in the same circles as people who actually did go to those schools. This will lead to awkward moments and unanswerable questions. You will get caught. The lesser-known the school is, the less likely people will even want to talk about it, for fear of embarrassing you (or themselves, if they, too, claim this school as their alma mater). This is your second best choice next to actually going to school.
Besides educational records, your employment history is the other category in which you can and will get stung if you get too carried away.
Wrong way: Claim you are qualified to coordinate disaster relief for an entire country, when the sum of your actual experience amounts to going to school and being a member of an international Arabian horse club. This person is, of course Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie” Brown, the former head of the U.S. government agency FEMA, whose job it was to save people from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
According to his resume he had been a university professor, an assistant city manager in charge of emergency services, and a director of a nursing home in Oklahoma. As it turns out, Brownie was in fact a student at the university, an intern for the city manager, and a lawyer of whom his boss said “he was not serious and somewhat shallow." Now, had the flooding from Hurricane Katrina been a bit more shallow, and the FEMA response a bit better, then perhaps the stuffing in Brownie’s resume may have stayed intact. Still, had he really done a “heckuva job,” the fame he might have gained as a “hero” would have outed him in the end.
Right way: If the truth about your employment history includes something like “Loading dock worker at The Electronics Depot” then consider it completely okay to change your title to “Logistics Supervisor.” Or, if you were a prep cook at a fast food restaurant, feel free to rewrite it to read “Sous Chef, Burger Barn.” Neither of these lies will raise an eyebrow, but both will add to your overall ‘hire me!’ allure as a potential checkout clerk.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my duties as Chief Domestic Engineer. (My wife gets a bit upset when she comes home to find the dishes unwashed and the cats’ litter box full.)
Does Tracey Have a Boo-boo?
Originally published in The Groove, September 2007
A Stark View
By Tracey Stark
Does Tracey have a boo-boo?
Please bear with me this month. I’d like to share an experience of mine regarding hospitals in Korea. Don’t worry though, I’m in fine health as of this writing.
Almost two years ago I injured my hand at a bar in Shinchon doing something not important enough to mention. I made it to a hospital that could do with a wrecking ball and was x-rayed. The bone poking through my skin led me to suspect I had broken something, so I wasn’t startled in the least when the doctor said, “compound fracture.” Even when he said “you need surgery” there was nothing to do but shake my head and mutter a curse for my stupidity.
Within a few hours I walked into surgery in a pair of shower shoes and climbed up onto the operating table. The surgery was successful, as was the surprise surgery the following day – another broken bone was apparent in follow-up x-rays.
While I lay in bed recovering, I wondered when I would be discharged. After all, I had only broken my hand. It’s not like I had open heart surgery.
And so began my painful endeavor of leaving a Korean hospital against doctor’s wishes.
As the nurse changed my IV bag and injected some additional meds into me, I asked her if I could go home the next day. She laughed and moved on to the next patient. (Perhaps I should have asked in Korean.)
“To prevent infection, is necessary for you stay two weeks,” the doctor told me during one of his infrequent trips to the broken hand room. (Next door to the broken leg room.)
Needless to say I balked. “I’ll be fine, doc. Just give me a prescription for antibiotics and I’ll clean the wound every day.” I thought that would clear things up. He would understand that I could take care of myself and that I knew how to prevent an infection. I would even save him and his nurses some time and supplies. But his answer was no. He explained that I needed intravenous antibiotics for the next 10 days. Pills, he said, were out of the question.
There was no way I was going to lie back and watch lame variety shows for two weeks, so I called in a friend to help me. A Korean, he is rather imposing in stature and good looking enough to command instant attention and respect. After a half hour arguing with first the nurse and then the doctor, he persuaded them to process me, issue me a prescription for pills, and send me on my way. (They tsk-tsked non stop.)
I understand the importance of caution and I do enjoy a bit of pampering from time to time. But there is a difference between giving someone a bowl of chicken soup and treating them like Terry Schiavo.
I believe my case is far from an isolated one, however. About a week ago, my wife had some bruising, swelling and pain in her wrist after an unfortunate run-in with a door. Fearing a minor fracture, she stopped in at an orthopedic clinic and was examined by a surgeon, x-rayed, and splinted up. She was told it was a sprain and that she should keep her wrist wrapped for two weeks. She was full of praise for their care and diligence and marveled at how little the whole ordeal cost her compared to Australia. That night she unwrapped her arm for a shower and found that the swelling was gone and that it no longer hurt so much. As a precaution, though, she wore the splint to bed. In the morning she tossed it in the bin along with the two days’ worth of mystery pills he had prescribed.
I’m not trying to sound ungrateful for the high-quality and low-cost medical treatment I’ve received. While a child may need his boo-boo kissed and an extra bowl of ice cream, most adults can’t take two weeks off to tend to an ingrown toenail.
But who am I to complain? Back home in America I’d have to be George Bush in a coma to get this kind of treatment.
A Stark View
By Tracey Stark
Does Tracey have a boo-boo?
Please bear with me this month. I’d like to share an experience of mine regarding hospitals in Korea. Don’t worry though, I’m in fine health as of this writing.
Almost two years ago I injured my hand at a bar in Shinchon doing something not important enough to mention. I made it to a hospital that could do with a wrecking ball and was x-rayed. The bone poking through my skin led me to suspect I had broken something, so I wasn’t startled in the least when the doctor said, “compound fracture.” Even when he said “you need surgery” there was nothing to do but shake my head and mutter a curse for my stupidity.
Within a few hours I walked into surgery in a pair of shower shoes and climbed up onto the operating table. The surgery was successful, as was the surprise surgery the following day – another broken bone was apparent in follow-up x-rays.
While I lay in bed recovering, I wondered when I would be discharged. After all, I had only broken my hand. It’s not like I had open heart surgery.
And so began my painful endeavor of leaving a Korean hospital against doctor’s wishes.
As the nurse changed my IV bag and injected some additional meds into me, I asked her if I could go home the next day. She laughed and moved on to the next patient. (Perhaps I should have asked in Korean.)
“To prevent infection, is necessary for you stay two weeks,” the doctor told me during one of his infrequent trips to the broken hand room. (Next door to the broken leg room.)
Needless to say I balked. “I’ll be fine, doc. Just give me a prescription for antibiotics and I’ll clean the wound every day.” I thought that would clear things up. He would understand that I could take care of myself and that I knew how to prevent an infection. I would even save him and his nurses some time and supplies. But his answer was no. He explained that I needed intravenous antibiotics for the next 10 days. Pills, he said, were out of the question.
There was no way I was going to lie back and watch lame variety shows for two weeks, so I called in a friend to help me. A Korean, he is rather imposing in stature and good looking enough to command instant attention and respect. After a half hour arguing with first the nurse and then the doctor, he persuaded them to process me, issue me a prescription for pills, and send me on my way. (They tsk-tsked non stop.)
I understand the importance of caution and I do enjoy a bit of pampering from time to time. But there is a difference between giving someone a bowl of chicken soup and treating them like Terry Schiavo.
I believe my case is far from an isolated one, however. About a week ago, my wife had some bruising, swelling and pain in her wrist after an unfortunate run-in with a door. Fearing a minor fracture, she stopped in at an orthopedic clinic and was examined by a surgeon, x-rayed, and splinted up. She was told it was a sprain and that she should keep her wrist wrapped for two weeks. She was full of praise for their care and diligence and marveled at how little the whole ordeal cost her compared to Australia. That night she unwrapped her arm for a shower and found that the swelling was gone and that it no longer hurt so much. As a precaution, though, she wore the splint to bed. In the morning she tossed it in the bin along with the two days’ worth of mystery pills he had prescribed.
I’m not trying to sound ungrateful for the high-quality and low-cost medical treatment I’ve received. While a child may need his boo-boo kissed and an extra bowl of ice cream, most adults can’t take two weeks off to tend to an ingrown toenail.
But who am I to complain? Back home in America I’d have to be George Bush in a coma to get this kind of treatment.
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