..so this shall be my revenge/cultural interpretation of Korean life. I work at a public Middle School just outside of Seoul, South Korea. I am, however, American as shit. I guess I'm not southern US "LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT MOTHERFUCKER!" American, but.. well, I'm from America. Ohio, to be exact (not that that makes me much better). And I would say that, according to the picture, I do not love America. A line has clearly been drawn in the sand. That being said, Koreans do a lot of things that can be confusing at times, and my goal is to try to explain these things, or at the very least completely belittle them. Is that a good enough mission statement? You know what? Fuck mission statements and theses (thank you). Let's do this.
So for #1, that sure is a long title. I guess I would've been better off saying "#1: Work". Cause Koreans love work. Did I say "love"? I meant loathe. But someone clearly must love it, someone who is in charge of everyone.
Damn skippy, they work on average about 400 hours more a year than any other country (blammo). The distant runner up was Poland (presumably because of all the effort that goes into screwing in light bulbs there. kidding) I'm not even sure that paints an accurate picture. Most people have not just a lunch break, but a dinner break as well. A lot of people work from about 8 am to 10 pm. Also, in Korea the weekend is aka Sunday. Yep, only one day off per week oftentimes. What's worse is that, since mommy and daddy are working that long, the best way to have their kids looked after is to send them to school for approximately that long. But that's for another post.
"Here's a subtle analogy of what you're making me do, boss"
What's funny is that I'm the only person, teacher or student, in my school who does not have to come in on Saturday twice a month (though they got me on my birthday, cockgobblers). That's because Korea was the only high-income nation in the world to work on Saturdays until legislation was passed in 2004 preventing (and this is a rough translation of Korean) ass-worked-off-ness. Obviously the legislation must say that "Thou shalt work on Saturday only occasionally, because our domestic tourism industry sucks ballz" (again, rough translation).
But why? Why the madness? Why are the subways packed at 11 pm as opposed to more reasonable hours? Well there's obviously no concrete reason but I'm gonna guess it all started when South Korea was one of poorest, most trash eating nations in the world following the Korean war. I think this sentence says it all: "More than 80% of the industrial and public facilities and transportation infrastructure, three-quarters of all government buildings, and half of all housing was destroyed." Welp, if your whole country is destroyed in the course of a brutal civil war.. it's unlikely that you're going to be without something to do for most of the day if you wanna become unpoor/unhomeless. So my guess is that legacy still survives. Mostly because a ton of people who survived that shitstorm still survive, and they're old and crotchety as shit. In Korean culture, the older you are (and presumably the more carnage and destruction you've survived), the more respect you get. So, they're basically in charge, or at least raised the people in charge here. Imagine if instead of your grandpa telling you the old "when I was your age I had to walk to school through 2 feet of snow uphill with my sister on my back" bullshit story, instead his story was more like "I walked for 40 days with all of my possessions to the only safe place remaining on the whole peninsula. Shit was blowing up everywhere, communists were coming out of the woodwork trying to kill me, and all I had to protect myself was a knife. By the way, my whole family was killed. Now, what was that you were saying about a hard day at work at the cell phone factory, son?"
Wait, I think my fictional Korean Rambo badass (actually, I know an 80-year-old guy like this) has made me rethink my bitching about having to sit around for four hours and do fuckall. My point there was that you're required to be at work even when there's no work, because.. cause it's work, God damn it! What are you gonna do, not work when you're supposed to be at work not doing work?!?!
"You non-communist killing pussy"
