How I came to Korea

If you click on my profile you'll make a not-so-startling discovery...I was born in Year of the Pig, as they say in the Korean/Chinese calendar. But blogger.com figured it would be more appropriate to call it Year of the Boar/bore...thanks guys.

Anyways, you may be wondering how a fat, lazy, smelly Canadian guy born in a little town waaaaaay up north finds himself in a place like Seoul...and Yeouido, no less, where only a handful of foreigners visit, let alone live and work. The culprit is my wife. She is Korean, as you may know, and when I was doing financial consulting in Canada we came across an interesting client. He found us through his wife's (see a pattern here? Korean women rule the men) reading my column in the Vancouver Chosun (Chosun is the name of the last dynasty to rule Korea--it was ended by the 1910-1945 Japanese occupation) which you'll find here. It's all in Korean, my email and webpage have changed, though. Anyways, this client is a big guy here in Seoul as well as in Canada and wanted (for some reason) to do something for us...so the next time he went to Seoul we went as well (with our first son, second one wasn't around yet).

When we arrived in Seoul for our 2-3 week visit we met his 'godfathers' as he called them. He wasn't mixed up in anything, he just liked the sound of being untouchable. From there we met another guy then another guy and then, the next day, my current CEO. We had what economists call a 'coincidence of wants'. He wanted a foreigner with training and experience in securities and alternative assets and I wanted a guy with the connections to get things done in Seoul. After a week or so of meeting for dinner and such (his English was pretty good and is better now, but my wife did a lot of translation in the first part) he said: "Don't go back to Canada, stay here and work with me." Not work for me...with me. That was interesting. I knew he had a more enlightened view than most Korean bosses right then and there.

So here I am. It's not perfect, I can't speak a lot of the language and sometimes I almost go nuts here what with the differences in culture and business, but it's not bad at all. I also go home every 2 months or so (my wife had baby #2 in Canada and is still there for a bit longer) which means lots of time in airplanes. I always fly Singapore Air but even then, the prospect of being in the air for 100 hours a year is not all that appealing (ya, that's over 4 DAYS flying, over 1% of the year). I do, however, watch about 20-25 movies a year on the plane, which is cool because Singapore Air has individual monitors with on-demand TV and movies for ALL passengers.