About Being Korean

My wife and sis-in-law were on a fortune-telling website a while back (I'll get the link in a bit and put it in this post...so watch for it). I don't go in for these things (not even newspaper horoscopes) for 2 reasons (i) it's against my religion and (ii) they are total crap (you may be the same for one reason or the other). Well, they put my vitals in it and it came up with an interesting 'fact'. I was a Korean man in my former life. Huh? Ya, I was a Han-gook dude--no wonder I like soju, sam-gyup-sal, san-nak-ji and just plain doing Korean things so much. (For the record my wife was a sea-creature of some sort and they can't remember what Jess was.

So, why don't I have a Korean Citizenship Card? Even when I was in Korea for 2 years I only had an Alien Registration Card, which allowed me to do most things: open a bank account, send money abroad, get a job (legally)...things like that. But it didn't allow me to get a Fantaseum discount card. Fantaseum is a movie theatre in Dae-hang-ro and the gal there said that because my ID# began with a "5" (alien) I could not get the card. Really? Ya, it seems that you need to be an honest-to-goodness real Korean to get 10% off your movie tickets. Weird. There's now some sort of movement to allow aliens to get real Korean ID cards. At present to become a Korean you need to do quite a bit: including adopting a Korean name. I could not be a Korean and use "James Burron" as my name, it would have to be Korean: like Park Soo Bin or something. Some people do this (like Holly and a soccer/footballer I read about but whose team and name eludes me at the moment) but for some that's a little radical. I think there's also a test (in Korean). This makes sense, because I know there are probably thousands (tens of thousands?) of 'Canadians' here that know little of the language but who nonetheless get Social Insurance Numbers (SINs) and even government welfare payments (there's no real welfare state in Korea, so that's not a problem there).

If you want another good source for stuff on Korea try Streetwise in Seoul, this post Super Size Me is pretty good (although I only gained weight while living with my '많이 먹어/Mani-meogo (eat a lot)' mother-in-law and lost it when I got on my sam-gak-gim-bab diet).

Time to feed Spencer his lunch...and me too!