This Week in Korea

So we’ve had an easy week this week. On Tuesday all foreign teacher’s were sent to Everland (a theme park) for a day long training session. We were lucky because it’s only about 15 minutes from where we live. Many of the teachers had to travel from a couple of hours away. It was an interesting day. After starting about 30 minutes late we had the same lecture that had been given at the training I attended in September given again for about an hour. I’d estimate that at least 60% of the 1,000 teachers there had head the lecture before. Since Meg hadn’t been to training she enjoyed it more than most people. We then had an hour and a half for lunch. So we ate our lunch, took a few photos with Santa Claus and the Korean version of Minnie Mouse and shopped in the little stores before heading back in for hour two of “training”.

Hour two wasn’t bad. It was given by a woman who runs an English academy and her theme was culture differences. She gave us wonderful tips like “if you’re going to drink alcohol make sure to take a Korean with you so that they can sense if a fight is going to break out and warn you ahead of time.” She also mixed in remarks from her life, such as: “Once I open a bottle of wine I just have to finish it. My husband calls me an alcoholic!”

I think my favourite story that she us told took place about twenty years ago. A high ranking woman U.S. army official was giving a debriefing for some Korean reporters. After she finished she asked if there were any questions. The first one was “Are you a virgin?” The woman just stood there in shock for a couple of minutes and then walked off the stage. The Korean reporters couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. Apparently they were curious as to how a woman could get so high in power (remember this was 20 years ago in Korea) and were wondering if she had sacrificed her personal life in order to accomplish this. Unfortunately, the Korean word for being unmarried at can also be translated as “virgin”. So what they probably mean to ask was if she was married (which probably would still be a strange question to ask a Westerner at a press conference).

Once this lecture ended we had a 30 minute Tae Kwon Do performance which was pretty cool and then a Q & A time. Our Q & A time opened with some opening remarks and then they took the first question. After they answered it they decided that it wasn’t going to work well and so they told people with questions to come up to the stage to ask them one on one and everyone else was allowed to have free time. So we went out and rode some roller coasters for about an hour and then went home. It was a pretty good day. Though it makes me a little sad about how much money the province spent for us all to come in for 2 lectures (one most of us had already heard) and a 10 minute Q & A session.

In other news, it’s been an interesting week in Korea politics. We had the day off yesterday because it was the Korean election. If you haven’t heard about what transpired in the Korean Parliament last week (less than a week before the election) here’s a link to a Youtube video of it. It’s definitely worth watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOWtQR13FtY

The election was held on Wednesday December 19^th. The parties have been campaigning for about a month and there were originally 12 candidates in the race. Out of these only 4 had more than 1% of the vote (two dropped out about a week into the campaign). With about a week left polling showed that the current party in power only had about 19% of the vote, while their main opposition had nearly 50% . It seemed quite certain that they were going to lose and by a lot. So they did the only honourable thing they could think of...they launched a criminal investigation into the leader of the opposition (Lee Myung-bak). 2 days before the election.

From the Korean Herald:

Under a bill passed by the National Assembly, an independent counsel will launch a second investigation into Lee Myung-bak's alleged financial wrongdoings, which range from conspiring to manipulate stock prices to lying about his wealth.

While interpretations vary, legal experts say it is possible under the current law for Lee to be indicted and stand trial. To be tried, however, he would have to be convicted before taking office. They also said Lee's election could be declared invalid if he receives a court sentence.

The end result of this fiasco is we now have a President-elect who has to wait to see if he’s going to be President in a few months or whether he’s going to jail. Of course judging from the video above, he might be safer in jail than in the parliament.