Intercultural Life
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We’ve been in Seoul since last week and have been pretty busy, so haven’t been able to upload much. BUT we are filming a lot of stuff while here.
Also while here I had some hospital visits and filmed this quick video about restaurants in Korean hospitals.
Not all Korean hospitals are like this, but they are definitely different to Australian ones.
A difference between the Korean system and the Australian system that I have seen has been that the Korean system puts the most stress on high school students with their one exam for getting into a good university, once in uni they can relax a bit. In Australia, while highschool can be stressful, it’s not the only way to get into university and there is not as much stress to get into a certain uni, instead the stress comes once in university where you can be marked harshly and so much is expected of you. I know many Korean students (who go to Australia for uni) have been shocked at how harshly they were marked in Australia because they thought the hard thing was getting into uni, not completing it.
In Korea there is a lot of talk about which university someone went to, rather than what they actually studied… it’s something that contributes to highschool student’s stress about their exam because all the pressure is about getting into the few ‘top’ universities.
Like in most other countries, the preparation of holiday food is done by women in Korean culture. Even in Australia there tends to be more traditional roles in a lot of families on holidays but it’s more obviously defined in Korea. With my mother-in-law and sister-in-law I helped prepare all the fried food for Chuseok. Koreans don’t mind eating fried food cold so it’s food that is supposed to last for a while. Because so much has to be prepared, it takes hours and hours and my body does not enjoy sitting on the floor for that long. So I had to roll my eyes at Hugh exclaiming his difficulty of not being able to choose what to eat.
Since we have an intercultural relationship I expressed some of my Australianess and told him that if he is not helping with the cooking and is just lazing around, he should clean up outside and make the front of the house look nice for Chuseok, which he did.
Chuseok is an important holiday in Korea. Everyone is expected to go back to their ancestral home towns (or wherever their family is) which means millions of people have to travel at once. The traffic is horrendous and the public transportation is completely booked out. Luckily for us, we are already where we need to be! One advantage of living in the countryside.
In this video we show a few snapshots over two days. We prepare food for the ancestral memorial service in the morning (that food gets eaten by everyone later) and have many relatives visit. Since it’s a ‘harvest festival’ holiday we wanted to show the countryside changing around us now that it’s Autumn. Hanbok (traditional clothing) is not necessary anymore, but is nice to wear which is why I put mine on in the evening.
Hey, it’s Hugh. I vlogged about a normal social situation in Korea where we eat so much. Many times we go to a wedding or ‘dol’ and eat so much, then we go out with friends and go to 3 or 4 restaurants in one night… so much food…
I made this comic quite a while ago but it was never posted because it was supposed to go in the book (for the Korean market). Since we are now changing the format of the book a lot (one of the reasons why it’s taking so long) I can post it on here.
Traditional weddings are rarely done these days in Korea unfortunately, but I’m glad we had one. We were carried in ‘gamas’ by our friends, which gave Hugh’s friends the chance to complain about how heavy he is!
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