He likes the TV show “Luke Cage” but always calls it “Lucas Cage”.

There always comes a point in multicultural marriages where you get scolded for something your partner does constantly as well. I need to try harder to remember Korean names, but Hugh also thinks so many English names are interchangeable. Luckily he has never called me “Nicole” before…

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I’m terrible at remembering names in English, and even worse at remembering them in Korean. I don’t remember the names of so many of Hugh’s friends, so when talking about them he either uses nicknames like “Jewellery shop guy” or takes the time to explain how we know that person in particular.

Hugh also has picked up some Aussie ways of identifying people, especially if they have the same name as other friends. We know a “Jenny Jenny”, as opposed to “Microwave Jenny”. That’s an Australian movie reference there… please guess what movie that’s from in the comment section!

Hugh and his sister watched this drama, so I saw bits and pieces of it but didn’t watch all of it. I was glad to see that a popular drama has a lead male that wasn’t another rich son of a CEO, like almost all other dramas. Apparently it has sparked an interest in men in the special forces though.

What I find a bit ironic is that now there is this interest in how soldiers speak and even some women (who don’t have to do compulsory military service) have started trying to talk like a soldier. Previously, men who finished their service could be self conscious about their automatic soldier speech, especially because people might make fun of it. But now it was in a drama, it’s suddenly “cool”. How fickle people are…haha.

Speaking of name changes, it used to be hard to change your name in Korea, but these days it is quite easy. I don’t think Hugh should change his name though…

This is a redo of a very very early comic, before I even had a tablet. Sometimes flight attendants can have trouble with Korean names, but it seems they have some tactics to avoid having to say the name. Fantastic!

Also you can see what we did today on our vlogging channel. Make sure you subscribe to get all the updates.

Just a very quick comic today!

For those that can’t read Korean, the funny thing is that the first syllable of Mr Gwon’s Korean name and the blood sausage dish are the same, so not only does he want to call himself something that he likes to eat, but it already sounds really similar.

Lots of our Korean friends have changed their names, it seems to be more common here than it is in Australia. What about in your country? Do many people legally change their name?

I did say that we’d do a K-pop Comments on EXO if the drama version of Wolf came out… well I tried! Better than nothing right?…..Hahaha…. Oh well.

In case you are wondering, he went to the hairdressers today and got his hair fixed… after that bad haircut I gave him.

I did an interview with Ahn Junghyun for the radio program 1013 Main Street yesterday which will be on the show today at 11:30am. You can listen on the website or on the smart phone app.

I was a bit worried I sounded very incoherent because I had an echo on the phone meaning I could hear myself 1 second after I spoke, which was distracting. I was also doing it in 40 C heat (that’s 104 F for you Americans ^_^) so please forgive me if I sound rambling. Yes, Australia is very hot at the moment. Especially where my parents live.

So my husband was annoyed that I said his name in the interview at first, but very quickly got over it. His Korean name is Sunhong which should actually be spelled “Soonhong”, but when he first made his passport years ago he wrote it with a ‘u’ because it fit onto one line on the passport form. He has forever condemned himself to having his name read out as “SUN hong? SUN hong?” in Australia.

Koreans tell me his name is very countryside sounding, but of course not being a native Korean speaker, I can not tell that at all. His family often call him “Honga” or “Hongie” but of course when calling out to him drag the sound out. Many times at his parents’ house I heard them saying “Hongaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Hehe.

8.48% of my readers are in Korea. A lot of them are foreigners living in Korea but I do get some Koreans reading my blog. So on the Facebook page I do get some likes from people whose name is only in Hangul. I can read Hangul so I had no problem reading their name out. My husband wanted to point out they were Korean which was obviously already evident to me! hehe

However, I am starting to notice people who are not Korean using Hangul for screen names or on Facebook, so it is possible that they might not be Korean. But in this example they had a pretty obvious Korean name. (When this happened it was not actually the name Kim Minji. I didn’t want to use a real name and a Korean friend was here when I drew this comic so we just thought of a really common Korean name to use).

If you want to learn Korean or even are just interested in Kpop and/or Korean culture I recommend learning how to read Hangul. The romanizations of Hangul are so different from how Korean actually sounds and Hangul is pretty easy to learn. When I first started Korean classes our teacher told us to never rely on romanizations and the sooner we learn how to read Hangul, the better. Correct pronunciation is of course much harder but even just being able to read Hangul to yourself opens up a whole new world.

Also, currently 207 likes on Facebook! Amazing for this little blog I started earlier this year.

I changed my family name to my husband’s family name. Actually, traditionally in Korea the wife doesn’t take her husband’s name (but the children do), so while I was not following Korean culture exactly, I still wanted to acknowledge my husband’s culture. So I decided to take on his family name. Gwon (권) can also be written in English as ‘Kwon’. If you are a Big Bang fan you’ll know this is how G-Dragon spells it.

I’ve only recently started using the name. Though we’ve technically been married for a little while, we had three weddings so I had to wait for all of them to be over. Then we were traveling for a bit and I couldn’t change it on my passport yet. Now I’m actually making it official and changing everything over to my new name. But I’ve realised I’m probably going to have to spell it out all the time! The times I’ve made appointments for things I have to very clearly spell it out. I don’t blame people for not knowing it, it is unusual for Australia. Also, my parents gave me a name with the less usual spelling so I have to spell that out quite often. Guess I’ll be spelling out my full name a lot!

Do you have a more unusual name for your country? Do you have to spell it out for people?

BTW, I was so tired last night (I make comics the night before) and didn’t try very hard with this one. Which is why I didn’t colour within the lines well haha. Sorry!