The Korean "3-Times A Day" Ritual

Toothbrushes at the workplace
Image provided by Simon
(whose Instagram provides a very good peek into life in Seoul, btw)

One thing that strikes me is how infrequently people seem to brush their teeth here in Central Europe. My question is: Why don't people brush their teeth after lunch, if they're at university or at work all day? (I've also met a higher-than-average number of people with bad breath in France and in Belgium which eventually culminated in me developing skills to implicitly and strategically avoid them)

In Korea, it is an accepted norm that one brushes their teeth after lunch. High schools dedicate space specifically for brushing your teeth. Everybody keeps toothbrush and toothpaste (and mouth wash) in their locker, and if you don't brush your teeth, you'll get called out for being "dirty"(smelly is the exact term if you think about it). Even the smallest convenience stores carry several types of toothbrush kits.

At university, students usually eat at restaurants around campus or at the cafeteria. And after eating, they go to one of the bathrooms on campus, take out their toothbrush kit and brushed their teeth before the afternoon sessions. Every once in a while around 15:30, someone would say "Eek, I haven't brushed my teeth yet!" and rush to the bathroom with their little toothbrush pouch.

"Chika-chika"rooms at NHN
Image source: Nara Design

In fact, Koreans care so much about dental hygiene that some companies provide dental equipment. Here's an example:  IT conglomerate NHN (better known as Naver) has equipped its Bundang HQ with a "Chika-chika room" on each floor, a space entirely dedicated to brushing your teeth ("Chika-chika"refers to the sound people make when brushing their teeth) The rooms are completely separated from the bathrooms, and come with toothbrush sterilisers (image below). Employees leave their toothbrush, toothpaste, mouth wash (called 'gargle' in Korea) and other dental hygiene goods in personal cups or pouches on the shelves (not on image).

A UV-ray & heat sterilising device from Kumhi Oral-Tech
(the best image I could find of such a device)

The first time I saw a UV steriliser for toothbrushes was during my internship at BCG. The Team Leader, a Harvard graduate in his mid-thirties, always kept a little cylindrical something the size of a pencil case plugged into his IBM laptop. It was a portable USB-powered UV steriliser. He was the only one on the 10-person team with the steriliser, but everyone else did always brush their teeth post-lunch. 

All the toothpaste!
Again, Image provided by Simon

A toothbrush and paste kit from Perioe,
one of the most popular dental hygiene brands in Korea.

Seoul by Erika Henell (May 2015)

S E O U L from Erika Henell on Vimeo.

Here's a video of Seoul's major tourist destinations and nightlife by blogger Erika Henell. I've been following her blog since a few years, and found out she recently visited Seoul.

She often posts daily outfits and makeup tutorials inspired by Korean and Japanese celebrities (as of recently, Park Bom seems to be one of her faves), as well as cosplay and gyaru looks.

You can peek into:

• Hongdae: Mecenapolis & street performances
• Gyeongbokgung Palace
• Myeongdong shopping center
• Korean food
• Namsan Tower
• Insadong
• Nightlife

Seoul National University elects Korea's first-ever openly gay student president

Hankyoreh, November 23rd, 2015.

Seoul National University (SNU), mecca of Korean higher education and a source of admiration/grief for many high school students, has been home to QIS (Queen in SNU) since 1995. Their website has a roughly translated English version, and is mobile-friendly. 

Kim Bo-mi, a 22-year old at the Department of Consumer Science, ran unopposed and was elected with 86.8% of votes, and a turnout of 53.3%. Kim served as Vice-President last year. She came out four days before the voting period (16th- 19th November), to much press coverage and public appraisal.

She and incoming Vice-President Kim Min-seok (Dept. of Political Science and International Relations) campaigned for the following items:

• To ban human rights violations, i.e. sexual assault and harassment
• To ban Protestant organisations from evangelising inside the campus
• To promote basic civic knowledge, i.e. CPR
• To recognise male students' absences caused by army drills as justifiable

Kim Bo-mi campaigned this August and September for the dismissal of two SNU professor accused of inflicting sexual violence on students. She was also responsible for creating the Student & LGBT Human Rights Council as a body of the SNU Student Council.

She also states that the clause on banning evangelising was proposed by her colleague Min-seok, a devout Protestant himself (and if you have been on a Korean campus, you'd surely agree the constant pestering of the combi - Korean Jehovah's Witnesses and American Mormon missionaries, will get to you). As the SNU campus suffers from evalgelisers who even enter the dormitories without permission and en masse, they decided it was time to put a stop to students being bothered by them. Kim has agreed to speak with the SNU Christian Students' Association to this matter.


After a quick look at the Korean media, I saw that articles treating her election have been thronged with negative, irrational comments (several commented on her physique and one even lashed out anger at her posture in the photographs as 'rude').

One extremist Protestant website has condemned her campaign as one of the "many attempts by the gays to overthrow Christianity and the higher education system".

However, Kim only commented on the fact she has received many calls from reporters since her coming out in the Chosun article.

Reference: 

Chosun Ilbo, November 24th, 2015. http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/11/24/2015112402177.html 

OF MONSTERS AND MEN @ FOREST NATIONAL, BRUSSELS

Beginning of concert. The band also dedicated the song "Organs"to the Paris attacks.

Katrína from Mammút. 

Nanna from OMAM

18:30 Doors open

20:00 Mammút (Iceland)

21:00 Of Monsters And Men

22:45 End of concert

Ticket: 33€
(incl. EVENTPASS)

TOEFL @ Selor, WTC II, Brussels

Office of the Flemish Community (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie)
on King Albert Boulevard II, Brussels

For some reason, ETS keeps saying Selor is located at "WTC III", a building which does not exist. There's WTC and WTC II, that's it.


Some differences between the test in Belgium and in South Korea:

• Pricing: 245 USD in central Europe / 170 USD in Korea (Woooow) 
• Documentation: ID only / ID + testing receipt with ETS ID
• Location: Only at Selor in Brussels / in most major citiesking section. You are also not allowed to enter the testing room before the test ends.
• You are checked with a metal detector, and not allowed to take anything (no watches allowed, but there's a clock in the room anyway) into the testing room, except for 
• You must log and sign the time in and time out of your break before the Spea
• tissues separated from their packaging.
• You must leave all your belongings at the lockers adjacent to the testing room. 

Most test-takers at Brussels seem to be at university level or higher, definitely no high school students there, while most TOEFL aficionados in Korea are middle-and high school students (ages 12 - 18), and some university students applying to postgraduate programmes in the US (companies accept TOEIC, which is much easier). 

And, not many people take TOEFL here anyways. I tried to register for the TOEFL a month in advance in Seoul, but all the seats at the 15 or so different locations had been sold out. I tried to find seats in Gyeonggi-do Province, no luck there either. Plus a glitch in the ETS website saying there were free seats when there were none, accepting my payment and holding my money, then telling me no booking had been made. This problem is so frequent ETS had to set up a separate team in Korea to deal with refunds. Just get a new online registration system, goddammit! (The refund was made within 2 weeks, which is exceptional for ETS - a friend of mine waited a couple of months and called the US back and forth - before the Korea refund hotline was set up).

It also seems that IELTS is much more popular here than in Korea. The IELTS is at about the same price (200 EUR), but students seem to prefer the interview-setting for the Speaking session.

CHVRCHES @ ANCIENNE BELGIQUE, Brussels

 

 

19:00 Doors open

19:45 Mansionair (AUS)

21:00 CHVRCHES

22:30 End of concert

AB has some weird kind of a sound system.

Tickets: 27.00

(incl. EVENT PASS)

I like big cities and I cannot lie

30 minutes to Maastricht.

50 minutes to Aachen.

Liège, for me, is a really, really small town. But then again, there's only a handful of cities in Europe which come close to Seoul's 10 million (unless you count Istanbul with its 14 million, but that's another issue). London: 8 million. Berlin: 3.5 million. Madrid: 3 million. Rome: 2.8 million. Paris: 2.3 million (only!).

So, every time you meet a Korean, take a wild guess, and ask them if they're from Seoul. There's a 1/5 chance they are. And a 1/2 chance they're from the Seoul Capital Area (25,6 million inhabitants from Seoul City, Incheon City, and Gyeonggi-do Province, making up 49% of the Korean population).

Korea's second biggest city, Busan, has about 3.5 million inhabitants, being in the 3 million league along with Berlin in central Europe (3.5), Pyongyang in North Korea (3.2), Cape Town in RSA (3.7), Jedda in Saudi Arabia (3.4), and Nairobi (3.1).
Note: North Korea surprisingly counts nearly 25 million inhabitants.
Note: Amsterdam only has 780,000 inhabitants.

The good thing about Liège is its location. Within a 1-hour radius (train time) lie Brussels (BE), Aachen (DE), Cologne (DE), Maastricht (NL), and Eindhoven (NL). Another hour, and I'm in Antwerp (BE), Bonn (DE), Luxembourg, and could probably hit some small villages in France. However, none of the cities are as dynamic as Seoul. There's history, yes, but nothing young people would find fun to want to keep coming back again and again, such as what Amsterdam and Berlin offer, regardless of their population. Not as much "fun" is the issue.

Here's a (obviously manipulated) photo of Seoul by night.

Image source: Google

How do you live in a giant city like that, and why are you Koreans so obsessed with Seoul (and cities in general)? is a question some people have asked me. It's simple. You grow up in one. Then you get bored everywhere else. Hey, we can fit the whole of Sweden in our capital and still have space left over. Why don't you let us move some of our people so they don't have to literally live on top of each other? Or better yet, maybe we could get two countries, Denmark (5.6) and Finland (5.4) to swap with us. With Finland's depressing winters and Korean high schools, we could become the permanent world leaders in teen suicides.

I've had a conversation with my friend Chelsea (who is also, like me, a big fan of big cities), which went like this:
I: Where would you live if you could live anywhere in Europe?
She: Maybe London? Paris?
I: Not Amsterdam? I'd totally live there.
She: Amsterdam is tiny.
Looking back, she'd probably not live in Paris. The non-existent customer service and two-month summer holidays where everything draws to a halt would drive her crazy.

There's simply more things happening in bigger cities. And more job opportunities (although Ulsan has the highest GDP per capita with its nearly 80,000 USD - close to that of Luxembourg). Seoul's GDP per capita stands at 40,000 USD, equal to the average in France. Also, the next biggest cities in Korea drop to 3 million and under, which means there aren't many cultural activities. Art, music, exhibitions, parties, clubs, restaurants, people. There's new things happening everywhere.

In summary: In Seoul, in Manhattan, in Tokyo, you can decide what you want to do at night on your way out the door. "Well, I could do this! I could go to this area to eat, this other area to have fun, and get home with the night bus/metro". That's simple impossible in smaller cities, because (a) there aren't that many things happening; (b) there's no public transport after midnight. In Liège, I'm the Cinderella of the Place Saint-Lambert because 00:05 is when the last bus leaves (technically, I'm one of the Cinderellas and Cinderellos).

Addedum: Cities by area / population / population density
        Seoul: 605 km2 / 10,000,000 / 17,000 km2
        Lyon: 48 km2 / 500,000 / 10,000 km2
       Liege: 70 km2 / 200,000 / 2,800 km2
Maastricht: 60 km2 / 120, 000 / 2,000 km2
(All numbers approximate and rounded)

Trading Zones in Technological Societies - a SPIRAL Conference (U. Liège)

Host: SPIRAL Research Center, University of Liège

Yesterday and today, I had the opportunity to participate at the Trading Zones conference held at the Cité Miroir here in Liège. Since I'm new to the field of STS, and haven't yet started courses on the subject yet (except for one Sociology course on Actor-Network Theory), it was useful for me, since I got to gain insight into current research from different universities.


Day One (Afternoon only)
Keynote speeches by 4 scholars in the field:

• Sheila Jasanoff (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard): Science-law-politics-governance
• Andrew Stirling (STEPS Centre, U. Sussex): Democracy and pluralism in science and technology governance
• Pierre-Benoît Joly (IFRIS): Innovation governance in France

Day Two
Individual presentations by researchers (incl. PhDs). Some of the projects I found interesting were:

Rita Giuffredi (CERN) & Andrea Cerroni (U. Milano Biocca)
"EU knowledge society and the production of scientific knowledge in the views of the European policy makers: Visions, values and legitimate actors"

Daniela Schuh (U. Vienna)
"European citizenship and the governance of international surrogacy arrangements"

Gert Meyers (KU Leuven)
"Personal data tracking in insurance: from solidarity to fairness"

Federica Lucivero (King's College London)
"Health and lifestyle: a blurring distinction in the age of direct to consumer generic tests and wellness apps" Link to project


Currently, STS is mostly researched at US and UK universities. Since STS as an academic field was born in the UK, anglophone influence in the field is considerable, and faculty members trained specifically in STS mostly hail from MIT. Of course, many also have followed unique interdisciplinary paths, as in the case of Professor Jasanoff (Mathematics, Linguistics and Law), among many others.

In Korea, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) offers a Master's and a PhD programme in Science and Technology Policy, with an interdisciplinary faculty, whose backgrounds range from Political Science, Philosophy of Science, Anthropology, and STS. Their 2015 visiting staff includes a former Assemblywoman.

In continental Europe, the ESST Network comprises 6 universities and offers the possibility ob obtaining an additional degree worth 60 ECTS upon approval of the Masters thesis at the Network level:

• Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain (Spanish, 1 year)
• IT Copenhagen University, Denmark (English, 2 years)
• Maastricht University, the Netherlands (English, 1 year)
• NKUA/NTUA, Athens, Greece (English, 1 year)
• Strasbourg University, France (French, 2 years)
• University of Oslo, Norway (Norwegian, 1 year)

Which explains why several people I talked to at the Trading Zones conference seemed puzzled when I explained I was a Masters student in STS at the University of Liège: ULg does not have the authority to award a degree in STS since it does not have an STS department. It is through its dual-degree convention with the University of Maastricht (which offers a 1-year Masters degree) that students can receive an STS (and if approved, an ESST) degree.

I was admitted to both Liège/Maastricht and Strasbourg, but chose the former for several reasons:

1. Reputation of faculty and content of programme offered at Maastricht
2. Possibility of improving French while being able to write my thesis in English
3. Central location on European continent with easy access to anywhere for travel

In order to be admitted to Liège/Maastricht, you must contact STS coordinators at both universities, and send them one dossier containing your academic documents, an English test score, cv and motivation letter (nothing out of the ordinary). Since my iBT score was close to a full 120, I wasn't required to do a Skype interview, but some of the Belgian students did have to speak to the coordinators as part of the admission process.

Why not apply directly to Maastricht and save the time and money? Simple. My GPA probably wouldn't have been good enough for direct access with scholarship to Maastricht, and I wanted some time to "warm up"before starting a Master's which may lead to a PhD (the Walloonian students want a year to prepare for their year in English at Maastricht, since all their Bachelor studies are conducted in French at Liège) At Liège, my main goals are to perfect my French, get to a B2 level with German (language courses are free at Liège, while they cost up to 300€/2 months at Maastricht).

The Orange Tulip Scholarship, like many, are based on academic results. The Faculty of Social Studies at Maastricht (FaSoS) only offers two students the OTS award. Yay for competition. Professor Mesman, the STS coordinator at Maastricht, warned that it would be wise to not count on the scholarship, and the Liège coordinator, Dr. Delvenne, has informed me it would be possible to continue onto M2 at Liège in another track (international relations, political science, or public administration) if I was unsuccessful and could not afford the Year 2 fees (1,000€ for EU/EEA but 14,000€ for non-EU/EEA).

The University of Liège, however, has a strange policy which was only communicated once I started the school year: my thesis should be written in English during Year 2 at Maastricht, but my supervisor should be someone from ULg. It's an issue I'm currently trying to solve, since it doesn't seem logical for a university without an STS department to supervise students when its partner university does. Of course, the language of tuition is French at Liège, even though the staff has some international experience, which is not a core factor but still important considering my French is nowhere as good as my English.

Overall, I'm okay with the quality of life at ULg. The teaching is not spectacular, and some professors digress way too much in the lectures. I'm hoping the STS courses next term will be more interesting. However, the readings are very helpful, and for some strange reason students here don't borrow the essential readings, so I've got them all now.

Student life is quite good, considering the cheap fees for sports activities, language courses, and cost of living as compared to France or the Netherlands. And yes, good bear, good student discounts for travel (5€ for any destination within Belgium), great concerts in Brussels, and quite a number of international Erasmus students who socialise a lot.

The administration is, as usual in Europe, shit (I really want to say shite, but I can't do that with the proper accent, so I won't). ULg decided they'd try a new online platform without testing it beforehand, and now students can't access their course material. The Law Faculty has to enter all our information hand by hand, and we've been waiting since, well, mid-September. Haha. Fun.

But, otherwise, things are okay. Seoul is more fun, and yes, buses run more than once an hour on Sundays. Belgium, on the other hand, has a quieter charm. And lots of nature. Lots. Plus, the rain-all-year-round season means I have less problems with my rhinitis. Don't even need to use a humidifier, since it's always between 40% and 60% humidity.

Where the hell am I?

A supermoon and lunar eclipse on my birthday!

The last 13 months have been eventful. I moved to Lyon, France, spent 7 months improving my French and almost got 1000€ ripped off by my housing company (full story available at my Yelp review), spent 2 months in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, got admitted to university in Liège and in Strasbourg, went to Seoul for a couple of weeks, and moved to Belgium.

Along the way, I caught up with my relatives in the north of Holland, met a silly and smart German partner, became super buddies with mah Alaskan homie Jamie, and met a bunch of other international folks on the move.

I've briefly travelled to Amsterdam, Bonn, Berlin, Cologne, Nice and Geneva. So, well, there went (almost) all my savings from all the tutoring and interning and translating. I'll just join the rest of Europe in austerity measures.

For the next two years, I'll be living in Belgium and the Netherlands, reading for a dual-degree Master's. I'm also learning German, and might look for jobs in German-speaking countries. I might return to Korea and complete my Conference Interpreting degree. I'm still weighing the options.

On the 'Korean' side of things, apparently my mum went to see a fortune-teller a couple of years back who told her my life would start "opening up"once I reached my mid-twenties. When she told me this, of course I scoffed, since most Koreans finish university at 23 or 24 and they would naturally start having more options in life.

Otherwise, this year Chuseok (Korean thanksgiving) coincided with my birthday and the supermoon/lunar eclipse. That was hella cool y'all!

In November I'm in Brussels to see Chvrches (@Ancienne Belgique) and Of Monsters And Men (@Forest National). Concerts are cheap here, standing tickets selling for  27€ and 36€ each, both including transport to and from the venue (within Brussels). Belgium has a lot more to offer besides waffles and beer! (Also Speculoos spread, Leonidas chocolates, and special meatballs called boulets instead of boulettes, the explanation being, they are bigger than boulettes. I've also finally found beer heaven. No offense Germany, but your beer is just bitter. Here they have blond beers, fruity kriek, and the bottles are smaller (Okay okay, your Radlers are awesome too).

Hope it's sunny where you are, dear reader, because it's a Belgian foggy week ahead for me!

Hello hello

Voilà. Here's an extremely blurry photo of me.

Hi, I'm Emily. I'm a interpreter in training and freelance translator from Seoul.

I currently live in Liège, Belgium, and study something complicated and highly theoretical that may or may not help me be employed in the future.

If you feel like you've seen me or my posts from here, it's perfectly normal. I'm her twin sister Eviley who bludgeoned her for the insurance money. Just kidding. I'm in the process of looking for a more user-friendly blogging platform, and as you can see, I'm testing Blogger at the moment.

I write about living in different places and my observations, and Korea. Korea and I have a long-lasting love/hate relationship through which she leaves me thoroughly confused at times on Friday nights. Which is why I spend much time talking about my Korea problems and curiosities with my friends, who are sometimes as lost as I am despite having been born and raised in Korea all their lives. Some of them are more lost than I am, and I take every one of those opportunities to sound smart for a glorious minute or so.

You may like it here if you have some of the following questions:

1. Why, despite being born Korean, do I feel like I'm a foreigner in my country?
2. As a foreigner, why is Korea so (insert appropriate adjective or phrase)?
3. Why are there so many Koreans in (insert location)?
4. Why do Koreans find  (something from some foreign country) so weird? 

As both an insider and outsider to South Korea, I am searching for answers to several of these questions. I don't have the answers, but I do have 8 years' worth of observations and conversations.