Diet

I had my annual company-provided health checkup recently and finally received the English-language results recently (the results first came in hieroglyphic Korean). Most everything was just fine and dandy, except that my total cholesterol was a touch high again this year. Last year my father, the physician named "Dr. Harris", told me that I needed to bring my cholesterol down, and I completely ignored him. "Things are happening to your body right now whether you acknowledge them or not," he warned. As I already get a reasonable amount of exercise (mostly from very early mornings at the gym), I saw my food consumption as something which I need to tackle.

In Korea, salad can be an anytime food!

I have never been a dieter. I'm generally conscious of staying away from fast food, sweets, binge eating, excessive amounts of carbs and all that. But though my diet is generally based around trying to eat more fruits and vegetables (and, hence, less of the bad stuff) I have never been strict about it. Nor have I needed to be. Since coming home one summer from college to have my mom calling me "chunky", I have never carried more than a couple excess kilograms. Since moving to Korea, my weight has stayed lower than when I lived in the US. And there is a reason for that: portion sizes at restaurants are smaller here, and I walk a lot more nowadays ... I have not owned a car for over 2 years.

But, heeding my father's warning for once, I decided I wanted to try to be more vigilant of my eating. Time for a diet... or, as the Koreans say, "DA-EE-OH-TUH!"  (다이어트)

So, protein shakes from the gym are out -- I don't know what is in those. Milk too -- unnecessary calories and fat. Out with cholesterol-heavy egg yolks. More fish-eating in the Samsung cafeteria and less pizza, pasta, fried pork cutlet... oh those things are so delicious though! And, I decided to try logging my foods last week into the Samsung S-Health application built into my new Samsung Galaxy S5 phone.

Spicy squid and a lot of foods that S-Health did not classify without a fight

Monday morning rolled around, and as usual I headed straight off the long bus ride from Seoul to Samsung Digital City in Suwon, darting towards the basement cafeteria in the Mobile R&D building. This cafeteria is quite new and most foreigners in Suwon like it for the ample variety of foods -- not everything is Korean food! I grabbed my usual morning salad, something I never considered a breakfast food until I moved to Korea, where I have learned that salad could be an anytime food. I sat down with my plastic tray, whipped out the phone, and here I went. Cherry tomatoes...uh oh, "Set Portion Size". My choices are cups, grams, and calories. Now I have no idea how many calories are in cherry tomatoes, and I struggle with the metric system, so cups... how many are 3 cherry tomatoes? 0.3 cups?? Sounded good to me! Sweet potato, maybe 0.5 cup? Rotini, grated parmesan cheese, lettuce, radishes, 2 cooked egg whites. I was already tired of this experiment! The app counted 326 calories...no salad dressing helped keep that number down.

Next, lunch in the Samsung cafeteria. For better or worse, I typically eat 2-3 meals per day in the Samsung cafeteria in Suwon. There are several reasons for this: I am not a great cook (and a lazy one at that), the food is convenient, it generally seems healthy (if I make the right food choices), it is dirt cheap (heavily subsidized by the company). And let's face it, I now commute at least 50 minutes each way to work now, and if I'm working late then eating at Samsung cafeteria is my only antidote from preventing starvation.

jin-mee tong-dak, seaweed soup, and the ubiquitous purple rice

With my newfound dedication to seafood, I went for spicy boiled squid. And again, whipped out the app at the lunch table. This time, I used the photo-taking option in the app to document my food, but this doesn't enter any information into the app. So, manually plugging away...  boiled squid, white rice, bean sprouts, dried seaweed, cherry tomatoes, pineapple chunks, kimchi, honey-baked ham, potatoes, miso soup, red pepper paste. I had no idea how to classify the white sauce covering the fruits. Though the menu board outside the cafeteria helpfully posts the estimated calorie values for each meal (most are 800-900 calories), I still found entering the portion sizes difficult and tedious.

I eat a lot of snacks at my desk during the day, and now I needed to input those too! 2 americanos, 30 almonds, 4 tangerines (in season now), some of my colleague's bagged popcorn, 3 mini-bananas, a red pepper.

For dinner, I skipped the cafeteria, and ordered a takeout salmon salad from Greenbasket, a gem of a little salad restaurant between the bus stop and home in Seoul. Again, I tediously estimated portion sizes and avoided the salad dressing. Still starving after the salad, I chugged a few glasses of water and ate 60 grams of cashew nuts (don't remember *how* I calculated that). For Day One: 2,508 calories. And to think of how many calories I burned trying to enter my foods into the S-Health app! I was hungry and tired of dieting already.

Thank God for Greenbasket!

The rest of the week got logged too...
Tuesday (2504 calories)
Breakfast: salad topped with tuna croquette.
Lunch: Spicy tuna stew, with a side of tofu, kimchi, seaweed, and purple rice. Turns out that purple rice is just white rice stained with a sprinkling of black rice. The things you learn when tracking your diet! (S-Health, of course, did not have an entry for "purple rice").
Snack: Mini Bananas, Carrots, Tangerines. I cheated when my coworkers started handing out chocolate and crackers in the afternoon, as well as a couple of the Honey Butter potato chips which Koreans are obsessing over at the moment (no idea why).
Dinner: Again went to Greenbasket (thank God for that place!). Salad topped with grilled chicken, again skipped the delicious dressing, again starving afterwards.
4th meal: Starving, so I ate cashew nuts and a cup of yogurt.

Wednesday (2737 calories)
Breakfast: Salad topped with Fried tofu
Lunch: Grilled mackeral with tofu stew, dried anchovies, kimchi, and some korean leaf which I didn't know the name of (neither did my silly S-Health app, of course)
Dinner: This time I made it a full 3-meal day at Samsung cafeteria! Tofu with rice, mushrooms, seaweed, zucchini, radishes. Side of chicken sausage.
Snacks: the usual, plus an energy bar I bought from the convenience store near the bus stop on the way home (as I was again starving!)

Thursday team lunch (I am not in the photo... it is my work team, trust me!)

Thursday (2772 calories)
Breakfast: Salad with a side of regular tofu
Lunch: Today we had a team lunch at a local steak and pasta restaurant near the Digital City. Per Korean custom, we shared a lot of small dishes which provided delicious variety, but made it hellish to record. Especially having the phone on the table the whole meal led to some teasing from my teammates. Besides steak and linguine, fruit & nut bread, olive oil, lettuce + cherry tomatoes, roasted potato, portabella mushrooms, truffle balls and brownies for dessert.
Dinner: Another meal out, this time with alums of the Darden business school living in Seoul. We met at a Mexican food restaurant, and again shared dishes family-style. To not be completely obnoxious, I did not keep my phone on the table and I worked hard to mentally record everything going into my mouth: chicken burrito, chips with guacamole, french fries, fried calamari, 1 porter beer.
Snacks: The usual + a slice of banana cake (with icing) I received when we celebrated my colleague's birthday.

Friday (2980 calories)
Breakfast: Salad topped with bacon
Lunch: A Korean style chicken dish, jin-mee tong-dak (진미통닭). Seaweed soup, crabmeat mixed with carrots ad cucumbers, seaweed, cabbage, and the purple rice.
Snacks: The usual fruits/vegetables plus a chocolate chip cookie gifted to me by a teammate.
Dinner: I ran into one of my colleagues as we were dropped off the Samsung shuttle bus in my neighborhood and followed him to a sushi restaurant. As you can imagine, sushi restaurant completely defeated S-Health. Being able to identify every type of fish and side dish while eating in a foreign country is almost impossible. Plus I was so tired of obnoxiously logging everything that I again tried to mentally record everything, but the sake inhibited my memory substantially (and sake has a lot of calories, who knew!).

The first of multiple dinner plates at American Thanksgiving in Korea (on Saturday)

So, as you can see, actually tracking what you eat is an exhaustive, and exhausting process. S-Health was difficult to use: though you can take pictures of what you eat the app does not do you any favors by identifying the foods you are eating from the pictures. Units are sometimes unconventional and can be difficult to estimate when you are not preparing everything yourself -- even then you would need to measure all the portion sizes quite closely. The app seems built for the American customer as it lacked even Korean foods, and I also could not enter the names of niche Korean vegetables in the Korean language. This lack of Korean support is strange because so many parts of my phone only speak to me in Korean jibberish.

In summary, diet tracking was every bit as painful as you can imagine. Last Saturday I celebrated American Thanksgiving with my friends, and per American custom I gorged on the feast of foods we had available (my friends are quite excellent chefs). No calorie counting, of course!! At the end of the meal, I lay down, satisfied with my gluttony and my complete annihilation of all the fastidious diet tracking.

The American Thanksgiving party... strike a funny pose!

Running in Korea

After moving to Korea my running habit has mostly gone on hold. Before business school I had become quite competitive in races ranging from 5km to marathon, and during business school also I would run frequently as a way to overcome the stresses of schoolwork and job searching.

But my first run in Seoul was not pleasant – under an overhead highway along the Han River at night. There is really nowhere else nearby to run in this crowded city, and after coming home that evening I felt sick. The regular smog in this city is a regular reminder of the perils of consistent aerobic activity outdoors – the air is not "China-bad" but it is still not good. Before moving here I was told that "Koreans don't really go jogging" and have seen that bicycling and walking are far more popular instead. After a winter of getting fat and lazy I finally joined a good gym near my house in April 2013 ... first time in my life that I ever signed up for a gym membership ... and I haven't looked back.

That said, my foreign colleagues at Samsung were a little more eager for running last year. We started with the Color Me Rad 5K in July, which really was more of a walk. In fact, I would estimate that about 90% of people walked the course. I have never seen so many people walking on a "race course". There were no time chips and the event was meant to be a good time, but I still was surprised that other people weren't jogging this thing. My foreign colleagues ran at a warmup pace and still easily passed hundreds of people. There was a ton of dry paint thrown at us and a great DJ blasting dance music at the finish line. It was fun.

In the fall we became more ambitious and signed up for the Pink Ribbon 10K in October 2013. Thankfully our fabulous Korean friend Hyewon signed us up on the Korean website, and we had a beautiful mid-autumn day to run on Yeouido Island. The event was designed to raise breast cancer awareness and I have never seen so much bright pink in one place! Despite absolutely no outdoor jogging I managed to run pretty decently -- nowhere near my peak but still was top finisher in my group. And given that there were maybe only 50 foreigners which I saw in the whole race, I could easily have been the top foreign finisher!

The next week a few of us double-dipped and ran the Seoul Race 10K along the Cheonggyecheon Stream. Was a bit chillier and a more serious event. This was the first race where the real Korean runners came out ... the ones who crank out 6-minute miles in their sleep. I might have been at that level long ago but not now -- nonetheless, I still managed to turn in a decent performance.

The highlights for Seoul Race were certainly off the course though. Before the race as we gathered in City Hall Plaza, a TV camera crew walked up to my group of foreigners for an interview! I will never know who got to watch my tape of me talking about life in Korea, but it was certainly an experience which I wouldn't have back home. Then after the race was a concert and my friend Whit got selected to dance with the band. Oh expat life!

Strange foreign dude dancing at the end of a race course... ALERT!!

This year, some of my racing friends moved out of Korea and there were no races until I joined some of my gym colleagues at Spartan Race Korea. The race was in hilly, scenic Pyeongchang – home of the 2018 Winter Olympics. But given the amount of traffic we endured to get there from Seoul on a Saturday morning, I think I will avoid the games in 4 years time. The race was sponsored by Reebok and I think the U.S. Army shipped an entire brigade to the race course, so I didn't feel so out of place as a foreigner here.

Not so muddy before the Spartan Race...

As the 7km course essentially went up a ski mountain, and given the substantial obstacles one had to clear to get to the finish line, this was not going to be a fun run. We jumped into mud pits, we ran on rocky mountain trails through the forest, we jumped walls, ducked under barbed wire, climbed ropes ...well, I wasn't able to do all of it, and given my uncertainty about the obstacles I didn't run quite my fastest, but this was fun and I was glad to have endured this. Still managed to finish in the top 10% overall, so I may need to do more obstacle racing in the future!

...just a tad muddier and more exhausted at the end.

In short, running exists in Korea, though not nearly as popular as back home in the USA. Running races as a foreigner is not difficult ... though it helps to have a Korean who can navigate the language and payment barriers on some of these websites. And, as with many things in culturally homogenous South Korea, you're a bit of a novelty racing as a foreigner, obstacle races excepted. The days are starting to turn chilly in Seoul now but I hope to be back for more races in 2015!

Dad Visits

When I first moved to Korea, I certainly thought my father would be the parent to visit first. After all, this is the parent who racks up frequent flyer miles in his independent consulting gig. The parent who worked for a Japanese company at one point, and has traveled to South Africa, Australia, India and Bangladesh for work. Yes, even Bangladesh. So I was surprised when my mother beat him to the punch. Apparently my father was "too busy" and "looking for the right time" to visit. Well, it took him 2 years but my father finally came to Korea in early October, almost exactly at the same time as my mother visited in 2013.

Early fall's weather once again did not disappoint – the climate was nearly perfect, sunny and mild every day of my father's visit. He said, "this is like San Francisco", to which I said, "Well, why don't you wait here six weeks for winter to arrive!"

[Side note: for those planning a Korean adventure, some tips: September and October offer the best weather, occasionally a minor typhoon blows through in September but not likely to impact your trip. April and May would be next best, similar weather but air is a little more polluted then. June is iffy, likely to be hot and humid. August likely to be more hot and more humid than June. November and March are chilly shoulder months. Don't even think about dreary July (rainy season), or icy December-January-February.]

My father came with his wife Jane (my stepmother) and found a nice Airbnb rental apartment on the east side of Seoul. They were in a very Korean area and not all that close to my house, but seemed like a nice, less expensive option compared to Seoul's expensive hotels.

Jetlag hit my father and Jane quite hard, and I was a little surprised that my father wasn't able to acclimate better – after all, he had visited Bangladesh! Their first full day in Seoul was a Sunday and I showed them my favorite tea house in Insadong, 달새는 달만 생각한다, which translates to "Moon Bird Thinks Only of the Moon". Part of the fun is finding this place, the name is only written in Korean and the teahouse is located in a back alley near some Korean restaurants. Well my father and Jane loved the serene quirkiness of this teahouse. It was just their cup of tea!  Pun intended :)

Next was the chaotic craziness of Myeongdong, definitely too crowded and overwhelming for my guests, followed by a walk through Namdaemun Market. We sat down there for some street food at a tent table, haemul pajeon with makgeolli – that is, seafood pancake with rice wine. My guests were delighted, but the rice wine was not good for overcoming jet lag, and my sleepy father and Jane went home early.

Monday to Wednesday I needed to work – similar to my mother's visit I simply didn't have enough vacation days to play tour guide every day – and my guests were good diligent tourists figuring out what to see using their Lonely Planet book and their intuition. On Monday they walked through Bucheon Hanok Village, along the Cheongyecheon Stream, visited Gyeongbok Palace, and found their way back to my favorite tea house in Insadong! On Tuesday and Wednesday they got brave enough to travel to Andong. Of course, they would not have figured out the train schedule without my advice – the Korail website was difficult for them to use – but it all worked out. Originally they wanted to visit Gyeongju as well, but that proved too ambitious for two foreigners to figure out by themselves.

Birthday dinner

Thursday was a holiday for me so I was once again able to accompany my guests through Seoul. Rather than visiting the DMZ, which is novel but I think overpriced and overrated, I took my guests to the War Memorial of Korea. My father is a history buff and he greatly enjoyed learning about the causes and timeline of the devastating Korean conflict 60 years ago. Our guide was a talkative, overzealous ajeoshi but perfect for my patient guests. We ate Korean food for dinner in Dongdaemun, where my guests marveled at the Dongdaemun Gate and the modern, exotic-looking Dongdaemun Design Plaza building. There we saw an unexpected hanbok fashion show taking place to celebrate Hangeul Day, recognizing the creation of the Korean alphabet in the 15th century.

Friday was my father's birthday, and my guests were once again late out the door (turns out that they had brought plenty of work with them on their Korean holiday, tsk tsk) and we met at the crowded Changdeok Palace to take the Secret Garden tour. Though a workday in Korea, I received a free holiday for "parents 60th birthday"! Yay! Though technically my father turned 61 that day I felt totally justified as I was not able to fly home to the USA to see my father's birthday the year before. For the Secret Garden the English-language tour was completely full, so we instead booked the next Korean-language tour 15 minutes later and raced ahead to learn about the Secret Garden in a language which we could understand. However, my guests would have preferred to walk around on their own without a tour at all – they felt "herded like cattle" as we were rushed from place to place. They enjoyed the peaceful neighboring Changgyeong Palace more.

Top of Cheonggyesan

We walked around for a bit in the tourist part of Seoul, past Gwanghwamun Plaza and City Hall, before taking a taxi to Ichon-dong, the traditionally Japanese part of Seoul. On a friend's recommendation I had made a reservation at a sushi restaurant named 기꾸 (kee-goo, although there was absolutely no English-language signage on the place). This was a cozy restaurant and I wasn't able to understand all that the serving staff was telling me, but the sashimi was really good! Best sashimi that I have eaten in Korea, very fresh and delicious. Unfortunately we thought the sashimi plate was the whole meal, and we were shocked as a feast of additional dishes came out later from the kitchen, including an entire cooked fish (for dessert maybe?). My guests were overwhelmed by fullness after the meal and delighted when I picked up the check ;)

For my guests' final Saturday in Seoul, I took them for the easiest decent hike that I know near the city, Cheonggyesan. This place is easily reachable by subway and I am glad that we decided for an easier hike – my father had absolutely no hiking gear (major faux pas in Korea) and Jane was battling an ailing knee. However we made it to the top of the hike and my guests were treated to a view (albeit smoggy) of the massive Seoul city. For dinner we wandered back to the heavily Korean neighborhood were my guests were staying in Gwangjin-gu and I did my best to order at a cheap squid restaurant with no pictures on the menus. I discovered that my father has a liking for baekseju, a light rice-based liquor with hints of herbs and slightly sweet. He got a little drunk!

Though they never truly recovered from jetlag, my father and Jane greatly enjoyed visiting Korea. Like all of my guests who have visited the Hermit Kingdom, they came away with preconceptions altered and a sense for Korea's place in the world.

DMZ Tour: Part 2

Having already visited the DMZ last year but leaving with a feeling of wanting more, I jumped on the opportunity to explore deeper when my friends Ramon and Tammy (and new neighbors!) invited me to join their DMZ + JSA tour on a Saturday in September. The second part of the tour, the JSA – aka Joint Security Area, is the part that I was really eager to see.

We got the good stuff out of the way early. The tour bus drove us through the security checkpoint at the Civiilan Control Line (6km from the DMZ, or 8km from the North Korea border), and a more detailed passport check before exiting the bus at Camp Bonifas for our security briefing. "No one is planning to defect to North Korea today, right?" the American military guard asked. The camp seems to be mostly administered by the US military rather than that of the ROK, though that may have just been because the tour was being offered in English. I didn't see any South Korean civilians in the DMZ, the 4km strip of land which separates democracy from a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.

I was probably not supposed to pose so casually with the ROK soldier

The briefing was an insightful and entertaining view of the history of the JSA, including the infamous "Ax Murder Incident". The JSA is a jointly-administered region inside the DMZ where North Korean and South Korean diplomats meet occasionally to discuss any inter-Korean affiars.

Then we drove in! The JSA is very quiet except for a few soldiers and the tour groups, who are strictly advised to only take pictures in certain directions. When we arrived at the actual room where the diplomatic talks are held, I was disappointed to only see South Korean soldiers, and not their North Korean counterparts as well. The soldiers were standing very straight at attention in a taekwondo pose designed to intimidate, with fists clenched all day. We were told not to get too close. One could view North Korean soldiers at a distance, looking at us and taking occasional pictures it seemed.

After the morning excitement of the JSA, we could have ended the tour there as far as I was concerned, and probably should have. The later features of the tour: The Bridge of No Return, The 3rd Infiltration Tunnel, the Dora Observatory and Dorasan Station I had all checked off my list from the previous year. Lunch was a very unsatisfying vegetable bibimbap and the Cosmojin Tour Company socked us with a stupid, tacky visit to an amethyst tourist trap shop at the end of the day. I wish I had either booked just the morning tour or taken the USO tour instead (reputed to be better but more difficult to book).

About 50m from the border. There is a North Korean soldier staring back at us from the entryway of that concrete building.

So I have now ticked all the North Korea boxes I wish to check on my time in Asia. I really have no desire to gamble with my personal safety to go into the country on a tour sanctioned by the "Dear Leader".

In fact, I don't think the DMZ is a box which every tourist to South Korea needs to check. One could save considerable time and expense by visiting the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul. In fact, when my father arrived this week I advised him to do exactly that.

Boryeong Mud Festival

I moved out of Samsung Global Strategy Group 4 months ago and transitioned to a job in a Samsung Electronics' sales group in Suwon. I miss the short commute I once had to GSG's office at Samsung headquarters above Seoul's Gangnam Station, and I was invited back recently on a Friday afternoon to discuss my new job with people still in the group. After this meeting as I stopped by to say hi to my former Korean staffers, one asked me, "Jonathan, do you have plans tomorrow?" Lucky me – I did not – and I was invited to a GSG-organized visit to the Boryeong Mud Festival. All I needed to do was set my alarm and reach Gangnam by 7:45am on a Saturday morning. I could do that!

I am a little bit muddy

Boryeong Mud Festival is hosted annually on Korea's western coast, about a 2-hour bus ride southwest of Seoul. GSG chartered a bus and I caught a nice nap on the ride over. We had a cloudy day, but no rain (thankfully rainy season this summer was much drier than last), and temperature was mild but not too hot. For someone looking to protect white skin, it was a good day to be outdoors!

When we arrived we walked past rows of buses with US military personnel. One of the Koreans in our group commented, "I feel like a foreigner here!" Though Boryeong Mud Festival is popular with expats, it was not the foreigner-fest that maybe some Koreans had feared – the domestic population was well-represented as well.

Our group set up camp on the beach and paid a couple guys to bring over umbrellas to cover our area. I was nicely surprised by the quality of the beach ... good sand and big waves crashing down on a windy day. Definitely the nicest beach that I have seen on the west coast of Korea. We took the compulsory group photo, then set out for the mud festivities nearby. "Should we leave our wallets and cellphones in our backpacks?" "It's Korea... it's a super-safe country... our stuff will probably be fine." Maybe we were too trusting in just leaving our valuables unlocked along the beach as we went to play in the mud, but true to expectation everything was as we had left it when we returned.

The festival mud area consisted of a series of inflatable stations, mud wrestling, mud slinging, and any other conceivable activities that one could do with mud. The mud that was used looked like the sea mud which one sees along much of Korea's western shore, and it was a bit watered down, but we all became quite dirty nonetheless. We started in "mud prison", where mud was hurled at us as we went behind bars, followed by an inflatable mud obstacle course which ended with a fun mud slide. Others waited in line for the mud wrestling and other events.

Compulsory group photo on the beach ... pre-mud

By mid-day, the queues had become quite long, so we retreated to the beach, where the leader of the group met us with fried chicken, beer, and Korean snacks. Not so good for the diet, but good for a lazy weekend on the beach. I did not know a lot of people in the group – several were GSG interns working in Korea for the summer – but it was still a good time. During the afternoon a few people napped on the beach while others walked towards a big stage where a DJ had set up to lead a beach rave. Young Koreans love bobbing their heads to the nnnsssst nnnsssst nnnsssst of house music, and the scene felt like something one might experience on Miami Beach or Ibiza.

Mud Festival made for an enjoyable Saturday, and I would recommend to any young person who happens to traveling around Korea during late July next year!

(all photos courtesy of Kisub "Keith" Song)

Korea's Coffee Obsession

Starbucks in Insadong

One thing that visitors to Korea never need to worry about is where to find a caffeine pick-me-up. Whereas most office buildings seem to carry the awful ready-mix stuff, the preferred drink of choice is the espresso-style drinks served up in the nation's coffee shops. And are they ever booming?! Some amazing stats:

• Reuters reports that the number of coffee shops in South Korea increased nearly ten-fold from 2006 to 2011
• According to The Atlantic, Seoul has more Starbucks locations than any other city in the world, even beating New York
• Wall Street Journal reports that due to fierce coffee shop competition South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission banned coffeehouse chains from opening a new shop within 500 meters (1,640 feet) of each other
• According to Forbes, Korea's #1 coffee chain, Caffe Bene, which reached over 900 locations since launching just in 2008 (Starbucks has over 600 since entering Korea in 1999), is now planning to invade the USA by expanding internationally

The coffee shop closest to my house: Zephyr Beans

The coffee craze in Korea can be explained by a few factors. Koreans are overworked and lacking sleep, at least relative to other OECD nations (see Figure 2.5 of this study). Korea is a highly group-oriented society and the coffee shop serves as a great place to meet up – for youth who need to escape from the watch of their parents this is especially true. Younger Koreans are also very alert to new trends and are now absorbing elements of American/European culture into their lives.

These factors help explain a few of the differences in the Korean coffee scene, at least relative to the American coffee culture that I grew up with. For one thing, coffee in Korea tends to be very expensive. Most people don't bat an eye at shelling out $4 to $5 for a cup. The explanation for this cannot be just supply chain differences – $2/cup coffee can be found if you know where to look. However, when you consider that Korean coffee shops tend to be rather large, even in crowded Seoul, and you think about the high rents that coffee shops must pay here, the high prices start to make sense.

Another difference that my friends and I noticed rather quickly is that finding a cup of fresh coffee before 10am is not all that easy here. Morning coffee shops do exist, particularly near large office buildings, but coffee shops in Korea tend to open late and close late, usually around 10pm-11pm. Some coffee shops in high foot-traffic locations like Gangnam and Itaewon even stay open all night. Whereas the American office worker has become conditioned to pick up her first latte at 7am on the way to the office, Koreans tend to wait until lunch hour to have their first cup of the day. Coffee for Koreans means friends and colleagues, and you will find more people drinking coffee here in the evening than at morning commuting time.

Because Koreans spend so much time sitting in coffee shops, the interior decors can be quite intricate. Though the chains seem to prefer dull uniformity, independent shops seem to exist in almost every neighborhood with unique wall art, plants, and music. This blogger has an excellent photographic set which captures some of the scene.

As far as tastes, Koreans greatly prefer espresso drinks to drip coffee. Perhaps the Starbucks influence explains this. I find it a tad ironic that, despite being American, I never drank americanos until I moved to Korea!
(Somewhat related, a good song by a Korean indie band about the Americano on YouTube)

To document some of this Korean coffee obsession, I went on a journey last Saturday to photograph every coffee shop I could see between my house in Hannam-dong and my former office at Gangnam Station, a journey of about 6km. I counted roughly 50 coffee shops over that stretch just along the main road, which doesn't even count the hundreds that lie in the back alleys. Following is a selection of photos...

I sent this picture to a friend in the US who was missing Coffee Bean

I didn't know that Caribou was #2 US coffee brand...until I saw it printed on a coffee cup in Korea

Yes, Korea has Krispy Kreme ... and Dunkin' Donuts!

The dominant Caffe Bene ... but really nothing special about this chain

Exploring Jeju Island

In 2013 I spent a lot of time exploring the Korean peninsula – to the point where I had some Koreans telling me that I had seen more of their small country than them! But the one place on the Korea bucket list that I had not checked off was Jeju Island, located in the sea south of the peninsula. Most Koreans were surprised... "You have not been to JEJU??? It's sooo wonderful..."

Given that Jeju is by far the #1 location for domestic tourism (Seoul to Jeju is one of the most trafficked flights in the world) I agreed that I had to see the place. Would Jeju live up to its claim as "the Hawaii of Korea"??

Eating black pork was definitely the best thing to do on Jeju

Fortunately in early May a confluence of holidays (Labor Day, Children's Day, and Buddha's Birthday) created a "Golden Week" and made for several days off from work. My friend Xuanhoa visited from Vietnam, and as it was her first time visiting South Korea I thought Jeju would make a perfect trip. Unfortunately, traveling anywhere from Seoul is hellish during a holiday period – 20 million other people have the same idea to travel as you do – but I took the plunge on air tickets (3x the normal rate) and thankfully found a guesthouse accommodation through AirBnb so we didn't need to stay at one of Jeju's exorbitantly priced hotels.

The flight from Gimpo Airport on May Day Thursday was simple, just over an hour, and we were able to drop off our bags off at the guesthouse in Jeju City just in time for dinner. There is not much to Jeju City, but thankfully our accommodation was walking distance to a street full of restaurants serving Jeju's specialty – black pork! A restaurant which claimed to have a Michelin rating (??) had a long line of customers waiting outside, but we found another nice-looking restaurant nearby and were seated at a corner table. Korean barbecue is always a hit with foreigners (besides the vegetarians, of course), especially when you get prime cuts of pork thrown on the grill. Our first meal in Jeju was goooood! Very full after dinner, Xuanhoa and I spent the evening walking to the waterfront and watching the steady stream of planes landing at Jeju airport on the flight path from Seoul.

If we were driving our own car, we would have spent more time at the beaches on Jeju

I had been told by Koreans that Jeju requires renting a car to really explore, but unfortunately my international drivers' permit had expired and I haven't gone through the trouble yet of acquiring a Korean drivers license (you never need to drive yourself anywhere in Seoul). Thankfully our guesthouse hostess, Suyeon, had reserved a taxi to take us around to the sights on the east side of the island on Friday. All things considered, for the 100,000 won daily rate ($98), it was not a bad value. Our driver didn't speak any English, but I knew enough Korean to communicate with the driver where to go.

We had a list of recommended attractions from Suyeon, and started at a couple nice beaches (Hamdeok and Gimnyeong). Unfortunately with a taxi driver you can't really linger at the beaches because he just wants to shuttle you from place to place so his day ends at a reasonable hour. Next we went to Manjanggul Cave, a UNESCO World Heritage site and "one of the finest lava tunnels in the world", but frankly it was really dull. Just a big long cave that takes about an hour to walk. After Korean food for lunch (grilled fish + kimchi stew), we visited the postcard attraction of Jeju: the Seongsan Sunrise Peak. From the outside this volcanic crater looked really impressive, and we were excited to hike it on the warm May day. But at the top you don't have such a great view – there is the grassy crater next to the sea but really it is underwhelming compared to what you expect. I thought Jeju's air would be clean (I hate mainland Korea's air pollution) but from the top of Seongsan the view was still quite hazy. From there, it was a short drive to the Seopjikoji, scene of a famous Korean drama that I have never watched, and though it was nice to be along the coast it certainly was not "breathtaking", as some of the online reviewers had claimed. Our final stop on the day was the Daheeyeon Garden, a kitschy green tea plantation.

The top of Seongsan was underwhelming, but we got this cool picture with a random Korean dude in a bear costume

On Saturday we got cheap and decided not to rent the taxi again. Rather we thought we could get to the south side of the island (towards Seogwipo) by bus. Not a smart move. Though there are buses which run to Seogwipo from Jeju City we ran into trouble when we wanted to move from place-to-place along the southern shore. We started at the Cheonjeyeon Waterfall, which I had read was "Jeju's most famous waterfall", and actually was nice and peaceful. Then, with no taxis or buses in sight, the long painful walking began. We started by walking to the Teddy Bear Museum, about 30 minutes by foot, after which Xuanhoa decided the museum wasn't worth visiting anymore. So we continued the long walk (another 45 minutes) to the Jusangjeolli, described by Wikipedia as a "spectacular volcanic rock formation". However, the Wikipedia entry must have been written by Koreans because this formation was rather underwhelming – and uncomfortably crowded. When we arrived, the first words out of my mouth were "Is that it?" The Jusangjeolli was not worth the walk. To find more things to do, I did a little web research on my phone and discovered that the "most famous waterfall" is actually named Cheonjiyeon, not Cheonjeyeon. Yes, these both exist along Jeju's southern coast. I'm guessing I'm not the first English-speaking tourist to be confused by this. The second waterfall (Cheonjiyeon) was far too crowded and not a good time investment compared with the less famous, similarly named Cheonjeyeon Waterfall. After too much walking on a hot day between too many disappointing sites, Xuanhoa and I had reached the limit of our patience and found a bus back to Jeju City, where we ate at the same delicious black pork restaurant as the first night. Yum. Eating was the best thing to do on Jeju.

Cheonjeyeon Waterfall was nicely uncrowded compared to its more famous cousin

Sunday morning we caught an early flight back to Seoul. With another day on the island, we would have climbed Hallasan.

My overall verdict on Jeju: if you keep your expectations down and do not travel during a peak period (try mid-week, definitely NOT during a Korean holiday) you might enjoy it. If you are a Korean or Chinese tourist, compared to your crowded and polluted city Jeju Island might seem like a green paradise. But compared to most of the world's green nature places, including those in Southeast Asia, Jeju is quite tame. It is not a place to bookmark on your "must see places to see before you die" bucket list and definitely not a place to travel to on your honeymoon, unless you are actually Korean and craving kimchi everyday of your matrimonial celebration. I was glad to see Jeju once, but I probably won't be back. Time to explore the rest of Asia outside of Korea!

Unexpected Professional Success

This week I received some unexpected visitors to my office in Gangnam, Seoul – two members of the working level from my client at Samsung Engineering one year ago. I kept in touch with one of the Associate level members of the team, Jungmin, on our internal corporate instant messaging system, but we hadn’t met in person in over 9 months. Samsung Engineering’s offices are on the far eastern edge of Seoul and a bit distant from where I work.

Mr. Yom, me, and Jungmin in the lobby of Samsung headquarters

However, it turned out that Jungmin and her colleague Mr. Yom from the Samsung Engineering Global HR team were at my office yesterday to meet with HR members of Samsung Electronics for an information sharing session. So I was lucky enough to meet with them both for coffee at a café in the basement of my office building.

The two of them were doing well and we all felt great to be catching up again – finally! Jungmin was promoted recently to Assistant Manager and Mr. Yom now has a 2^nd son. We also shared news about other members of the task force that we worked together with. Two of my Global Strategy Group (GSG) colleagues from the project had left Samsung and returned to the US…the other got engaged over Christmas to his girlfriend. From the Samsung Engineering side, VP Moon says “Hello” … Bryan is now “Dr. Chung” … Stefanie is now Executive Assistant to the CEO … and Mr. Ji had lost a lot of weight – 8 kg! Mr. Yom showed me a picture and indeed Mr. Ji looked quite different. Mr. Ji also got the Korean male perm and even sat under the knife for double eyelid surgery – clearly he is now trying to find a wife!

The project team at the Samsung Engineering Museum, April 2013

But the most rewarding part of the conversation, surprisingly, was about work. One year later, the HR team that Jungmin and Mr. Yom belong to is still implementing several of the recommendations which GSG and the Global HR team put together last spring! The team has grown to 10 people and they have traveled around the world – to India, Thailand, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, USA – to implement the set of standard global HR policies that we had worked on. “Your research and analysis has been really valuable to us,” Mr. Yom said. “We still get asked by people who were not involved with our project, ‘Who is GSG??’”

Though I had received praise from other projects I had worked on, it felt really great to see the enduring effect of my team’s work. Sometimes, you spend 3 months working on a report that you fear is headed for the shredder. That is the life of a strategist, I suppose. You get deep trying to understand your internal client and the problems they are looking to solve, but like external management consultants we rarely are present to see the implementation of our work. So seeing our work in action is really exciting!

The Expat Cycle

Samsung GSG FC poses for a team photo

As the days become longer and mild air finally returns to Korea, it is clear that spring has finally returned. Spring was typically my favorite season back when I lived in the US. Spring represents a time of rebirth, a time when you clean out your garage and pat yourself on the back for surviving yet another winter. You find excitement as the weather improves and grow in anticipation for what the time until summer will bring. As the snow melts new cracks in the roads reveal themselves, and as plants blossom you see which ones have failed to survive the harsh cold.

For Samsung expats in Korea, spring also represents a time when many people reveal that their interest for living here is lost, and they decide to restart their lives back home.

Two of the questions I typically receive when I meet Koreans are: "How long have you been in Korea?" and "How long will you stay?" The first question is simple enough but the second one is not one that I am accustomed to hearing. It feels strange to me to be announcing a defined timeline on my life here. When I lived in the Washington DC area, a place home to a large population of transients, one was never asked the question. In Washington it seemed implied that one will leave when he loses his purpose for being there. But in Korea things are different.

Dinner in Seoul with foreigners from UVA Darden who now work for Samsung

Because the question "How long will you stay?" is asked to me so many times in Korea, I actually think about the answer more than I otherwise would. Unlike most Westerners here (English teachers and US military), I'm not here on a defined assignment and at Samsung I could probably stay in Korea for a very long time if I decided I wanted to. However, we all have defined end dates in our contracts, so the question about what we will do at the end of our contracts is always something that my foreign colleagues and I need to consider.

For the foreign Samsung-ers who have been here longer than me, many contracts are ending around now. A few of these people have decided to renew to stay in Korea and a couple lucky others convince Samsung to transfer them to other countries. The remainder pack up their circus tents to return home. This means attending a lot of farewell parties and receiving a lot of "goodbye" emails. To keep track of all the expat comings and goings I had to create an email folder on my work computer called "Revolving Door".

I suppose this cycle is somewhat inevitable. No one I know comes to Korea looking to immigrate here forever. The foreigners recruited into my strategy group all have MBAs and mostly come from wealthy countries with plenty of other career opportunities. We come to Korea for the experience mostly, but after 2 or 3 or 4 years here the experience excitement wears off and we come to crave something new and fresh. As a foreign Samsung employee leaving Korea after 4 years put it to me, "I have heard enough 'Imnida'" (a common sentence ending in the Korean language). Over time, typically only the ones who have married a Korean spouse consider staying long-term — and even this is not a guarantee to stay.

At a hiking rest stop with my former colleague Kathryn ... before she left South Korea

South Korea is a developed nation and the quality of life for a Samsung MBA expat is good. There is always enough money saved up for a fun night out with friends, and my colleagues and I are always looking to pad our travel itineraries with exotic Asian destinations (I managed to go to Vietnam and Japan this winter). Far from being alone, we come here with a group of like-minded MBA colleagues who are usually available on the weekends for a good time.

However, the life of a Samsung expat in Korea is far from being all fun and games. The office environment is often difficult and Koreans are known for working long, relatively unproductive hours in unforgiving conditions (read this article for a description of the reasons why). The relentless pressure to deliver quickly on seemingly absurd timelines is often high, usually with little in the way of praise or recognition for your efforts. This week a Korean at the gym asked me, somewhat incredulously, why I left the US (I was wearing a "Wisconsin" t-shirt and he had graduated from Madison). "Life is too busy in Korea," he said. Korean society is super competitive and Koreans get caught up in life's rat races far more than foreigners do. A Korean colleague at Samsung commented to me a few months ago, "I think that Koreans often don't know how to enjoy life."

Did get a little bit of Korean skiing in this winter

You also miss things living in Korea as a foreigner. Some people grow tired of kimchi and rice and miss their comfort foods. I ate my first Chipotle burrito in over a year recently in the US on a business trip and it tasted ... AMAZING. Some people grow tired of the little things: banking difficulties, inability to communicate in the Korean language, the crowded buses and streets. Korea's poor air quality puts me in a down mood sometimes — especially this past winter when the occasional dirty smog from China blew ashore. I also miss friends who I now only see on Facebook and communicate with via Skype, and I have lost track of the number of wedding invitations I have declined in the last 18 months.

In addition, as a foreigner you never quite belong here. Korea is far more open to the world than in the past, but it is still a place dominated by an "us and them" mentality. The Korean concept of "oo-ri", or togetherness, sometimes is difficult on expats. Korea is a collectivist society, and as a foreigner you will never become a part of the collective. The fact that foreigners tend to rotate through Korea relatively quickly, leaving Koreans to stay and muddle on, only reinforces this way of thought.

As for me ... I plan to stay for now. It feels premature for me to leave Korea after a year and a half, and I feel as if I still have more to see and do here. But as I linger here and slowly watch my foreign colleagues drift away, one or two at a time, I may too one day feel the urge to jump off and restart life anew somewhere else ... completing the Korea expat cycle.

Foreigners may miss their foods from home ... but most enjoy the occasional Korean BBQ