Comparing cultures
Wow, they provide free Internet access for us here at the event venue. Coolness!
First impression of the weather: it's like Genting Highlands! As the plane prepared to land, we were told that it was 10 degrees Celcius on the ground. The air is bracing but the sun is pretty warm -- no worries about it being too cold here :)
I think I'm getting old: I used to be famous for the ability to sleep anywhere, at any time, but I couldn't sleep on the plane. It was an overnight flight; we left at 1am Malaysian time and arrived at 8am Korean time. Korea's an hour ahead of Malaysia so that makes things even worse -- I'm dead beat.
People here hardly speak English. I asked one of the organisers whether English is taught in schools, and was told that points of grammar are emphasised but the students don't practice listening & speaking. So some students have an excellent grasp of English grammar, but can't speak the language! "And when a foreigner talks to us, we get nervous and freeze," he added. Goodness!
So my group had an interesting evening coz we were walking about looking for a restaurant in which to have dinner. All the signboards are in Korean, which we naturally can't read, so everything looks alien. Finally we found a restaurant and managed to order food with a lot of sign language and guessing. I wish I'd bought the Korean phrasebook I saw in the KL International Airport, nevermind that it cost a cut-throat price of $47!!!
Korean characters are pictorial, I think (I can't think of the correct term right now -- the characters/words having evolved from pictures). They look more like pictures than Chinese characters do, in fact, or at least that's how it seems to me. I keep taking pictures of signs and signboards because I find the writing so fascinating.
Spoken Korean sounds vaguely like Japanese to me. A lady said she thinks it sounds similar to Hokkien (one of the Chinese dialects) but I don't hear any such resemblance myself. Of course, having never met any Japanese in the flesh I can hardly qualify to compare spoken Korean and Japanese... LOL
They drive on the WRONG side of the road! hahaha. We Malaysians drive on the left side. Here they drive on the right side, but it's still the wrong side, if you get my drift ;)
Oh yeah and they write their dates year/month/day. I just realised we're so used to hearing about "9/11" that we hardly even realise it isn't 9/11 -- Malaysians write day/month/year so by right it should be 11/9 to us!
Aren't different cultures fascinating?