First impressions

Snow *-*   Gunsan - South Korea

When I landed on South Korea, all of a sudden I saw it would be an odd experience for me. Now I was an obvious foreign, lost, totally away from home. But, right from the beginning, my host family seemed to be very jolly. I am home again.

Though I’m living with brazilians, I’ve been in touch with lots of coreans here. In these ten days I’ve been in South Korea, I’ve learned a lot and I’ve seen many unexpected things. For now, I’ll talk about some of’em.

First of all, it is a extremely important habit to take your shoes off when you arrive home or go to other people’s house. Shoes carry dirt and bad things to home, so you must take them off.

You can see here is a place where technology is waaay developed, and a very ordinary thing. The price of electronics, such as ipods, laptops and all kinds of machines, is not high at all. A notebook here is three or four times cheaper than in Brazil. Shoes and clothes are very cheap too. The only thing that is really expensive is food. You can find boxes with 12 pears by 55.000 wons, which means 82,3 reais or 50 dollars. With this amount of money, I can buy 40 pears in Brazil. However, most of the fruits here are really big.

Other interesting thing here is the habit of giving gifts anytime. When I bought my laptop, I was given a diary and a tangerine. When I bought a coat, the seller gave me a bonnet. And when some coreans visited my host family’s home, they brought like thirty rolls of toilet paper as gift.

Those are some curious things I’ve seen by now. There are more, but I shall talk about’em in a further post.

For the time being, farewell. Have a nice weekend ;)