1. Space. On official-type forms, they don't leave much room in the blank squares to write the things you need to write. I am lucky I have a short name; otherwise, it wouldn't fit. This example is representative of space in general in South Korea.
2. Food. Koreans love food. A meal is very much a social event, not just a time to give your body what it needs. At a dinner with a group of people, or even just at snack times, people often share all the food from one big dish/bowl/cake, using their own chopsticks or spoon or other utensil. On the rare occasions when the kids bring lunches from home (such as for field trips), everybody passes their food around or just lifts a dish from their neighbor. The first time one of my students stole my cake when my back was turned, I flipped my lid and gave them a pretty good chewing-out, but I've since regretted it (a little), after realizing that it's a normal part of their culture for them to pick up food from someone else's dish. And for the most part, Koreans are way more generous concerning food than Americans. I can't count the number of times our Korean co-teachers have unexpectedly brought leftovers from lunch (always the good stuff) into the teacher's lounge and insisted we take a break to partake in the eating. Although it's sometimes really hard to take even a few minutes off, I really appreciate that they think food is so important. Sometimes, they'll even bring in food themselves for all the teachers, like clementines and instant-noodle bowls.
3. Dong chim. This is the term for an action children--and occasionally adults--make against another person: they clasp their hands together, index fingers pointed forward, and try to shove into your anus. The action of dong chim extends into kids sometimes just digging a hand into the buttcrack. I have had this happen to me a total of three times, one by Eric (torso-flasher), whom I threatened with a loss of five points if he ever did it again; twice by Daniel, a new student who, for the most part, I can't stand. He tried shoving his hand into my crack twice while we were standing three feet from his mother, who saw the whole thing and did nothing to dissuade it. According to Wikipedia, dong chim is the South Korean, Japanese, and Filipino equivalent of the American wedgie.
4. Parents. If parents of hogwon students get paranoid enough that their spoiled little packages might contract any of several forms of the flu at school, they just remove their kids from school for a month.
5. High heels are the dominant shoe form for women to wear here, and it's crazy because everybody does a ton of walking. In Itaewon, a friend and I sat people-watching for about 15 minutes, and, with pretty steady streams of people going in both directions, we counted a total of 11 women wearing flats. I went to a
theme park a few weeks ago, and there were women in platform heels all over the place!
6. Dressing room. Sometimes it has curtains, sometimes it has more boxes of clothes than room to change. If you get lucky, it has a door; if you're even luckier, the door extends both below your shins and above your neck. Some days, you're out of luck, and they lead you to the open corner behind the two-foot-wide wall unit on the other side of the cash register; some days, you're completely screwed, and the only place to try on a miniskirt is directly in front of the counter. Some days--the gods spit on you, and give you a dressing room that is really just the back third of the store blocked off by a giant pink curtain, and the "back wall" of that dressing room is really a floor-to-ceiling window--blocked only partway by boxes--that looks into the hallway of the rest of the building, and you don't realize until after you've gritted your teeth and hoped for zero passersby that on the ceiling of that hallway, directly above the mirror that just saw you strip down to your skivvies and try on a slip dress, yes, directly above that mirror is a CCTV monitor.
