Things I Love About Korea

I love eating on the floor. Actually, I pretty much just love the way Koreans eat food, period. I love eating with chopsticks. I love having my bowl of rice, and eating out of the common dishes that fill the rest of the table. I love having a 찌개 (Korean soup) and five million kinds of 김치 (kimchi), or just the one common kind with rice and 김 (roasted, salted seaweed). I love eating fruit after every meal. (The only exception to this is when the fruit happens to be tomatos with sugar sprinkled on them. I've changed a lot of my thinking since coming to Korea, but I'm afraid that I'll always see tomatos as a vegetable, despite their actual classification as a fruit.) I love that so much of Korean family life revolves around food.

I love that people love that I greet them in Korean. It almost never gets old, that little start of Oh, I wasn't expecting that when someone tries to pantomime something to me and I speak back to them in Korean. Or the way they exclaim, "You're so good at Korean!" when all I've said is hello. Sometimes this grates, but usually not.

I love the Korean emphasis on the family. I especially love Korean little kids. I think I want at least one of my very own. Still working out on how to swing that...

I love Korean floors. I love that no one wears shoes in the house, and that the floors are always spotlessly clean. (This is important when you use it not as just a surface to rest other things on, but as your living space.) I especially love that Korean floors are heated in the winter, instead of uselessly heating the air in the room. It makes winter mornings much more enjoyable.

I love Korean pop culture. So much more enjoyable than its American cousin.