Communicating Effectively in Korea

Korea was the country I was most excited to visit. For a long time, I’ve felt an innate kinship with the Korean people and their culture. It’s a little bit ridiculous, but it stemmed from my love for kimchi and one of my favorite baseball player’s recent rise to stardom in the KBO. Now, after 13 days of travel across the country and back, I’ve bolstered and substantiated my connection to the country with our mutual love for restaurants dedicated to fried chicken + beer, infinite mounds of banchan with every meal, horse racing, and the inimitable k-pop genre. As a quick overview, we spent the majority of time in Seoul, but also took the train to Busan and flew to Jeju, where we originally planned to take the ferry, but a friend strongly urged us to fly given the frigid temperatures and piercing wind that make the boat ride not worth it.

In Korea we entered our second month of uninterrupted international travel, and it was here where we realized how the ability to communicate well dictates every single experience. In Japan, communication was a breeze, virtually everyone spoke English, almost all signs were multilingual and we had droves of recommendations from different friends on what to do and where to go. In Korea, we were reminded that the world doesn’t revolve around English speakers, and it became imperative for us to learn how to communicate and then have the confidence to do so when the lights were shining.

The first lesson we learned in communication occurred before we landed in Seoul, and had nothing to do with a language barrier. We were faced with an inauspicious start to the trip when we were barred from checking in at the Tokyo airport three hours before take-off because we failed to complete the Korea Electronic Travel Authorization (K-ETA). We read that visas weren’t needed to enter, but didn’t read carefully enough to see the note about the necessary K-ETA form that needed to be filled out ~24 hours in advance. Thankfully luck was on our side, probably because we each ate several good luck, volcanic eggs while we were in Hakone, Japan, and our flight was delayed two hours, which gave us the time needed for the form to process. There’s something particularly harrowing about relying on a government organization to come through on a time crunch, but we made it and learned to not assume, because we’re American, that everyone’s going to let us across their border because we showed up (interesting fact: the Japanese passport is the most sought after in the world because you don’t need visas for entry to 120+ countries!).

Even before we touched down for phase 2 of our sojourn in Seoul, undoubtedly the first thing that struck us was the weather. There was snow on the ground, and the airport workers on the tarmac were beyond bundled. I mentioned the weather warning we received from a friend, who told me the weather is “brutal” during this time of the year, but Rachael and I each had one small suitcase and a backpack that we packed knowing that we were going to be six weeks in cold weather and six weeks in equatorial weather. If you couldn’t tell from the pictures, what that really means is when it comes to cold weather clothing, we each had one compressible puffy jacket, one sweatshirt and one beanie. Given the wind chill temperature fell into the negative numbers, a range that I’d never braved before – I got a little nervous. So, lesson two in communication is to listen to your friends that know a thing or two about where you’re going, and when they use the word brutal to describe the weather system, ask a few additional questions and confirm that your belongings will do the job. All that said, we’re tough kids from the temperate streets of LA, and we didn’t let the frigid Korean climate get us down. Each day, we pepped ourselves up with a big breakfast that always ended with some kind of hot soup, then did our best to layer under our puffy red jackets and hit the streets to get after the sights and sounds.

Now to what I assume is the most obvious learning – learn the language. In this case, I quickly found that Korean was more challenging to pick up than Japanese. In both languages, there’s a huge emphasis on politeness and formality, where even the simplest phrases have honorific additions to indicate politeness that add a significant number of syllables. Much of the problem for me arose because I spent quite a bit more time studying Japanese words and phrases before the trip than I did prior to the trip to Korea due to my ignorant assumption that understanding a bit of one language would help me quickly pick up the next. Maybe there’s some validity to that, but not for someone that knew 10 words. Thus, just when I was getting “proficient” in Japanese, I had to throw away my “arigato-gozimasu” and pick up “an-yong ha-se-yo” and “gam-sa-ham-ni-da. A few phrases did go a long way though, and Rachael and I got in the habit of practicing saying these new phrases out loud to one another in the hotel room, and after a few days I even got complimented on my great Korean accent.

Once we learned the barest of fundamentals, we attempted to up the ante and figure out how to navigate and order at restaurants and bars. The foundation of this trip was built upon eating and drinking at local establishments. The best meals we had in Japan were those without English menus, where the staff didn’t speak English and we had to navigate the menu with Google translate or by pointing at what looked good on other peoples’ plates; we sought to continue that trend in Korea. To get the crash course in all things food in Seoul, we took a eating + drinking tour of Gwangjang Market, an open air street food market.

Gwangjang Market is a maze of inter-connected alleyways lined with competing food vendors offering both sitting and standing room in front of their individual stall. Each stall is governed by a group of vendors, who we noticed were usually women from middle to old age, that are constantly juggling a combination of tasks, from selling available seats to passers-by, fresh cooking their speciality dishes, to serving the people seated or standing at their stall. Each of these folks conducts a mini symphony every night, as she keeps balance between keeping the existing guests happy while ensuring that no empty stool stays empty for long. All this is to say, when you’re ordering and engaging with the busiest waitstaff of all time, you have to be direct, clear and most importantly polite!

Each stall is a small restaurant featuring one of a handful of different street foods. The most prolific were: shallow fried mung bean pancakes, mountains of chili-basted and pickled banchan ranging from octopus tentacles to worm-shaped root vegetables, knife-cut noodles, kimchi dumplings, forearm sized blood sausage, tteok-bokki (rice cakes braised in chili sauce), raw beef tartare and tons of deep fried, cinnamon sugar coated donuts. We tried all of these dishes as we navigated the crowds, and our guide was a master of the entire market. She knew virtually every vendor, and shouted greetings at each as she hustled us through the madness to make it through her tour in the allotted two hours. The highlight for me (and horror for most of the other attendees), took us to a stall that was the epicenter of chaos in the market, where our guide sat us down for a surprise course. She disappeared for a minute into the madness, then came back with three bottles of soju and a huge plate overflowing with wiggling, writhing “live” octopus tentacles. Apparently, when you kill an octopus, the tentacles betray the grave. They fight to get off the plate, and more importantly fight to avoid going down your esophagus. When you put the tentacles in your mouth, the suction cups latch on to your tongue, lips and cheeks; each bite is a one-on-one fight to stop the tentacle from lashing. Apparently people die doing this every year, but these pieces were seemingly too small to be dangerous, and we had a guide at hand who kept the soju flowing. Admittedly, it didn’t taste like much, and I’d prefer a nice grilled octopus tentacle any day, but the experience was amazing, and we earned tons of street cred from the locals who stood around to watch us eat.

The final key to communicating like a pro in Korea was learning to partake in local activities and past-times. We explored a ton of different extracurriculars, and found one that was particularly appealing – horse racing. Over the last decade in SF and LA, I’ve become quite the fan of betting the ponies, and have even found myself trackside, within the winner’s circle when a friend’s horse won a stakes race at Golden Gate Fields, so naturally, getting to the Let’s Run Park in Seoul was a big priority.

There are three primary tracks in Korea, one in Seoul, one in Busan and one in Jeju, and from Thursday - Sunday there are two tracks in operation at a time. We took a Sunday morning train from our hotel when races were going in Seoul and Busan, and the energy in the train at 11:30am on Sunday morning was palpable. When we arrived at the station, the trains emptied fast into an underground station packed with people selling racing forms and digests showcasing the experts’ picks on projected winners. They were selling for about a dollar, or 1000 won each, and when I asked if they had any forms in English, the lady selling the form kindly laughed and handed me one in Korean. The instant we reached the surface, the older men around us instinctively lit cigarettes. We were home.

Once inside, we realized the magnitude and spectacle of the sport in Korea. The stadium had five levels, was easily 500 yards long, and every indoor inch of space was packed with people. We estimated that there were around 30,000 people in the building, but if I learned there were 50,000, I wouldn't be surprised. We also quickly realized we were the only obvious tourists in the house. We didn’t hear a word of English, or see a soul with the same awe-induced or overwhelmed look that we sported as we wandered around getting the lay of the land.

As we took stock of the stadium, a few non-obvious things jumped out because of their difference from the horse tracks back home. First, there was zero alcohol consumption on the premises. Drinking is an institutional element of horse racing in the US, so this was quite a shock, in fact I’m on a first name basis with one bartender at both Golden Gate Fields in Oakland, and one at Los Alamitos in LA. Second, the entire place operated like clockwork as the patrons navigated a cyclical path between the two sets of races, live in Seoul and televised at Busan. There were no TVs broadcasting races from other countries, so all eyes were on the Korean tracks, and every one moved in unison from the outdoor paddock to judge the horses in Seoul, to the track to watch the live race, then to the TVs inside to warm up and catch a glimpse of the Busan paddock, and finally to the TVs to watch the Busan race. This is rinsed and repeated from 10:45 am to 6pm when the last race posts. The rhythm was hypnotic and it was easy to get carried in the sea of people around you who moved in 20ish minute intervals as the races went off almost exactly on schedule. Lastly, all the betting was done via handwritten slips – which as you can imagine, were all in Korean. Everything moved fast, and there weren’t a lot of options for help so Rachael and I treated the first hour like a puzzle that we needed to solve until we got the courage to deposit some money and try to “win some won” which was the slogan we adopted for the afternoon. Unfortunately, we didn’t do very well, despite some well researched bets, a trained eye for musculature in horse necks, legs and butts, and a keen strategy to bet on whichever horse pooped closest to post time. At the end of the day we lost won, and did not win won.

So all in all, communication was critical to the success and failures of our first week in Korea, and we set our sights on avoiding future mistakes and continuing to go deeper and deeper into local languages so we could get the most out of every place we visited. More to come on Busan, Jeju and our trip to the DMZ!