North Korea's "First" Fast-Food Restaurant Opens

The Chosun Ilbo reports this, but I think they might possibly mean first "western" fast food restaurant.  Some Koreans might argue that all fast food is "western" because it is unhealthy and no tradition Korean food is unhealthy for you... right...  I also thought I read this exact same story over a year ago.  Not sure what that was then.

North Korea's first fast-food restaurant selling hamburgers and waffles has opened in the center of Pyongyang. Although there are hamburger joints in North Korea, this is the first full-fledged franchise-style fast-food restaurant there.

The Choson Sinbo, a Pyongyang mouthpiece in Japan, last Saturday reported the fast-food restaurant opened at the Kumsong Intersection in Pyongyang early last month and plans to open a branch in downtown Pyongyang in the near future.

According to the newspaper, the restaurant has an "affiliation with a Singaporean company specializing in waffle joints." The Singaporean company supplies only the facilities, while the local operation hires staff and supplies raw materials.

"Before the restaurant opened, staff were trained on cooking and service techniques by a staffer dispatched from the Singaporean company, but it developed food with new flavors after repeated tasting and sampling," the newspaper wrote.

The menu lists chiefly hamburger and waffles plus various carbonated drinks and Kumgang draft beer.

Food prices were fixed "at an affordable level," it said. A hamburger and bun is 190 North Korean won and a mug of Kumgang draft beer 76 won. The average monthly pay of ordinary North Korean workers is reportedly about 3,000 won. The price of each hamburger is similar to that of 100 g of rice (about 200 won) in North Korea and much cheaper than a piece of illegally imported South Korean choco pie (500 won).

The photo is from the Choson Sinbo, a North Korean sponsored newspaper put out in Japan.

How the heck do the average North Korean workers get their hands on black market South Korean choco pies?  That is hilarious.  More power to the North for finally getting a franchise fast food joint.  Hopefully Dear Leader Kim will mellow out just a bit and cut the people of that poor country some slack and allow more places like this to open.

Guide to Japanese Bowing

Okay, I admit that I thought this was real up until about halfway into the video when I read the lines for the bows when "you lose a secret message" and "you violate the ninja code by falling in love".

The "caught red handed in an orgy of evil" bow was good...

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Cheonan Conspiracies Continue (and with good reason)

Said best by CNN:

The United States is going all out this week to show support for its key Asian ally, South Korea, in the wake of one of its war ships being sunk, as President Barack Obama dispatched the secretaries of State and Defense to the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. delegation of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will hold a first-ever meeting with their South Korean counterparts in Seoul to discuss numerous diplomatic and military issues concerning North Korea. While the high-level meeting has long been planned in accordance with the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean conflict, both countries are using the opportunity to send a message to North Korea during heightened tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang.

However, questions still loom and many South Koreans still have questions and are demanding answers about the sinking of the Cheonan.  The LA Times just published an article best summarizing most of the points of concern that are fueling the conspiracy theories.  Here are the highlights of the article...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls the evidence "overwhelming" that the Cheonan, a South Korean warship that sank in March, was hit by a North Korean torpedo. Vice President Joe Biden has cited the South Korean-led panel investigating the sinking as a model of transparency.

But challenges to the official version of events are coming from an unlikely place: within South Korea.

Armed with dossiers of their own scientific studies and bolstered by conspiracy theories, critics dispute the findings announced May 20 by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, which pointed a finger at Pyongyang.

They also question why Lee made the announcement nearly two months after the ship's sinking, on the very day campaigning opened for fiercely contested local elections. Many accuse the conservative leader of using the deaths of 46 sailors to stir up anti-communist sentiment and sway the vote.

President Lee could simply be a massive tool and is guilty of trying to politicize a national tragedy.  However, the timing of both the incident itself and when the findings were realized does make it look orchestrated to effect an election cycle.  This would make it either intentional or a fantastic coincidence.

The critics, mostly but not all from the opposition, say it is unlikely that the impoverished North Korean regime could have pulled off a perfectly executed hit against a superior military power, sneaking a submarine into the area and slipping away without detection. They also wonder whether the evidence of a torpedo attack was misinterpreted, or even fabricated.

Of course the South Koreans have anti-submarine detection systems in place.  The fact that they all failed seems to be something that does not alarm or concern anyone who believes the Cheonan was legitimately attacked.  I do not think the general public should be believing that sneak attacks from submarines are impossible to thwart.  If every South Korean boat out there is always as vulnerable to a North Korean submarine as the Cheonan was, then South Korea and the United States are woefully unprepared against an enemy that is continuously suffering from massive famines within its own borders.

"I couldn't find the slightest sign of an explosion," said Shin Sang-chul, a former shipbuilding executive-turned-investigative journalist. "The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn't even find dead fish in the sea."

Shin, who was appointed to the joint investigative panel by the opposition Democratic Party, inspected the damaged ship with other experts April 30. He was removed from the panel shortly afterward, he says, because he had voiced a contrary opinion: that the Cheonan hit ground in the shallow water off the Korean peninsula and then damaged its hull trying to get off a reef.

"It was the equivalent of a simple traffic accident at sea," Shin said.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement that Shin was removed because of "limited expertise, a lack of objectivity and scientific logic," and that he was "intentionally creating public mistrust" in the investigation.

Even if there is no conspiracy and it was overwhelmingly obvious that North Korea was responsible, kicking people off the investigation panel (who were appointed by the opposition party no less) who disagree with the majority opinion is quite reprehensible.  How can you claim legitimacy in the findings of a report when all minority opinions are expelled and vehemently discredited.  Shin Sang-chul's credentials were good enough to get him on the panel in the first place, why would the Defense Ministry just decide he was not enough of an authority to contribute his opinion only after they heard it and it was contrary to what they wanted it to be.  

What if he had agreed with the findings that a North Korean torpedo sank the ship?  Would they still have apologized to him and kicked him off the panel for having "limited expertise"?  Of course not.  This incident alone discredits all the efforts of the entire panel and it was handled atrociously.  It gives the entire process the feeling of artificial due process and puppet panel experts.

Two South Korean-born U.S. academics have joined the chorus of skepticism, holding a news conference this month in Tokyo to voice their suspicions about the "smoking gun:" a piece of torpedo propeller with a handwritten mark in blue ink reading "No. 1" in Korean.

"You could put that mark on an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea," scoffed one of the academics, Seunghun Lee, a professor of physics at the University of Virginia.

Lee called the discovery of the propeller fragment five days before the government's news conference suspicious. The salvaged part had more corrosion than would have been expected after just 50 days in the water, yet the blue writing was surprisingly clear, he said.

"The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press," Lee said.

Another point concerning timing, but the marking itself is just very strange and raises many questions.  I found a picture of it from here.

Many questions are raised just by glancing at this "conclusive evidence".  Why is it that the fact that "no 1" written on the side of it implicates North Korea at all?  Anyone could have wrote that, including the Chinese, the Russians, the South Koreans, or the United States.  Additionally the entire marking is pristine.  This torpedo fragment survived an enormous blast, scorching high temperatures, and weeks underwater... yet the magic marker ink casually wrote in the side of it went untouched... not likely.

The LA Times article did not mention this, but when the Defense Ministry showed this "smoking gun" and held a press conference, the team presenting displayed the wrong torpedo diagram during their presentation.  The diagram that was supposed to be presented was of a CHT-02D torpedo (the one presented as the the torpedo that sank the Cheonan).  The thirty foot long poster display that was shown during the presentation was a model PT-97W... pretty sloppy work and the official explanation was just a "mix-up by a staff member while preparing for the presentation."

South Korean politicians say they've been left in the dark about the investigation.

"We asked for very basic information: interviews with surviving sailors, communication records, the reason the ship was out there," said Choi Moon-soon, an assemblyman with the Democratic Party.

The legislature also has not been allowed to see the full report by the investigative committee, only a five-page synopsis.

"I don't know why they haven't released the report. They are trying to cover up small inconsistencies, and that has cost them credibility," said Kim Chul-woo, a former Defense Ministry official who is now an analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government think tank.

Indeed... why bother commissioning experts to a panel to file a report if it is to never be released?  That seems very odd to say the least.  Only allowing for a five-page synopsis to be released means that it was edited down and summarized.  Who edited it down?  Who had the ultimate authority to release the final five pages of information that was supposed to convince the world of North Korea's guilt?  

Once again, this whole process screamed of pre-determined bias in favor of North Korean guilt.  Which leads to a central argument in any conspiracy... if they are actually guilty, why is the South Korean government being so secretive about the whole process?  What other minority opinions or inconsistencies exist in the final report and why are they being kept from the public if North Korea is so obviously guilty?

A military oversight body, the Board of Inspection and Audit, has accused senior naval officers of lying and concealing information.

"Military officers deliberately left out or distorted key information in their report to senior officials and the public because they wanted to avoid being held to account for being unprepared," an official of the inspection board was quoted as telling the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

The Cheonan, a 1,200-ton corvette, sank the night of March 26 about 12 miles off North Korea. The first report issued by Yonhap, the official South Korean news agency, said the ship had been struck by a torpedo, but soon afterward the story changed to say the ship sank after being grounded on a reef.

The military repeated that version for days. The audit board found that sailors on a nearby vessel, the Sokcho, who fired off 35 shots with a 76-millimeter cannon around the time of the sinking, were instructed to say they'd been shooting at a flock of birds, even though at first they had said they'd seen a suspected submarine on radar.

On April 2, as Defense Minister Kim Tae-young was testifying before the National Assembly, a cameraman shooting over his right shoulder managed to capture an image of a handwritten note from the president's office instructing him not to talk about North Korean submarines.

Such inconsistencies and reversals have fueled the suspicions of government critics. U.S. officials, however, say the panel's conclusion is irrefutable.

I remember the first couple days after the sinking there was a lot of confusion in the media and no coherent message or explanation from the government.  It appears that the military wanted to blame it on a torpedo attack right away, but the government held them back.  Perhaps if they waited to attribute blame once they provided proof (like the magic marker serial number?), then the world would be more likely to accept it?  The hours and days after the attack fuels conspiracies because the government and the military gave conflicting stories.

It also seems obvious that career military officers would lie about the events of that day to protect their reputations.  Nobody wants to be blamed for this or to have been accused of being negligent or unprepared.  However, if people have been falsifying information and giving misleading testimony, has the government bothered to sort it out and correct the testimony, even if it contradicts the official story of North Korea's guilt?  Also doubtful...

This whole incident might go no farther than the ship hit a reef and sank, and they want to blame an enemy so that the soldiers who died did so protecting their country, not due to a navigational error.

Pyongyang, meanwhile, denies involvement in the sinking and calls the accusation against it a fabrication.

South Koreans themselves appear to be confused: Polls show that more than 20% of the public doesn't believe North Korea sank the Cheonan.

Wi Sung-lac, South Korea's top envoy for North Korean affairs, says the criticism from within has made it difficult to get China and Russia on board to punish Pyongyang for the attack.

"They say, 'But even in your own country, many people don't believe the result,' " Wi said.

That is a whopping one-in-five South Koreans not believing that North Korea is responsible.  If the government thinks those numbers will decrease on their own and they can continue to stonewall these conspiracy theories, they are mistaken.  

If you want to hear some REALLY out there conspiracy theories, Russian Today Television seems to think that the Cheonan was sank by the United States to change public opinion in Japan to keep a military base on Okinawa.  Wow, that is a good one...

Who Do Koreans Want To Go On A Trip With?

The Korean Times is not impressing me with their mastery of the English language.  But to be fair, I feel like this survey conducted is a tad absurd to begin with.  No less humorous though.

Source:

South Korean nine-member group “Girls’ Generation” has been selected as “the most wanted celebrity with” at summer resort in a survey conducted for 12,050 male and female adults by state-run KBS music channel FM2.

The first runner-up was comedian Yoo Jae-suk, 38; followed by actor Lee Seung-ki, 23; singer and actor Rain, 28; soccer star Park Ji-sung, 29; and comedian Kim Je-dong, 36. 

By gender, men in general have chosen ‘Girls’ Generation’ No. one for vacation and women has selected Lee Seung-gi.

In terms of age group, those in their 20s and 30s have selected ‘Girls’ Generation,’ those in their 40s Lee Seung-ki and those in their 50s or older like lee Myung-bak, cinger Rain and football star Park Ji-sung most.

When asked what kind of music they like to listen during their vacation, Cho Yong-pil’s “Leaving for Vacation” and Sweden’s pop group ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” placed top in local and foreign popular song, respectively.

Not sure why but I got the biggest chuckle out of Koreans over the age of fifty wanting most President Lee Myung-bak and Singer Rain.  Kudos to the copy editing team that missed the spelling error of "cinger."  I feel like if they just had spell check they would have caught that one.

I am also unsure why ABBA is making such a big come back in Korea.  Koreans love Dancing Queen for some reason (is it not totally random?).  I found a sweet vid of Girls' Generation singing Dancing Queen.  Check it out...

Koreans Only Care About Money Apparently

I found this interesting article in the Chosun Ilbo titled "Koreans Most Materialistic People in the World".

More than two-thirds of Koreans consider money the most important sign of success, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Korea and China topped the poll of 24,000 people in 23 countries on the question at 69 percent.

They were followed by India (67 percent) and Japan (63 percent).

But respondents in Western countries regard money as a less important indicator of success. A mere 27 percent of Canadians thought money spells success, followed by Swedes (28 percent), Dutch (29 percent), and French (32 percent).

Even in the U.S., only 33 percent of Americans agreed that money means success, and 67 percent disagreed. The worldwide average is 43 percent.

The young are more materialistic, with 48 percent of the under-35s seeing money as the hallmark of success, compared with 35 percent of those aged 55 and older.

Eighty-four percent of Koreans, Japanese and Chinese said money is more important than it used to be.

It is very interesting that all the countries that stress money as an indicator of success are in the East (China, Japan, Korea, and India).  This seemingly explains their rise in economic power over the last twenty years and transfer of GDP and growth from the West to the East.  Or maybe the causal relationship is the other way around.  Perhaps the West no longer values money because they are in decline and losing it.  They have to look elsewhere for happiness and prosperity in their future.

I realize there is a difference between materialistic and superficial... but they often have a strong correlation.  So enjoy this youtube tutorial I found of how to give yourself KPOP hair.

USS George Washington Has Arrived

There have been numerous articles for the last couple months now in anticipation for the upcoming United States / South Korean war games exercises.  The significance is in the arrival of the USS George Washington Aircraft Carrier.

Article Source

The U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington will steam into Busan Port on Wednesday in time for the "two plus two" meeting of the foreign and defense ministers of South Korea and the U.S.

On board a military aircraft bound for Seoul with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell on Monday said the carrier will lie at anchor at Busan Port from Wednesday to Sunday. Three more American warships, including the destroyer McCampbell, will also visit Busan and Jinhae ports during the same period, he said.

It will be the first time since October 2008 that the 97,000-ton aircraft carrier visits Busan Port. It will host a reception and a number of guided tours for local residents, and some 300 crewmembers will visit a home for orphans and do volunteer work like repairing nearby school facilities.

Morrell said the George Washington's visit is a clear symbol of the strength of the alliance. The carrier will take part in drills over the months to come, he added.

The presense of the aircraft carrier is significant because it brings with it enough firepower and military force to actually conduct a war.  If the United States were to bring down the North Korean regime, they would need an aircraft carrier close by to fly planes and refuel.  Additionally, with the arrival of the aircraft carrier, all of its support ships arrive as well.  How many is uncertain, but it probably includes numerous submarines, destroyers, cruisers, frigates.  All told, there might be as many as thirty US Navy ships arriving to the waters of South Korea.  Between the planes in the skies and the guns on these ships, any nation on Earth could be destroyed several hundred times over.

The commitment of such a large amount of man and firepower is a threat that both the Chinese and North Koreans recognize.  Let us hope they can take a warning and just keep a cool head about further military incidents like the Cheonan in the future.

Taco Bell Arrives in Korea

If you head over to Chris in South Korea, he took some fun pictures of the recently opened and ONLY Taco Bell in South Korea.  Older expats are claiming this is not the first opened and there were others that pulled out due to slow buisness in the 1990s.  However, I think the number of North American waygooks in their twenties looking for cheap Mexican food has at least quadrupled since then.

The EV Boyz actually wrote a song last year demanding a Taco Bell in Korea.  Looks like they got what they wanted.

Korean Office Workers Average 4.1 Days Off in Summer

The Chosun Ilbo recently conducted a pretty large poll and released a series of articles showing their findings.  The one I thought most interesting was that this summer...

Employees with mid-sized to large firms will take an average of 4.1 days of summer vacation this year, each spending W448,000 on average, according to a poll of 363 businesses employing 100 or more by the Korea Employers Federation (US$1=W1,209).

The summer vacations for large companies average 4.7 days and those for medium-sized firms 3.9 days, down 0.3 and 0.2 days from last year.

Some 65.9 percent of businesses offer paid vacations, up 2.3 points from last year. Vacation spending is up from last year's W36,000. Big corporations are to dole out on average W584,000 in vacation pay per worker, and medium-sized companies W409,000.

Some 94.2 percent of companies planned to give their staff a few days off. Smaller firms with 95.1 percent were slightly ahead of big firms' 91.5 percent. A KEF official said this is because some big businesses, having adopted the 40-hour- week, have instead abolished special summer vacations or replaced them with some other kind of leave.

I do not know how Koreans can do it.  I go to my corner grovery store (Mountain Mart) and the same woman is there seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, every day that I have observed so far.  That is not how anyone should live.  No point to living if you never get to enjoy yourself and pursue your own interests.  There might be a connection here with South Korea's astronomical suicide rate...
 
This reminds me of an Al Jazeera clip I watched a few months back.  It is almost comical when you hear stuff like "employees must be told how to take a vaction."
 

Al Jazeera Spotlights Web Addiction in Korea

Al Jazeera English's program 101 East did a special on South Korea's increasingly higher growing levels of internet addiction.  Here's their promo blurb about the episode:

South Korea is one of the world's most wired countries. Up to 90 per cent of homes have high speed broadband internet access and 24-hour internet cafes are found on almost every street corner.

But this ready access to the web has come at a price, with the government classifying two million South Koreans as "internet addicts".

Much of this obsession is with online gaming, a problem that has long been treated as a teenage affliction.

But recent trends reveal a more worrying problem - growing numbers of adults are falling into online gaming obsessions and the consequences are severe, sometimes at the cost of lives.

Users have dropped dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end.

Earlier this year a young couple was sentenced when their baby died from malnutrition after the parents spent nightly 12-hour sessions on the net living in an online world.

The government is spending millions to educate the public about the dangers of internet addiction and to fund counseling centres for the web obsessed but the problem appears to be growing.

This week on 101 East, we look at the impact of internet addiction as more and more South Koreans get caught in the web.

The episode captures perfectly well the current situation in the country.

Internet addiction is real.  I was once an addict to online gaming back in 1999-2000 to an online World War II strategy game.  I was in high school at the time and it became my life.  I only existed in the real world so I could make it through the day and play online every afternoon and sometimes all night.  I lost all my friends and I was near failing out of school.  My father had to have an intervention and I was forced to give up playing any kind of video games at home for the rest of high school.

That was ten years ago, I cannot imagine how more appealing now are the better graphics, faster internet speeds, and more addicting games like World of War Craft.  This is a growing epidemic in developed countries (especially amongst teenage boys) and it needs to be recognized and treated like any other compulsive or chemical addiction.

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Hitler has to Desk Warm

***UPDATE***  If you liked this video, check out my latest parody of Hitler being replaced by an English teaching robot.

Something that native English teachers complain about in South Korea is desk warming.  For public schools there are usually 6-8 weeks vacation in winter and 4-6 weeks vacation in summer for the children.  There are always summer and winter camps, but they do not go the entire time vacation periods.

Usually during this period Korean teachers are allowed to "work from home" or are supposed to enroll in a class or in some other way improve themselves.  They do not have to come to school and sit at their desk for eight hours when there are no students to teach.  Increasingly, however, native English teachers are being forced to come and do nothing during the recess periods.

There are many reasons for it that I understand.  Mostly because there is no uniform policy between all the schools.  Native teachers themselves complain about other native teachers who may be getting more unofficial time off then they are.  Offices of Education are annoyed with people whining about this so they just restrict everyone to their minimum days of vacation to be "fair".

Another reason is because they think we are helpless children and if we wander off to Japan or Southeast Asia for a couple weeks we will either get arrested or decide to never come back to Korea.

Either way, this video is a reflection of our frustration and it is meant to be in good humor.  I like my job and I love South Korea.  But sometimes things can be frustrating here.