People keep asking me if I'm nervous about going to a different country and teaching the people there.
For me, the scariest part of going to a foreign country filled with foreigners who speak foreign languages and eat foreign foods and drive foreign cars is the part where you wonder if they have any federal agency overseeing their airplanes and food supply. Dying in a plane crash would be a horrible way to go. Imagine sitting in a Soviet manufactured aluminum death-tube as it corkscrews towards the Yellow Sea from thirty-thousand feet while the pilot screams Korean obscenities over the intercom and a fat German tourist grabs onto your arm and pleads with his sweaty Teutonic eyes for comfort as all your epinephrine diluted blood shoots into your brain until it boils off from being engulfed in a large ball of super-heated jet fuel.
I hate flying.
Likewise, food poisoning is pretty awful too.
In mid-February I am going to get in a Soviet death-tube and fly to South Korea and teach English. I don't know how to speak Korean so I'm not entirely sure how this is going to work, but I am assured this is something doable.
I mean Korea is just another country right? Not quite. Here's why.
South Korea is the bottom half of a peninsula which takes up 38,600 square miles of mountainous land and serves as home-country for 38 million souls. Its primary language is aptly called Korean and can be expressed in written form with either an alphabet called Hanja which is derived from Chinese characters or Hanguel which looks like it was constructed from Lincoln logs.
This is all very alien to me.
I was raised as an adopted Korean male in the State of Montana from the time I was six months old. Montana is a landlocked state filled with sandstone and mountains and coniferous trees so, rationally, I have also developed a completely reasonable fear of peninsulas. Peninsulas are silly and shouldn't exist.
Peninsulas are little nipples of land which kinda just jut out into a large body of water. They are flukes of geology which are formed when the ocean gets tired of eroding things and wants to set up its pins for a game of bowling. That's what peninsulas are: tsunami targets.
The last time I was on a peninsula it was called Florida and I was twelve. Our family stayed in a hotel that was shaped like a banjo which was located about five minutes from Disney World. The commercials, although goofy, are spot on. The place was indeed very magical. Although, it did smell like mouse poop. In fact, the entire town of Orlando kinda smelled like sewage. Also, I am beginning to realize that all that magic I saw in Disney World was actually electricity powering light bulbs. I was a very dumb twelve year old.
And I have become a very dumb twenty-five year old. Is it even possible to land a plane on a peninsula?* Isn't that like trying to throw a dart at a tenth of a dart board? Or playing folf with only a tiny strip of frisbee? Don't they call that a javelin? That's no frisbee at all, the whole thing would just flop on the ground uselessly and then explode into spewing flames sending eviscerated bits of me into the South China Sea along with all my hopes and dreams and-
South Korea and Florida share many similarities. For instance, they are both peninsulas. They also both have people made from clothes and cities made from buildings. Likewise, both contain governmental bodies, companies, and oceanfront properties. So the question begs to be asked, are there truly any real differences between these two places?.
Surprisingly, there are some key contrasts between Florida and South Korea.
For starters, Florida is a state in the United States of America and is thus a smaller appendage of a higher federal body politic and is only allowed to pass legislation that doesn't contradict the national constitution. Korea is a sovereign nation with its own government and military and pop music charts.
A slight contrast between Florida and Korea is the neighborhoods they live in. South Korea has a large angry badger perched on its head called North Korea while Florida has Georgia and Alabama. Georgia and Alabama are states governed by people named Nathan and Bob, respectively, and where over a quarter of their populations, according to the CDC, are obese. North Koreans don't really eat and have been governed for half a century by the Kim family who have ruled the country via a brutal Communist-Fascist system called Juche. In 1987, Kim Jong Il was accused of blowing up Korean Air Flight 858 in late November of 1987 in order to scare the South Korean soccer team at the following year's Olympics. Where I am going to live in South Korea is less than 50 miles from the sovereign nation where this man came up with this idea which he then did.
Another, more bigger, difference between Korea and Florida is that Florida has a lot more black people. Sixteen percent of the US State is African American while ninety-nine or so percent of South Korea is inhabited by a group known as Koreans. Koreans look a lot like the group of people in the United States we sometimes call, 'Asians and/or Pacific Islanders'. By contrast, only 2.4 percent of Florida is 'Asians and/or Pacific Islanders'.
Business and crime outline certain differences between the two. Florida used to launch Space Shuttles and was the entry point for over 16,000 lbs of cocaine in the year 2000 while Korea does not have a Kennedy Space center nor do many people smuggle cocaine over its borders from neither the Caribbean, Mexico, nor South America.
Though on a different scale, progress,business, and crime are still booming in the Land of Kim Chi though. Korea has a burgeoning tech and manufacturing sector with companies such as Hyundai and LG sitting as some of the top companies in their fields. And although not a haven for coke, it was reported in Korean paper 2010 that 4 out of 10 Korean men did indeed pay for sex. So I guess that's a thing.
Drugs aside, in 2005, South Korea had 2.1 murders per 100,000 people. In Seoul That's about 210 murders in a population of over 10 million people. Miami, a city in the peninsula of Florida, had 61 murders. Ignoring the fact that Miami has 400,000 citizens and is under a twentieth the size of Seoul and 20 times 61 is more than 210. It has been said that the number 61 is smaller than the number 210. Thus it can be said that Florida is safer, overall, ignoring certain factors, than Korea.
So I think it can be safely concluded that peninsulas are places of rich diversity and that many peninsulas share certain traits while being completely different in others.
I still hate flying.
*Over 70 percent of the planet is water, leaving 30 percent of this to be land, and so on most good days there is about a 30 percent chance that a plane will successfully land on solid ground. Similarly the full peninsula of Korea is about 85,000 square miles while the state of Montana is 150,000 square miles. This means that peninsulas are about half the size of a proper body of land. So even though, on a normal day, it is 30 percent likely that a plane will land on solid ground, when dealing with peninsulas there is only a 15 percent chance the plane will land tarmac rather than shark infested Pacific Ocean death-blood pools.
