Chuseok is labeled on our calendars as the Korean Thanksgiving. However, if you think about that for a second, it seems odd that Korea would celebrate Thanksgiving. Christmas, yes. New Years, of course. Even Halloween if you want. But Thanksgiving? I thought the fourth Thursday of each November was a uniquely North American holiday celebrating the survival of the pilgrims through the first Winters in the New World. Not to mention the fact that the Korean holiday Chuseok is celebrated sometime in September or October and has nothing to do with eating turkey, stuffing, or apple pie. It seems hardly to be anything like the Thanksgiving I know from America. However, upon a little further research I have found that Chuseok is a holiday celebrating the harvest just as Thanksgiving is supposed to be the holiday ... read more

Look in a mirror and you won't see yourself; you'll only see a reflection of your outer appearance. Challenge yourself, your mind, your body, your courage, your strength, endurance, and patience; only then will you glimpse the self you look for when you gaze at a mirror.... read more

If you've ever been to Thailand you know what I'm talking about. If you have not been, then let's engage in a little thought experiment: Imagine you're a typical backpacker. You either quit your job or graduated from school and you have decided to up and leave wherever you're coming from to "travel the world." Well you realize that you can't see the whole world, so you figure out your options. You've saved enough from work/graduation money to either (1) backpack around Europe for a month and then return home to work again or (2) backpack around Southeast Asia for 6 months to a year before you have to return. Thinking like a backpacker, naturally, you want to be gone as long as possible while experiencing as much as possible. Europe is nice, but it's expensive ... read more

Korea is about the size of the state of Indiana in terms of land area. However, Korea has 7 times as many people living on that area of land as Indiana has (47.5 million to 6 million people). To attempt to put this into perspective, take Indiana and everyone that lives there and then add everybody that lives in the most populated state, California, and dump them in Indiana. Then you'd still have to add another 5 million people, say Colorado, and that should set the scene for the Korea I'm about to discuss. See, when you have so many people living in such a small mass of land, there tends to be some differences. Here's a small one: there are no late games. Have you ever been watching a sports game, say baseball for example, ... read more

There are no guns in Korea. Well at least compared to the United States, it seems like there are no guns in Korea. Gun laws here are very strict. You are not allowed to keep a gun at your house. You are only allowed to own a gun for hunting purposes, and the few who do, have to keep these guns at the local police station. When you want to hunt, you go to the police station, check your gun out, hunt, and return it to the station when you're finished. This is vastly different from America, where it is considered an undeniable right that every citizen over the age of "able-to-hold-a-gun" is allowed and in fact encouraged to wield a lethal weapon. I must say that this difference in gun culture is intriguing. Now, don't ... read more