OutsideInKorea » socializing

Jobsee.kr — the new hotness

Chris — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:22:12 +0000

I haven’t written any articles for OutsideInKorea in a good long while. Rather than offer the usual excuses, let me point you to my new project, one that has taken up much of my time in recent months, and something I’m pretty excited about: jobsee.kr.

What’s it all about?

The Korean English-language ‘blogosphere’ (I know, don’t hit me) has exploded in recent years, and there are people out there writing their hearts out, which is wonderful, and as it should be. I’ve been in Korea and writing online about it since the late 1990’s, and at my own domains (including this one) for almost 10 years, and because of the nature of the beast, most of the weblogs have come and gone over that long stretch of days. There are a few sites that have been around for the long haul and are still thriving — Robert Koehler’s site being the canonical example — and of course on the non-weblog end of things there is Dave Sperling’s venerable Eslcafe.com, which I’m pretty sure was there, and looking much the same, when I first came to Korea back in 1996.

There are a number of job-board sites catering to the foreigner-in-Korea market that have sprung up over the years, as well. Some have gained traction, some have not, but none have shifted Dave’s site from its position at the top of the job-listing heap. One thing that seems to be almost universally true is that the job listing sites tend to be useability nightmares, or sport design aesthetics from the 1990’s, or both. Nothing much has changed, for a long long time. The emphasis has shifted firmly to recruiting companies that use their own sites to promote their job openings, but cross-post to the more popular job listing sites.

There are a plethora of bog-standard PHPBB bulletin boards out there, as well, there are groups on the social networking platforms like Facebook, and there is a floating community of sorts in the comment threads on many of the larger K-blogs. To be honest, I don’t really know what’s happening out there on the weblogs these days, because every time I’ve dipped a toe into the blogstream in the last few years, it’s come back blistered and discoloured from the level of vitriol and shoutiness and resentment percolating there.

So I had a think. I’m no designer, but I knows what I likes, and I like building sites (my network of personal sites, community sites and sites built for other people is unfeasibly large and still growing), and having spent years a) in Korea, b) in software and web design and c) in the ESL industry, I figured, hell, maybe I could do something that would fill what seemed to be to be a gaping niche.

That niche would be: a site for job-seekers, for those interested in coming to Korea, a site includes a more modern take on web-based community than the same old bulletin-board model, a site that is interactive, pleasant to look at and use, and that includes useful information and tools for the Korean expat community. And that’s kind of fun, into the bargain.

Here’s what I came up with.

I’m getting close to launch now, still second-guessing my design decisions, hammering bugs out of the woodwork, thinking about how to try and ramp it up into a vibrant and active community, and trying to plan administrative ways to make it something that’s not just another wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Little joke there, but you know what I mean. There are a lot of expats in Korea these days who are not into the whole negativity vibe that seems to grip the community, lots of long-termers and short-termers alike, and a whole generation of younger types who expect their online tools to be a little less, well, like using digital stone knives and bearskins.

So, for launch, which is coming relatively soon unless I decide on yet another tear-down-and-redesign, the site will include:

Jobs listings

Jobs listings are the core of the utility of the site, I think, and for at least a month or two after launch, I plan to make them absolutely free to employers. Little touches like Google maps showing you where the job is located, granular built-in search tools, filters and views to help jobseekers find exactly what they’re looking for, and a back-end Dashboard for employers to manage the job listings they’ve posted in the past are all part of the mix. I think it’s pretty sweet.

Resume posting

Jobseekers can post their resumes for employers to browse, tag them and categorize them so they’re easily found, and sit back and (hopefully) let the job offers roll in. Posting your resume to the site will always be free.

Live FAQ

I get a lot of questions about working and living in Korea on the various community sites I frequent (Metafilter, in particular) and via email. People want to know how things work: they need useful info before deciding to leave home, and after they arrive in Korea. That need was one of the reasons I started OutsideinKorea, but I eventually decided that the blog format wasn’t really the best way to help people out. The Jobseekr FAQ subsite is, I think. FAQs are organized by topic, and every topic has a textbox at the bottom where visitors can ask questions they might have, and I and my crack team of SuperExpats will do their best to answer. As soon as we have an answer, it’ll appear on the site, along with the question.

Community

Community is another centerpiece of the site. It’s a new take on web community, focused on individuals and ways for them to get together into groups around interests or locations, plan events out in the real world, and stay as private or as public as they wish to be. Forums are, of course, baked-in, and tied to groups, public, private or hidden from community view. It’s really a great piece of software, and I hope that people will enjoy using it. Think of it as a kind of Facebook for our community — you can even use your Facebook login to create an account there with Facebook Connect!

Another major part of the whole is that anyone who registers an account in the community — as well as being able to dive right in and start interacting with people and joining or creating groups and starting or participating in forum threads — can create, in a few clicks, their very own hosted Wordpress weblog, at http://jobsee.kr/community/whatevertheywant

Weblogs are a dime a dozen these days, of course, but with tight integration to the community, and the ability to create group weblogs tied to the Groups that users can create within the community — well, if it takes off, I’m excited to see what people do with the tools I’m providing.

Thus endeth the promotional post. I hope anyone who happens by OutsideinKorea or is still subscribed to the RSS feed will go and check out the new site. Like I said, it’s going to be launching soon in all its glory, but the community subsite is ready to rock, and I’d love to see people join up and start kicking the tires.

Welcome to the next generation. I hope it kicks some butt.

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A Short Korean Food Primer

Chris — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:32:42 +0000

Are you new to Korea (or planning to come) and want to know how to order food at one of the local eateries, or just know what it is? Do you live somewhere else and want to impress that beautiful waitress (or waiter, I guess) at your local Korean restaurant?

Well, despair no more, friends, because I’m going to give you the beginnings of a Rosetta Stone for ordering Korean food with style and aplomb and hopefully not too much embarrassed-for-you giggling.

It might help a little to peruse Learning to Read Korean Part 1 and Part 2 (Parts 3 and 4 are upcoming) before you jump in, but I’ll try and provide some phonetic cues in this article which will make it unnecessary to actually be able read Korean (that said, it’s really easy, so I encourage you to give it a go!)

Throughout this article, I’ll use the Korean, then the revised romanization, then a phonetic approximation for those who are not familiar with the sounds of Korean (regrettably, a prerequisite for proper pronunciation of the revised romanization scheme), then the translation.

An example: 밥 – bap, ‘bahp’, rice (cooked)

Dining Customs

In Korea, you order your main dish, which is frequently some kind of soup or stew, often served individually in a heated stone or clay bowl to each diner, or in a larger pot or pan in the center of the table over a gas fire, which is shared amongst everyone at the table. Also shared are the constellation of 반찬 (banchan, ‘bahnchahn’, side dishes) — the more there are, the more sumptous the meal is perceived to be. It is perfectly fine to ask for more of a given side-dish if it’s all eaten (and is provided without charge), and it is unnecessary to eat all of the each of the side dishes (and in fact might give a bit of an impression of gluttony).

Everyone also gets a small individual lidded stainless (or sometimes ceramic) bowl of short-grain, glutinous rice, which you are generally expected to finish. Long-grain, ‘fluffy’ rice is almost unheard of — if that’s what you get in an overseas Korean restaurant, it’s just not the Real Thing. The rice bowl is customary kept to the diner’s left, and the soup or stew to the right. Stainless steel chopsticks and long-handled shallow steel spoons are customary, although Korean folks (overseas or in touristed areas of Korea) may try and be ‘helpful’ and give you a fork. Be gracious, thank them, and put it aside in favour of the chopsticks. Many restaurants (but by no means all) have areas with floor seating and table-and-chair seating; the former is, of course, the traditional style.

Food is very regional, and every little village and town has its own specialties, for which, according to the locals of that hamlet, it is justifiably famous. Regions also tend to have their own takes on standard dishes like 김치 (kimchi) or 김밥 (kimbap) or 비빔밥 (bibimbap).

Some etiquette no-nos if eating with Koreans (or just trying to be polite a la mode Koreane): don’t

blow your nose at the table
pick up your utensils and start eating before the eldest person at the table does so
stick your chopsticks upright in your rice and leave them (edit: this is done with the rice offering during annual graveside ceremonies to honour ancestors, and so is inappropriate to do at a convivial dinner)
pour your own liquor — watch what others are doing (the matter of drinking etiquette deserves its own essay, which I’ll tackle sometime later

Answers.com mentions a few other things as constituting bad table manners

Bad manners include [...] chewing with an open mouth, talking with food in one’s mouth, [...] stabbing foods with chopsticks, mixing rice and soup, and picking up food with one’s hands…

As far as I’ve seen in 10 years here, those are pretty much nonsense, at least in any but the most absolutely formal of situations.

The Language Of Food

Here are some vocabulary elements that show up in the names of various foods, and will help you to guess what category, at least, the dish might fit into.

밥 – bap, ‘bahp’, rice (cooked)
장 – jang, ‘jahng’, paste
자장 – jajang, ‘jahjang’, black bean paste
된 – doen, ‘dwehn’, fermented soy beans
고추 – gochu, ‘gohchoo’, hot pepper
김 – gim, ‘k/gim’, dried laver seaweed (the initial sound is partway between ‘k’ and ‘g’, usually romanized in the past as ‘k’) (note also, that it’s not the same 김 and the one in 김치 (kimchi).
떡 – deok, ‘dduhk’, chewy rice cake (the inital ‘d’ is highly aspirated)
두부 = dubu, ‘dooboo’, tofu
고기 – gogi, ‘gogee’, meat
닭 – ‘dak’, ‘dahk’, chicken
돼지 – ‘doeji’, ‘dwehjee’, pork
감자 – ‘kamcha’, ‘kahmcha’, potato
회 – hoe, ‘hweh’, raw fish or other raw seafood
찌개 – jjigae, ‘jeegay’, soup or stew
탕 – tang, ‘tahng’, soup or stew
국 – guk, ‘gook’, soup or stew
면 – myeon, ‘myuhn’, noodles
주 – ju, ‘joo’, alcoholic beverage (소주, 맥주, 동동주, etc)
차 – cha, ‘chah’, tea
물 – mul, ‘mool’, water
불 – bul, ‘bool’, fire

비빔 – bibim, ‘beebeem’, mixed
냉 – neng, ‘nehng’, cool or cold

Those syllables (there are many many more, of course) are enough to get you well down the path of figuring out the most common Korean menu items! Let’s start putting them together and see what we get. (

된+장 = fermented soy bean + paste: one of the most common bases for soups and stews.
고추+장 = hot pepper + paste: the other most common flavouring, after 마늘 maneul, ‘mahneuhl’, garlic)

See how easy it is?

How about the everyday light meal or snack, 김밥?

Well, 김+밥 = seaweed rice, which is what it is. Rice with goodies, wrapped in a seaweed roll. Sushi roll ahoy!

How about that old dinner standby, 불고기?

불 + 고기 = fire meat. Sounds painful, but it’s the grilled marinated beef that is iconic of Korean BBQ. Variations are 닭 불고기 (chicken + fire + meat) and 돼지 불고기 (pork + fire + meat).

Now, let’s put together some even longer dish names, why don’t we?

된장찌개 = 된+장+찌개 = soybean + paste + stew.
김치찌개 = 김치+찌개 = kimchi + stew.
두부 찌개 = 두부+ 찌개 = tofu stew. Woohoo!

What about that other everyday Korean food that everybody knows and loves, 비빔밥?

비빔+밥= mixed + rice, which is exactly what it is (except you do the mixing, which adds to the Power of the Delicious, if you do it right). And, of course, it’s what you mix in with the rice and the 고추장 that makes it sing. A sunnyside-up fried egg on top is mandatory, in my humble.

Let’s try that again with another noun. How about

비빔면 = 비빔+면 = mixed noodles, the noodle equivalent of 비빔밥.

A standard Koreanized Chinese food is 자장면. What’s that?

자장 + 면 = black bean paste + noodles.

One of my all-time favorite Korean foods is 냉면. What does that mean?

It’s easy: 냉+면 = cold + noodles.

We can get even fancier, because there are two kinds of 냉면.

물 냉면 = water + cold + noodles (cold buckwheat noodles in a cool broth)
비빔 냉면 = mixed + cold + noodles (cold buckwheat noodles with veggies and seasoned pepper sauce, that you mix in the bowl in much the same way you mix 비빔밥, of course!)

Fantastic stuff in the summer time.

And, last but not least, we can now read the label on that old favorite from university days, ramyeon (ramen in Anglified Japanese).

ramyeon = 라면 = 라 + 면 = ra + noodles. I dunno what ‘ra’ means, but it’s darn tasty.

Cool, huh?

Now, I won’t pretend that this list is exhaustive, and there are synonyms and other words for some of these things, as well as many, many more ingredients and combinations Just a few tastes from the groaning buffet table. But after studying these building blocks, you should be able to navigate your way through that Korean-language menu on the wall with a little bit more authority.

Good luck!

(If you have any additions or corrections, feel free to leave a comment, below.)

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