#1: One of the challenges that comes up daily is having to convert units of measure. I know this sounds like a petty thing, but it really affects almost everything.
COOKING MEASUREMENTS:
You have your cooking scenario where you have bought 500g of pasta. In your American head you know that your family can eat about 12 oz of pasta in a meal. But how does that translate to grams? Or your recipe calls for 2 cups of raisins, but all the packaging is in grams. How many grams will give me 2 cups?
I brought a kitchen scale from the States that measures in pounds and ounces. Once I arrived here and realized how everything I buy is measured in the metric system, I had to buy a new scale that measures in grams. My cookbooks are all in US measurements, but when you buy a block of butter in Korea it doesn't come in sticks with little lines on the wrapper indicating the tablespoons. It's a giant block of butter! So, I have to get out my phone and ask google how many grams are in a tablespoon and then weigh it out.
Then there is the cooking temperatures. My oven here measures in Celsius. But it also isn't accurate. So, we bought an oven thermometer to figure out how off it really is. I've jotted down what I have to set the temperature to on the oven to get the temperature I really want. So, if my cookbook says to bake at 350 degrees F, then I have to set my oven to preheat at 210 degrees C, so that it actually heats to 180 degrees C, which is about 350 degrees F. Then cross my fingers and hope for the best.
ROOM TEMPS AND OUTSIDE TEMPS:
Again with the Celsius. Our room thermostats say it is 23 degrees Celsius. That seems to be a comfortable temp. In the summer, they got up to 30 sometimes. I can definitely say that was very uncomfortable. If the room gets down to 20, it feels chilly. Outside though, the windchill is -11 degrees C right now. That sounds unbearable, but when converted to Fahrenheit, it is not really that bad (12). If it were negative in Fahrenheit, then I would know it is REALLY cold outside.
CLOTHING SIZES:
Korean (Asian) sizes are still a mystery to me. I just recently learned that for the kids their sizes actually refer to their height in centimeters. So, Charlie wears a 120, Willow wears a 140 and Maya wears a 160, and that is roughly how tall they are. But there is no kid size above 160. So, when buying a coat for Maya, we had to look in the women's section since her arms are too long for a 160. In adult sizes, she's an 85. I have no idea what 85 refers to. Circumference? I asked our tutor and she hadn't heard of 85. She said the sizes were 44, 55, and 66, which do not correlate to the measurement of anything that she knows of. But even weirder is that in their sizes for school uniforms are 15, 16, and 18. Where do those numbers come from and why are they different from all the rest?
Also, on this topic, many expats are bigger than the biggest Asian size. Which is not to say they are large, but rather that Koreans/Asians are naturally small/petite in comparison. Most expat women say that shop clerks just shake their heads when they come into a store. I'm talking like a US women's size 8 is too big. In the underground shopping malls, I have noticed that many clothes are marked FREE, as in, One Size Fits All. FREE size. That applies to Asians, not Americans.
I recently was in Itaewon, which is near where the military base used to be. It had stores marked "BIG SIZE". I was told that meant it carried clothes for Expats.
SHOE SIZES:
This became even more challenging because Decathalon opened up here and it is a French store. So, I had to know Maya's shoe size in European sizes. But then I had to learn Charlie's shoe size in Asian sizes. That means Maya wears a 39 while Charlie wears a 180. Meanwhile I bought Willow shoes in Chinatown and she got a size 20. No idea what measurement that was.
They also do not sell any shoes bigger than a US women's size 8 in Korea. This is quite an issue for many Expat women. They have to get all their shoes when they travel abroad to other countries.
I need to carry a notebook around with me with all their sizes converted to Asian and European and US too, just in case I want to buy them something and they aren't around to try it on.
PAPER:
I know this one sounds totally ridiculous, but it is the one that really surprised us as to how inconvenient it is. For example, Eric has this really nice leatherbound portfolio that he used to use with legal pads at the office for taking notes in meetings. We cannot find paper the right size for his portfolio. Koreans use A4 paper size, not 8.5" x 11" like we are accustomed to. None of our folders are big enough, nor are our manila envelopes.
TIME:
Koreans use military time. This one at least I can mentally convert in my head and I don't need Google to do it for me. It does take getting used to though. Our oven tells the time in military time. When you see hours posted in a shop window, it is military time. Receipts have a military time stamp. Get used to it, it is everywhere.
CURRENCY:
This one is obvious and thankfully also an easy mental conversion. Roughly speaking 1,000 won is equal to 1 US dollar. When speaking about how much something costs with the kids or with anyone really, we can say the price in either currency and everyone can mentally convert backwards or forwards.
WEIGHT:
There is a scale in the gym locker room that measures me in kilograms. It is a nice small number compared to the one in my bathroom that measures me in pounds. I don't bother converting my weight from one unit to the other. It is not something I want to focus on too much.
PRICE OF GAS and SPEED LIMITS:
I don't have a car, but I have friends with cars. And gas is measured in liters here, not gallons. So, to figure out how much you're paying in US dollars, to see what the price comparison is to what you spend back home, you not only have to convert the liters to gallons but also the won to dollars. And, obviously, the speed limit is in kilometers per hour, not miles per hour. Again, I don't drive, but there are speed camera traps everywhere. It is good to know if you're over the limit, in whatever unit you're measuring.
BOTTOM LINE: everything everywhere is measured in a unit that is not one I grew up with and there is A LOT of MATH (or Googling) involved to convert everything to a unit that I can understand. Even eggs aren't sold by the dozen. They come in packs of 10.
#2: Learning Korean
This one is a doozy. Unlike learning Spanish, where at least the letters were the same for the most part, we had to learn a whole new alphabet: Hangeul. English is written using the Roman alphabet: 26 letters, 5 vowels and 21 consonants. Korean is written using the Hangeul alphabet: 24 letters, 10 vowels and 14 consonants. What makes it even more complicated is that the letters aren't written one after the other, like in English. They are combined into syllables, so that when you write a single syllable the consonant letter sits vertically above the vowel letter. And sometimes you can have a consonant, vowel and another consonant in the same syllable, so you have to combine the three letters into one stack.
What I learned right away was not to try to write out what their letters sounded like in my letters. It doesn't translate well, and you'll never write it the same way twice. Even the word Hangeul can also be spelled Hangul, because it is just our way of trying to write a Korean word in the Roman alphabet. We don't have all the vowel sounds they have. And they don't have all the consonant sounds we have.
The most challenging part about the Korean language for all of us is not reading or writing the alphabet. It is being in a room full of people speaking Korean and not knowing what anyone is saying. It is challenging for Eric at work and it is challenging for the kids on the playground or the lunch room at school. It is challenging for me when I go to lunch with the other 3rd grade moms. We have coping mechanisms and rationalizations for why they aren't speaking to us in English. Eric and I can deal with it better than our younger two kids. Maya has many bilingual friends and most of her class can think in both languages. So, she she seems to have it the easiest, or maybe is just the best at dealing with it.
The double-edged sword of living in an International city like Songdo, that was built to cater to foreigners like us, is that we are not fully immersed in Korean and the majority of the Koreans who live in Songdo speak at least a little English. It is very helpful to us, but it doesn't force us to learn Korean. So, we get by with the few Korean words we know, just for greetings and saying thanks. If we happen to need something from a shopkeeper that doesn't speak English (the bike repairman, the grocery store clerk, the maintenance guys, etc) we just use Google to pull up an image of what we want, or Google Translate to quickly translate what we want into Korean. It does the job.
#3: the Korean banking system
For the wives who are here because of our husband's jobs, we have visas that just identify us as family members. Our husbands have the work visas. So, at the bank, the account can only be in their name. We, as non-working wives, are allowed to carry around bank cards, but they have our husband's names on them, not ours. As such, we cannot wire money or transfer money back to the States. Some women have managed to open accounts in their own names, but because they don't have jobs, their husbands just put some money into their accounts once a month. Why bother doing this? Because some cell phone companies only allow one cell phone plan per bank account. So, the wives have to get their own bank account in order to get a cell phone plan. I wiggled my way out of that rule by having Eric get his cell phone plan through one carrier and I got my cell phone plan through a different carrier.
Why is all of this challenging? Because there are no checkbooks in Korea. No one writes checks. If Eric and some work friends go out to eat lunch and one guy picks up the bill, the other guys will pay him back by doing a wire transfer of money to his account. If the 3rd grade room mom is collecting money for a class party, she will send out the bank account information and we will wire money to the classroom bank account. If the school is selling yearbooks, they will send out their bank account information and everyone wires them the money. Everyone here is very comfortable passing out their bank account information. But I can't wire money without Eric. He has a little card that generates random numbers when you push the button. In order to wire money, I have to enter the random number generated at the exact second I want to wire it. Which means if he is at work, I have to get him to send me the number over a text at the exact second I need it.
How do you pay bills? Not with a check. Paying bills is actually easy, once you learn how. And, if you can get it to auto-pay that is definitely the easiest. We had to watch a YouTube video to learn how to pay our first gas bill. It was only for 50 cents, but it took us 2 hours to figure out how to pay it. As it turns out, there are multiple options for paying the gas bill. You can pay at an ATM, or using an OCR machine within the bank, or at the Post Office. But at the Post Office, you have to pay in cash. I have also heard you can pay your bills at the 7-Eleven, but I haven't tested that. All of those options require leaving the house though.
The online banking system is also very challenging because of the levels of security required just to log in. Only the person whose name is on the account is allowed to log in. You have to download a PKI certificate that must be stored on an external storage device. The PKI certificate has its own password. You have to transfer the PKI certificate to your phone in order to use the banking phone application. It just goes on and on, you get the idea.
#4: Air pollution
This one, above all the rest, is the hardest for all of us to deal with. Never before have we had to worry about what the hourly pollution rating is. Never before have we had to wear masks on bad days and run air purifiers in our house. This is our new reality. We have an app on our phone that we check before leaving the house. Everyone has a different threshold of what they will tolerate before putting on a mask, but the app is pretty clear in its opinion.
We were told initially that the bad air is at its worst in the spring. When we arrived in the summer, there were just a couple bad air days here and there and we just stayed indoors with the windows shut. Once school started though, we were forced to go outside on bad air days just to get the kids to school. They don't happen that often, but sometimes one bad air day can stretch into a week of bad air days. No one is happy when that happens. Cabin fever strikes and tempers flare.
There is also a lot of finger pointing at China during these bad air days. Very little blame for air pollution is accepted by the local Koreans, despite there being 2 very large coal power plants in the vicinity. Map of World's Coal Power Plants
But, just so I'm giving a balanced view, even though we look at the air levels and wear masks on bad air days, does not mean that Korea has the worst air. It just means that Koreans are aware they have bad air. Other countries have much worse air, but no one pays any attention to it. I have met expats who moved here from the Middle East and had no idea that the air was bad there. It never came up.
World Economic Forum article on Europe's dirty air
National Geographic article on Lethal Air Pollution in Countries Worldwide
Despite all these challenges, we are adapting quite well and really making the most of our time here. I am having a great time learning about Korea and traveling around seeing all it has to offer.
