'Shoot With A Rice'

Koreans usually call a meal 'a rice'. Because a bowl of rice is essential on the meal table although others vary.

Normally, Korean meal has one bowl of rice, one bowl of soup([guk] or [ji-ge]), and other plates. A Rice bowl places right near the person, and a soup bowl does right of the rice bowl--a spoon and chopsticks follow them.

If you have a Korean friend or just a Korean around a you who you want to be familiar with, I suggest one thing that works very good--Treat a meal.

I know that it is human nature to love to get any favor from others. However, if you are thinking about giving a good impression to your Korean friends, I can say 'a rice' will work more efficiently than other presents which in some situations cannot show your real heart as it is.

There even is a slang that means 'to treat a meal'--'To shoot with a rice'. When a good thing just happens to a Korean near you, you will hear this word in Korean "I'll shoot all you guys with dinner!" from the person. It means "I'll treat you." or "It's on me."

Literally, it might be right expressing 'to treat' as 'to shoot' in a way in Korea. Because the people treated by whom would start talking 'positive' stories about whom immediately as if they got shot. Even though some didn't like whom, they could change their mind a bit more positively at least.

If you made your mind to 'shoot' your Korean friends 'with a rice', don't worry about money. Usually, it doesn't matter how much you pay when you 'shoot', but your action to 'shoot' and the situation to have dinner together just count. You can try out with a little 'Deokbokki'(photo available above) or other 1000 won (approx. 1 dollar) streetfoods. Though I'm not denying this proverb "The more, the better!"

Once you 'shoot', the others would 'shoot' back at the next time. That's the mysterious symmetry of how familiar relationships grow in Korea.

*Thanks to miwooc.com for the photo use authorization

Look Up, Private!

Last year when I was living in Camp Humphreys in Korea which is a US Army base. On a day, it was lunch time when I was passing by my battalion building. Meters far from me, there were 2 officers and 2 enlisted soldiers. 2 enlisted were talking to each other so that they couldn't pay attention to the officers. All of a sudden, one of the officers just stopped the enlisted and said, "Hey hey, look up, private!" Then the enlisted could recognize the officer's rank on the beret and saluted. It was a rule that enlisted soldiers render a salute to the officers, outdoor. (I'm not talking about the event above was how, which is not common. Most officers I've seen were humble for sure.)

If the Republic of Korea were one of those privates, it might not have missed to be careful of higher ranks.
From years of my accumulated experiences of news watching, I found a certain pattern of Korean journalism's news making. That is, a 'quotation'--to translate news from other 'powerful' countries related to a special issue of Korea.

Korean press tends to study powerful countries' face. Suppose there was a soccer game between Korea and France, news with the headline 'responses abroad' suddenly appear. It might be made of a translation of news from AP, AFP, UPI, Reuters, CNN, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Japanese press. For relatively big issues in Korea, Korean press rather worries about how 'they' talk upon the issues.

What isn't good is, a translated news can be used for somebody's favor. Also, sometimes it can cause an illusion that the issue is now being evaluated more positively and bigger than it really is. So Korean people have a big chance of taking in and believing forever a distorted point of view as if it is really true in quality and qualtity.

Korea wants to be 'Korea in the world' as soon as possible. I understand it is very important to keep up with the international sense. However, whenever I see translated news such as "World Praised Korea Highly", I feel subtle and wonder if it was because of a sort of toadyism.