#120. 틀딱충 -- Shut up, gramps!

What kind of classes were you taking when you were a grade 9 student? In Canada, where I spent my grade 9 years, I took the core classes (English, French, math, science, physical education), and some electives (business studies, fine arts, and music). While it did not immediately strike me as odd, I realized over the years that there was one core class that the Canadian education system was missing, that the Koreans thought were important. And that...

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#119. 주작 -- God of lies

It is still snowing where I live. It has been a really long winter, and although I try, it is difficult to look upon the winter season with kindness when it has been dragging on for nearly six months. Save for the Christmas season, winter is the depressing time of the year where the land is barren and the weather harsh. It is something that you must prepare for during the happy and plentiful seasons of spring, summer, and autumn. Did you ever...

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#118. 마크정식 -- A best way to a man's heart is through his stomach (feat. GOT7)

Special thanks to Jess from Paris, who suggested that I do a food-related post! Pardon the cliché beginning; my family was quite poor when I was growing up. There was never enough money to get anything beyond the absolutely necessary. Forget the designer-brand clothing (even when I was a child, the Koreans were sensitive to designer brands, which make you appear wealthy, or so they believe!) and the adorable stationary (a must-have for every schoolchild...

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#117. 반다비 -- Can you bear being the mascot of the paralympic games? (Shamanism 10)

Many of the anglophone fairy tales start with the phrase "Once upon a time..." Korean fairy tales often begin with the phrase: "옛날 옛적에, 호랑이가 담배피던 시절에..." (A long, long time ago, back when tigers used to smoke tobacco...) And the story I want to tell in this post is very relevant to this particular phrase, so let me begin my story with this: -------------------------------------- 옛날 옛적에, 호랑이가 담배피던 시절에, there lived a tiger (호랑이) and a bear (곰)....

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#116. 세로드립 -- Find the secret message (feat. f(x), Apink, and GFriend)

Have you ever seen the "Christian Fish symbol"? It's called Ichthys, or "ΙΧΘΥΣ" in Greek, and it looks like this: You may be wondering why the Christians decided to use a fish, of all things, to represent them. If you're familiar with biblical stories, there is the story of Jesus feeding a huge crowd out of a couple of bread loafs and some fish, but that story is just one out of thousands of stories in the bible. While it is a well-known story,...

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#115. 소나무, 대나무, 민들레 -- Here are four phrases related to the native plants of Korea

When I started learning English, there were some phrases that did not make any sense to me. For example, what does it mean when you say that "Bob is as cool as a cucumber"? Does that mean that Bob is hip? Are cucumbers hip? Are we talking about their soothing powers? I admit that I always had an image of a cucumber wearing sunglasses and chilling in the sun, with a margarita in one hand (not that cucumbers have hands!) And I'm not the only one...

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