For this week’s TL;DR
we’re doing one of our own questions,
because we thought about it recently.
How has Korea changed
in the six years that we’ve been here?
Because there have been
a lot of changes.
A lot of you are gonna be new here,
and you don’t know the pains
that we’ve went through.
There was pretty much no cheese
when we arrived and
I can’t live without cheese.
I CAN’T LIVE, LIVE WITHOUT CHEESE!
So yes, what you’re gonna find here in Korea
is that a lot of the foods that you might
now be like ”Ah that’s great that we have here”
We didn’t have that we first came here,
cheese is a very good example of it.
So they do have a bigger sortment
of cheese at local grocery stores,
and what I wanna focus on is
things that everybody can go
to like Homeplus and Emart
are the local grocery stores.
Do they have cheese available now?
Yes! They do.
Is it still $16 for this much cheese?
Yeah....
Do you splurge on it when it comes to
Christmas or depressing moments? Yeah....
There are no big cheese boutiques
here so it’s difficult to find like a Stilton
or a whole bunch of the fancy pants cheese
that you get.
But, you can get like a parmesan cheese
or like a white cheddar now.
They have two kinds of parmesan now!
Yes! That’s a big deal. PARMESAN!
You know what, I thought about
when we were watching
cooking shows last night,
we were watching Anthony Bourdain.
And he goes to a cheese
boutique in Philadelphia.
It’s like watching porn.
We see the cheese boutique we’re like
”AAH LOOK AT THAT CHEESE!”
The cream at the top of that mhm!
But the Koreans seems to
have gotten into Brie?
I don’t know why there’s so much brie!
Who told them that brie was important.
So there seems to be like an
excessive amount of brie!
There should just be one brie,
and there should be more cheeses
to choose from.
I need some goat cheese...
One of these days Simon.
I need that goat cheese man.
You’ll also find in some of your
grocery stores a bigger selection
of herbs than we just to have like
now you can see mint,
cilantro sometimes as well,
basil has started to get popular as well.
While before there was pretty
much no herbs in any grocery stores.
I just bought six limes yesterday,
at e-mart. Martina, she called me up
like ”OH MY GOD THEY HAVE LIMES AT E-MART!”
It was 6 dollars and 50 cents for six tiny,
little baby limes.
I will use this lime sacredly, I will use its skin,
I will use everything.
I feel like we’re back to the hunting days,
we’re like ”I must respect the lime animal”
CIRCLE OF LIME!
It was such a bad joke but it made me laugh!
Outside of food, because
we could talk about that for 20 min.
We’ve also noticed a change
in the attitude that Koreans
have towards foreigners.
We noticed this change maybe two years ago?
In our three first years in Korea,
if you stopped at a corner it was guaranteed
that someone would say in Korean:
”Look it’s a foreigner!” Oh 외국인! 미국사람!”
Which means, it’s an American!
”Oh 외국인!” ” 미국사람!”
”어 아니에요, 캐나다사람이에요”
And that was really annoying,
‘cause not every foreigner is an American.
Everyday we’re told ”Hey you’re not one of us”
And it really Jars on you after a while.
If you’re reminded that you’re an
outsider everyday, we barely hear that anymore.
Yes! It’s really a big shift and it’s possible
it’s because we’re now in Seoul.
Yeah. Maybe there’s a change, HOWEVER
I still remember when we used to
come to Seoul we still heard a lot
of people muttering about ”Oh, it’s a foreigner.
Hey look it’s a foreigner”.
This doesn’t mean that it’s completely
obsolete now, like even the other day
we were filming something and some
old guy’s like ”Oh look at the foreigner!”
It still happens, but not as much as it
used to and we like that change.
Korea, please stop telling us that we’re foreigners,
we know already don’t remind me.
We can combat it quite easily though,
ok you be Korean I’ll be Martina.
OH 외국인 (Oh a Foreigner) OH 한국사람 (O a Korean).
A really positive change that we’ve seen
something that really really annoyed
us before but over the past few months
it has become so much better,
night taxies are no longer dirty evil vultures.
That’s right! Yes, because before if you wanted
to get into a taxi after midnight,
the taxi will like slow down and
roll down his window, and say like
”Where are you going?” and then he’s like
”Oh that’s gonna cost you like $50-60.
They would give you like a flat which is illegal,
there should be a meter rate.
And sometimes they won’t even pick you up,
they’ll like roll down the window and just drive
right by no matter what.
But, recently the taxi drivers went
on strike to raise the base rate of the taxis
as well as raising the rate after
midnight and after that went through
we noticed a huge difference.
No taxis says no to me anymore,
just hop in there and they’ll take you
where you need to go which is what taxis
are supposed to do. So that increase,
that strike apparently really helped the attitude
of the taxi drivers. Great change for taxis,
very good approval rating from me!
Thumb up!
On the negative side of things that
have changed in korea is that we’ve seen
a hyper franchisation happening in Korea,
that is a word right? I believe so,
what we’re trying to say is that the streets
that had nothing that local shops are now being overrun
by big franchises as Gap and Uniqlo, Forever21.
Like we’re here on Hongdae and it’s a university,
indie artsy area and they’re opening
up a Godiva chocolates?
Do you not know the people that live here?
That operate around here?
They have that building on that main
street leading up to Hongdae now.
They’re opening up a massive new balant shoe store,
it’s like three stories high.
Like three stories of new balance shoes in Hongdae.
How many shoes do you think university
students will be purchasing?
I just don’t understand.
But I think my biggest disappointment was Garaso-gil.
Oh man that’s so bad now.
So Garaso-gil was this street that,
we did a video a while back.
We went for SE7EN’s chicken
in that whole area and it was they had
these little shops that were kinda boutique-ey
so some of them were higher and pricing
but it was still the only shop you could get it at.
Now it basically turned into a Korean department store,
that they’ve taken all of the stores
in the department store and just
put them on the street.
They even have a Mr.Donut there.
Why do you have a Mr. Donut
on like a fashion street that’s WHAT?
Essentially when you’re walking down Garaso-gil
now, every shop that you might think is unique
and cool shop, you can get from any department store,
you can go to MyeongDeong and get it there,
so it’s nothing special anymore
it’s just a pretty are thats turned into a franchise.
So why am I gonna go there and fight the crowd?
‘Cause it’s a very crowded area.
So we still have hope for Hongdae
to retain this like indie spear but the
charm of Garaso-gil is totally lost now.
I’m sorry. I hope Hongdae doesn’t go that way
‘cause there’s still those little shops here.
Keep those shops Hongdae, we’re watching you!
You can do it buddy! We believe in you!
Yeah! I’m an anime character!
You can do it if you put your mind to it!
Okay Simon-chan!
We’re gonna talk a lot more about this on our
blog post so make sure you click on the link here,
including the hyper franchisation of kpop.
And the excess amounts of bands
that are coming out and not being very good.
Holy smokes.
So question for you guys.
We got a split here:
for those of you that are living in Korea
and experiencing it, what is it like in your area?
Do you live in Busan? Do you live in Jeju?
Are you in the countryside?
Have the changes affected you
as they’ve affected us or is it totally different?
‘Cause we’re talking about our perspective
now being in Seoul but maybe in the
countryside things are still a little bit different.
So for those of you living outside Korea
what is your Korean community like,
do you have a Korean community?
Is there a local store you can buy stuff
at or is there nothing at all?
Let us know.
Two TL;DRs ago we wound up talking
about Korean blood types and
a lot of people were asking
”Well what about like the positive
and negative bloodtypes?”
But somebody left a really interesting comment,
Mariam Watt wound up telling us
that less than one percent of Korea’s
population are RH-negative so there’s
no need to talk about positive
and negative because supposedly
it’s the rarest in the world for any country
to have that little of RH-negative.
BerlinTokyoConnect said that blood types
are also important in Japan in fact one
of her friends was asked for
blood type at an interview.
If I were there I would be like I don’t know..?
The best bloodtype?
And speaking of Japan, Lynnette Bates
wound up telling us that bloodtype AB
as opposed to be like really cool
is very stigmatized in Japan because it’s unpredictable.
When I thought AB was the best blood type because.
I’m pretty sure the words she used were
like eccentric and unpredictable.
Unreliable! And Crazypants!
I’m pretty sure they said *** in here as well.
No, not at all!