The Thing about Korea is.....

(This post is mainly in honor of the fact that I will soon vacate this place and also for Ryan, who is only about to begin, which is maybe a little bit my fault.)

You will never fit in. You are too big and stupid.

Korean toothpaste has sugar in it. Sometimes, it's flavored. Orange or green tea. I don't recommend the orange toothpaste.

The eggs come in packs of ten, instead of twelve.

After you use toilet paper (and here you'll call it tissue paper), you should always throw it in the trash can and not in the toilet. Toilet paper doesn't get flushed in the toilet. That might be why they call it tissue and not toilet paper. Ladies, this means after you use the toilet and the paper therein, you should put in the trash can, not the toilet.

The bakery items are lies. Everything looks sweet enough to kill you. But it isn't. Koreans don't know how to work bread. Bread is the Korean rebound from rice. There was a bad break up with rice and Korea is trying new things. But Korea is still too hung up on rice. A Korean pastry can never deliver what it promises.

You thought cute could only be something passive, something tame. A puppy, a baby, a nice skirt. But in Korea, you learn that cute can be something fierce, something aggressive. Cute kicks your ass in Korea.

The onions, garlic, salt and pepper in Korea are not as strong as our Western products. And spicy means something suspiciously mundane.

It is illegal to do anything slowly in Korea. This is especially true where speech and driving is concerned.

Meat will often still have it's bones. Especially chicken. Watch out.

The middle school aged girls will see you and laugh. And laugh and laugh. If you ride on the bus with them, they will laugh the entire time, until you leave their sight. At first, you will feel self conscious. But eventually, you'll just laugh too.

Do not drink Soju. It's too cheap because they don't filter out the chemicals and the price you pay the next morning is never worth what you didn't pay the night before.

The best people in Korea are the children and the older women (adjumas). The young women are too vain, fragile and perfect, the young men are strangely withdrawn and the older men are too self important. Children and older women are the people who will probably possess the least amount of English abilities, but they will provide the best human contact.

In Korea, there is not sprit or 7 up. There is cider, which us Westerners always associate with apples and Halloween. Erase the notion from your consciousness. Because cider, from here on out, means something equivalent to Sprite or 7 up. And coke is always cola.

You will forget how a western style shower and how an oven works. Your shower is your bathroom, and a nozzle attached to the sink. Your oven is your gas range. And when you say gas range in Korea, you will say "gas rangeee." Start practicing.

Your English will disintegrate and you will pronounce e's on the end of words that don't have them and will begin to rely on a sort of English Korean hybrid language that will follow you around like a bad smell.

Young Korean women are the most beautiful women in the world. But you can't have one. No one can.

Young Korean men are the most beautiful men in the world. By which I mean, they look a lot like very beautiful women. It's weird, but kind of hot because when you see a beautiful Korean girl with her beautiful Korean boyfriend, there's probably a moment where you think you're seeing two cute chicks. Beautiful Korean lesbians.

Except that allegedly, homosexuality doesn't exist in Korea. Despite how well dressed all the men are.

Rice accompanies every meal in one form or another. It is illegal to eat a meal that doesn't have rice lurking in it somewhere. Rice in Korean is "bap." That will come up. Trust me.

Korean bus drivers and taxi drivers are all psychotic mad men. That said, they are probably some of the best drivers in the world.

There is no "f" in the Korean alphabet. School children will spit on you trying to turn "P" into "F's."

Yes, they eat dog. Guess what though? The Japanese and Chinese eat dog too.

Heat comes from the floor and not the wall. It's much more efficient, but still kind of startling initially. The reason for this, like most things, is historical. Koreans built their fires under their homes, rather then having a fire intrude into the living space. It's damn efficent.

Fruit trucks circle neighborhoods advertising their wares via repetitive recording, on loop, played through a microphone. They will say the names of various fruits or fish or vegetables and then repeat "im-meda" which means "here is" in terms of presentation. It makes it sound like you are living in a war zone, in some place gone mad, some place driven mad by the sound of something that took over the city and drove everyone out of their homes and minds. But it's just fruit.