I know before setting foot back in Korea that there are some changes that make life a lot better for expats than when I first taught ESL in 1996-2000: The growth in the Internet and its availability would have made things much easier back then.
Red pepper wasn’t introduced into the Korean diet until it was discovered in the New World and made its way to Asia, but I can’t for the life of me imagine what Korean food must have been like before then, because red pepper is so essential in most Korean cooking.
PC Bangs are the same way. There are some readers here who are familiar with Korea before 2000 and can remember back to a time when internet access in Korea was scarce. Most people might find it hard to believe considered how unbelievably wired Korean society has become.
That changes things for the expat a good bit.
Now, thanks to the Internet, you can download pretty much any American or Western movie or popular TV show and often sporting events you want.
You can also easily keep up with news around the world.
And since I figured out recently how to read in full pretty much any book previewed in Google Books, access to reading material in English is wide open.
It also keeps friends and family back home easily accessible. I’ll probably buy a couple of computer cams for some family members with cable modems before I leave, and I plan to buy a desktop computer early on with one for myself in Korea.
All of this makes being an expat in Korea much less of an isolation than it was in 1996.
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