Expat Advisory Services Eastern Asia

Vegans, stay away from Korea because it's impossible to live here without throwing away your values. Or you could come over anyway and check out this restaurant map posted to Facebook by a member of the Seoul Veggie Club. While vegetarian and vegan groups have been active in Korea since the late 1990s, the concepts are still unfamiliar in most restaurants.

Living in Seoul, one grows accustomed to reading the city vertically. I grew up in small and mid-sized Midwestern cities where architecture sprawls low and wide, and as such, was trained to see urban environments two-dimensionally, as a series of buildings placed next to each other. But after living in Korea for a while one’s perceptions shift, and it wasn’t long before I was looking up as much as left and right. Restaurants on the sixth floor, PC bangs on the tenth: Up is the way the city is built. It takes a particularly unusual tower to strike one as out of place here.

Many current and former Korea expats will remember Jung Nan-young's heartbreaking struggle to rehome more than 200 rescued dogs. Ms. Jung had more dogs than she could possibly care for, and city authorities were trying to force her off the rental property in Daejeon where they were crowded together in a dark greenhouse. Ms. Jung slept in a small room in one corner of the greenhouse, and she couldn't afford to move.

In late 2008, the closure of a small private shelter in Daejeon brought some 25 volunteers together to move 70 dogs to a mountainside property in Asan. Photographer Harvey Rosas, one of the volunteers, posted a warning when he shared his pictures on the Animal Rescue Korea website: One image was very disturbing.

One of the dogs already living at the shelter was missing her nose and most of her upper snout. Her teeth were permanently exposed, and in a still photo she could have been mistaken for an aggressive dog.