Korean celebrities don in traditional Hanbok to greet the fans on Chuseok, Korean harvest festival. Some pretty women, a few hunks and a little kid in beautiful costumes; can’t remember everyone’s name regrettably…
FT Island
Can’t afford a Lamborghini, or Ferrari, or Porsche? Try being a cop in South Korea instead… [via Cutkillavince [Fr]]
Bumped into this Korean restaurant last week by chance; was settling some stuff at a nearby bank and the restaurant was just a block away.
Seollal (설날), or Korean New Year, is the first day of the Lunar Calendar and one of the two most important traditional Korean holidays (the other is Chuseok).
Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival is an annual winter festival in Hwacheon county, South Korea, which attracts over a million visitors each year.
The 7th edition of the festival is held on January 10-19 in 2009; as usual the highlight of the festival is ice fishing for Sancheoneo (cherry salmon), a mountain trout species found primarily in north-eastern Asia.
Besides fishing, the frozen Hwacheongang River also plays host to ice/snow sledding, snow castle/sculpture, bobsleigh, ice tubing, ice soccer, ice skating and other winter recreation activities [Sancheoneo Festival's official website]
~590,000 Korean students took their College Scholastic Ability Test (수능 – Suneung) on Thursday (Nov 13)… a day where the students had to endure a gruelling nine-hour tests that would significantly influence their future career prospect.
It’s a day where stock market and offices were opened an hour late to ease the morning traffic; where flights had to be rescheduled during the listening test to avoid the slightest disturbance… and it’s a day where temples and churches were packed with parents praying for good performances from their kids.
Parents praying for their kids in a Seoul temple; and students cheering for their seniors
to do well in the exam (Image from Xinhuanet)
The CSAT would determine which university/college the Korean students would be enrolled to… and the reputation of the universities will make a huge impact on their career path. A student who gets into a top university is almost guaranteed a bright future in their working career.
The larger-than-life exam culture is not entirely unique to Korea; most of the East Asian countries are adopting similar ideology, presumably originated from the Chinese civil servants’ exam in ancient Chinese dynasty some thousand of years ago. The Koreans however seem to be taking the whole idea to its extremity.
Many quarters have criticised that the high pressure of preparing for the CSAT attributes to the high suicide rates of Korean teenagers; while some others are criticising that the system are undermining the students’ creativity and other talents by overemphasising the exam results.
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