Last couple of days I have spent surfing Korean blogs at Naver.com, which is a lot like a Korean yahoo.com, only it's not. There is a lot of these websites, that provide e-mail addresses as well as a search engine -- their home pages provide news contents and categorized searches, like government, hobbies, games, entertainment news, etc.. There's Daum.net, Naver.com, Hanmir.com, Empas.com, and many many more. Many of these sites have caught on to the blogging phenomena, but many already previously offered home pages, similar to that of Geocities.com, but better (more organization) and since about 70+% of Koreans are computer/internet literates, most have a good working knowledge of html, and thus have better looking websites.

Back to my original point, I was browsing through blogs at Naver, because I thought I might want to get one there (I know -- yet another blog). I looked through several sites to see which had the best offer (for FREE, of course), and it appears that Naver offers free blogs with a storage space of 10 MB (I could be wrong -- that was just off the top of my head) which includes media such as short movies and music, as well as pictures and other graphics. That is probably the best offer to my knowledge -- I have found other sites that give a storage space for pictures only also. Either way they are all superior compared to U.S. sponsored sites like Xanga or blogger.com in their attractive offers. However, to me, Blogger.com remains far more attractive, simply because I have more power with layout than other sites. Much like places like Xanga, Typepad, korean blog sites also have set templates that could be altered, but the range is very limited.

Besides all that though, I do want to get a Korean page, where I will blog in Korean. Although there evidently is a plethora of over-seas Korean bloggers, I can always join the mix and add my valuable, albeit two cents. I think there would be a lot of Koreans who are interested in life in SoCal -- many of them fantasize as a paradise like haven, where the rich and the beautiful mingle, and where the weather is blessed with sunshine all year round. While the much part of the latter is true, Los Angeles is a hodge-podge of a city, filled with all sorts of people imaginable. I really can't sum up LA county in a sentence or two. It is one of the biggest metropolitan area in the world, but people need to differentiate it from Beverly Hills 91210, because LA County not only has Beverly Hills and Malibu -- it also has South Central and Compton. It contains the opposite extremes and everything in between.

I made friends in Oregon when I was younger, and they asked me what my zip code was. I was kind of baffled, since that isn't normally a question you'd ask people. But since at the time, Beverly Hills, 91210 was extremely popular, they wanted to know approximately how far (by zip code, evidently) I lived away from this dramatic yet blissful paradise. At the time I lived in 91204, surprisingly close to 91210 by just 6 zip codes, but it was eons away from B.H..

When I found out that I would shortly be moving to the U.S. (I was 9 years old), I imagined my new home to be filled with blonde-haired, blue-eyed people, much like Barbie and Ken. Even though I had less than a decade of life under my belt, I was surprisingly optimistic, and I felt an immense courage to live on another continent across the Pacific ocean. In fact, it was as though I welcomed the challenge -- it felt refreshing to start anew at a distant strange land. Not too strange, because I had lived in the U.S. previously, in the earlier portion of my childhood years. When I arrived, I was dumbfounded, because the only "caucasian" people I saw were the teachers at the schools. In my first ESL class, I was hearded into a room, full of faces that reflected mine -- a brownish, yellowish mixture, brown eyes, and dark black hair. It is surprising that outside of the caucasian race, very few other ethnicities have different colored eyes or hair. Most of Asia, including the East, the South East, and the South West, as well as the Middle East, have people with black hair and brown/black/dark eyes. So anyways. It is safe to say that I saw very few Barbie/Ken clones, even in Orange County (that's the "OC" for you OC series fans)!

So the botton line is, while I doubt many Koreans living in the mother country would be naive as a nine-year-old to have such vague assumptions about living in or just generally life in LA, I want to give detailed info on what daily life is like in LA. Since most people who would come to California from Korea would inevitably stay/reside in LA/Koreatown, I think a first hand perspective would be refreshing -- quite different from what guides or books would tell. From what I have heard, there's a lot of guides/books about foreign countries by people who have never even been. From a website that I frequent, I have learned that a New Yorker was introduced to a English-teaching job in Korea by a person who has never even been to Korea. From what I understand, it seems as though that the person who did the introducing made it seem plausible that they understood what life would be like for this New Yorker when he moves to Korea. Basically, my point is, one needs to hear it from an actual local to get the feeling. To hear it from a local who was once one of them would be best. I can tell them that kimchi is abundant in this far and mystical land, and in Koreatown, the official language spoken is Korean, not English. The white man would not fare well here, unless he speaks Korean, or has a good Korean friend.