I found this article written for JoongAng Daily (a Korean newspaper, I’m guessing) with a list of “You know you’ve been in the United States too long when…”. I found it amusing but in some ways unusual at the same time. I expected some of the items:
- You wear sneakers and carry a backpack when dressed in a business suit.
- You look forward to Monday Night Football.
- You order a supersized Big Mac with a Diet Coke.
- […]
But some of them left me scratching my head. For instance, “Sheer blue eyes no longer frighten you” — are blue eyes so rare in Korea as to be frightening? I mean, I wouldn’t mind meeting someone with purple eyes (though orange eyes might creep me out a bit).
And then there’s “You feel no guilt over trying on a dozen pairs of pants and not buying any of them.” Whenever I’m buying clothes, I make sure to try them on first; and, if they don’t fit, I put them back on the rack. Is it the dozen-pairs-of-pants part that Koreans find most odd or the putting-them-all-back that they’re not used to?
I think that in other parts of the world, they find it a bit rude to put things back on the shelf, to return things…this is probably what brought on that comment.
Koean =! Korean
I don’t think blue eyes are common in Korea. Asian eyes are usually black.
Ah, I’ve fixed that typo. Thanks.
I had to necessarily limit these observations to be about what Koreans livin’ US in the US are doin’, hardly any of these items are that odd to those of us that observe US citizens on a daily basis in the US.
Blue eyes are not common at all in Korea, but in my experience, many Koreans find them interesting or attractive (like looking into the sky or ocean or something). Frightening might be an overstatement, but certainly they are rare enough that they might be off-putting to people who haven’t seen them in person before.