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Just got back my korea postage today. It took 7 weeks to deliver home from KAIST - I used the slower sea mail option. I was so worried I wouldn’t get to see my stuff again because 6 weeks have passed, thank god it arrived! Kudos to the reliable Korean postal service :)

Try maekju, makgeolli, soju and some hangover ice cream

And I did! The Korean classes I took here proved to be useful for times like this. We managed to order the fried chicken that we have been staring at our dorm doors for a good 3 months. What a sense of accomplishment haha. And the chicken tasted damn good too. From then on I think we have been ordering food like almost every other week. It’s really useful during weekends when stalls are closed and you are lazy to walk out to eat. Now wouldn’t it be cool if they have an app for food delivery so foreigners like us don’t have to struggle speaking over the phone. Apparently they have one in Seoul, but not in KAIST. Too bad. You can just see it as a motivation to learn more conversational Korean here.

But before you get to enjoy the fun of online shopping in Korea, you will have to face the trouble of internet banking here. Do a simple lookup on the Internet and you can easily see a trove of complaints on Korea’s internet banking. You will need to set up a local certificate on your device first before you can do Internet Banking. And getting that done is VERY tedious, no thanks to all the instructions being in Korean and the technical complexity of doing so. I made 3 trips down to the bank just to settle my certificate. I never understand why a technologically advanced country like Korea still insist on such backdated systems. In my country, you will just be issued with a OTP token and that’s all you need for internet banking. And isnt OTP more secure than local certificates too? Oh well, I guess Korean banks ain’t keeping up with technologies like the private sector.

I used to think that meritocracy is the root of why we have become an apathetic society in Singapore. But somehow, Korea managed to pursue progress without eroding values. I am still figuring out the difference here. Maybe it’s because of different standards of meritocracy. Koreans do not have an explicit policy on meritocracy, but rather based it on the traditional value of hardwork that is deeply ingrained in the Asian culture. Perhaps it is by falling back to these traditional values that Korea managed to preserve its values while going forward.

And that brings me to the next point - why? Korean business students don’t just study business course, they call it business and technology management. I attended some business courses and I actually learnt much about latest technological trends - Alipay, mobile payment, cloud computing. Compare that to our business course back in Singapore, I don’t think our business students know these. There’s still a gap to be filled between business and technology in our education. That’s why we don’t see much of our (business) students using Slack and Trello. They are stuck with Excel sheets and Powerpoint - the traditional communication tools. In today’s business environment, business cannot be separated from IT. The fact that our education still segregates business courses from technology courses already put us one step behind our Korean counterparts.