OT: Moving back to Korea, What are your tips an tricks?
After a decade back in the states, my winding life path looks like it's taking me back to Korea, so I may become 'BlueSeoul' once again or maybe 'YeosuBlue' for a while at least. I was wondering what new websites the kids are using to get cheap airplane tickets and what other traveling/moving tips you might have.
Damn, I thought this was a long awaited CRex update :(
good luck with the endeavor!
Congrats. Are they going to comp your move? If so get a relocation company, especially if you need help finding schools for kids. I am also moving and looking at AMS Bekins and Shift Moving.
Also if you are moving from SF and need to sell/donate stuff check out remoovit.com.
I hear that Pyongyang is lovely this time of year.
I wish they had that remoovit available here in Tampa. Trying to sell stuff on OfferUp and Marketplace is bullshit. All I get are scammers.
Yep, I tried using FB marketplace and it sucked. Scams. Finally some random dude shows up and then offers 10% of what I have the item listed for. Soooo much wasted time.
Thanks, I'll check it out!
google flights
I'm not an expert on the subject but I've heard that it's a bad idea to take a submersible.
Skiplagged.com. Works best with domestic flights when a connection flight to your destination on the way to Florida or NYC is cheaper than just flying straight to your destination. However, they find the cheapest prices to wherever you want. Make sure to buy the tickets directly from the airline. The site will add a fee if you buy from them.
Learn to like food that’s been buried underground?
Wait till you hear where vegetables come from.
Also, I'll bet you a box of donuts that the dude has had access to kimchi in the San Francisco Bay area
The answer to all things Korea is going to somehow involve Kimchi.
The trick is that once you dig it up, you fry it on the bbq with all the fat from the meat you cook. 1000% better.
I totally second this. Last weekend I actually made a marinade with Korean Gochujang paste for some kabobs and served them with Kimchi. It's awesome stuff.
If there's some way you can send an email address along, I can connect you with a good friend. He is from South Korea, then lived in the states for school, then moved back to South Korea about 3 months ago.
Hi, you can DM on discord. I just changed my name to YeosuBlue and put a test post on the mgoblog discord.
Can you post the mgoblog discord server invite please?
Actually this is the mgostreaming discord. https://discord.gg/hbwMN25A
According to my friends, you need to order taxis (they won't just pick you up on the street) and need a Korean phone number/sim card in order to do so.
Kakao everything - Talk, Maps, Bus, T (for taxi), Metro.
You definitely can just pick one up on the street, but if it's later in the night you'll probably need to get one on an app or call. I lived off of a major thoroughfare and if you just went out to the street you'd have a taxi within 30 seconds unless it was late.
If you wanna go away from the central areas later at night, it can often be nearly impossible to get a taxi to take you that far. I knew people who said they often had to take 2 or 3 different taxis to get home because it was so hard to get someone to go the whole way to their place. Drivers didn't wanna go that far out and then have no fare on the way back to the busy areas. Only big city I've lived in so I can't compare to other places.
Someone else mentioned the taxi thing. And apparently they're a lot more expensive than they used to be.
going.com for flights
If you order plain fried chicken there, is it what we call Korean fried chicken here in the U.S.? Inquiring minds want to know.
kinda, there's like a million flavors, so you just order whatever flavoring you want. The sweet and spicy korean chicken is called 'yangnyum' or something like that. I usually get the butter or garlic fried chicken.
South > North
I've heard that the South is preferred of you have a choice.
I haven't heard great things about the northern half of Korea. Just my $0.02, but I probably wouldn't take any vacations there.
In all seriousness, would love to really go to Korea one day. I've flown through Seoul on my way to Shanghai, so that doesn't really count, but Incheon is one of the nicest airports I've ever been in.
Just a reminder that so many of this country's airports are effectively third world compared to those of other developed countries.
So is our public transportation and health care.
Not to go down that road, but I feel our healthcare system gets unfairly criticized. I'm deep in the healthcare field domestically and have good experience overseas in western countries. We have probably the best trained physicians (especially surgeons) in the world. People from all over the world come to the US for medical school, not the other way around. Also, the vast majority of healthcare tech is developed in the US.
While I trust primary care in most developed countries, I only trust the US for any type of moderate to significant surgical procedure.
The biggest issue in the US healthcare system is that US citizens are some of the most unhealthy people in the developed world. Our obesity rates alone are crazy high, and obesity is the gateway condition for various other diseases. It could be said that our life expectancy is because of our healthcare system, not in spite of it. Our system is not optimal by any stretch, but we inject the system with some really unhealthy subjects that would unduly strain any system in the world.
Anyway, I know it's a complex subject. It hits close to home for me.
I visited Seoul just before the pandemic with a group of 17 people (friends and their family). Unfortunately my friend's daughter got sick and needed medical attention. We were in a Hongdae area hotel and the concierge suggested a doctor's office next door. I went with them so that I can translate for them. Got to the office, filled out a form and got to see the doctor within an hour.
Went we went in the office, he had his Yale degree hung on the wall. He spoke perfect English and I was not even needed. After the examination he prescribed some medicine and we picked them up downstairs with no wait.
The best part? The whole thing cost $35 including medicine.
This was without any insurance. Anyone think any of the above is possible in US?
Um. Yea. Anytime I (or my family) am sick and need primary care, I visit my northwestern trained doctor about 3 miles away with $20 co-pay each time. Medicine last time was $5 (generic).
To suggest that good stuff like that doesn’t happen in the US is pure propaganda.
Try to do that with no insurance.
Even with the insurance, I cannot see my doctor unless it is scheduled weeks out.
According to census.gov, 92% of Americans have health insurance. While not quite universal healthcare, it’s darn close. (With that said, it would be nice to find a way to close that 8%)
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-278.html
As for your last sentence, that could be true for “your” doctor, but you can easily see an equally trained doctor at an urgent care or minute clinic if you get sick and need immediate care
Even with healthcare, I cannot just walk into some random office and get care at reasonable cost as my insurance may not cover that doctor.
Not sure what clinic you are talking about but I have NEVER ever seen a doctor for a non-emergency case in less than after several hours of waiting. Hell I have t usually wait about an hour for a doctor even for a scheduled visit.
Even filling a prescription takes hours of waiting. I have never experienced a pharmacy where I handed the prescription and walked out with the medicine in 5 min.
I'm not denying that access to healthcare varies in different areas. With that, I have very basic insurance, and I can walk into my urgent care clinic for whatever whenever. Per the link below, the current wait time for the one closest to me is 10 minutes. Depending on time of the say, the local Walgreens will have the script filled within an hour (although I did have an instance were it took almost a full day)
https://www.nm.org/locations/immediate-care-glenview
It's become pretty routine for Canadians and Brits to wait months to over a year for care, and to fly to the US and pay out of pocket for immediate treatment or testing. Maybe what you say about your doctor is true, but it is far from the norm.
You’re saying the quiet part out loud. The way medical insurance works in this country is the issue. Congrats for you that you have great insurance. But you’re basically saying uninsured people don’t matter when you keep tooting the horn of the US medical system.
I have a fairly basic insurance package. There were certainly several other much better packages we could have chosen.
Also, per my previous post, the vast vast majority of Americans have health insurance. The issues/costs associated with the US healthcare system have little to do with the uninsured.
My counter-example. My son went to see our primary care physician for a routine checkup. $35 co-pay. He was battling weight issues, so she referred us to an in-network nutritionist. We thought it would be a great idea for him to hear about nutrition guidance from a professional set of ears rather than just his parents. Two consults later - which basically amounted to the nutritionist recommending a calorie counter like MyFitnessPal and a handful of ways to substitute certain bad foods for good foods - we were billed almost $1,000 that our insurance provider wouldn't touch.
While we partially take the blame for not verifying that our flavor of insurance wouldn't cover the in-network nutritionist expenses, it's absolutely insane to think that about 45 minutes total of a nutritionist's time should cost almost $1,000, even if covered by insurance. The combination of private health insurance and exorbitant medical costs, combined with the huge disparity in health care availability based on region (rural versus urban) and socioeconomic status, is what makes our current health care system very broken.
By the way, my spouse is a physician. She can describe how the health care *system* is broken in many more eloquent ways than I can.
You described it just fine IMO, and you highlight another problem I think needs to be addressed, in that we need to have reasonable expectations of what a healthcare system can and should deliver.
It seems to me (and I'll underscore the word "seem") that a lot of Americans expect our healthcare system should be set up where you can visit your awesome doctor anytime for any reason, and receive the best care ever without wait and for free. This "utopia" healthcare system does not exist anywhere.
IMO, the US healthcare system tries to cover too many services at the sacrifice of cost and sometimes quality. For example, should insurance cover nutrition services, or chiropractor services? Honestly, I don't know, but much of the developed world does not cover this. Another example is mental health services, such as therapy, marriage counseling etc. We cover this quite well, whereas Asia doesn't really cover it all. So when we compare healthcare systems across with world, its often not apples to apples.
Quality of insurance is basically as important as having insurance or not.
I got tricked into going to a hospital for a simple doctor's appointment. I talked to the doctor for about 5 minutes and got a bill for around 350 because I was being charged an emergency care rate. It was the Falk Medical Building in Pittsburgh. Wouldn't know I was in an emergency setting at all since it just looked like any big doctor's office. It happened to enough people that administration from Carnegie Mellon sent out a warning about it to all the grad students, since we basically all had health insurance through CMU.
In South Korea I needed an MRI, walked into a hospital on a Saturday afternoon with no appointment, waited about half an hour and talked to the doctor, 30 min. and then MRI, 30 min. and talked to the doctor again about the results, and that cost me about 250 altogether.
And I don't see anything left or right about that. It's just not a good system if you don't have high quality insurance, which probably means you're considerably richer than a large majority, and it's objectively way more expensive than other developed countries. We don't even need universal Medicare. Many countries have successful mixed government/private systems. From my understanding, Korea and Germany are good examples of those.
Let me be clear, I'm not knocking the South Korean healthcare system. I'm sure its a great system overall. My stance is that I think the US healthcare system gets unfairly criticized, and that comparing to someplace like South Korea is not a meaningful way to do so. Because:
1. South Korea is far more culturally homogeneous which helps when focusing on certain healthcare services
2. South Korean people are far more healthy which mitigates stress and cost on the system
Regarding relative cost of healthcare - our legal system also drives up costs in the US (settlements, attorneys, malpractice insurance premiums, etc.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/upshot/malpractice-lawsuits-medical-costs.html
All of it but the cost part is possible
Not without insurance.
Doctors (PCPs and Specialists) are paid way more in the US than other countries. That contributes heavily to the cost structure, especially for PCP visits with no insurance.
There are lots of areas of inefficiency, but WindyCityBlue makes some great (and accurate) points.
And to respond to a few other comments of yours (you are going to quickly for me on my phone lol), I've had scripts filled very quickly, cusually several hours seems like a stretch, at least on average.
Your experience with clinics is your own, all depends on the type of practice, how busy it is that day, etc. That may have been a unique experience in Korea as well, it's just one instance so can't glean everything from it.
Eh this is a massive overstatement. The US has many world-class airports (DTW, ATL, SLC), many just fine airports (most second-tier airports fall here as would JFK), and some pretty bad airports (ORD, EWR).
There are plenty of nice airports around the world in developed countries (OSL, ICN, BRU) but there are lots of just fine ones (CDG, SYD, SCL) and some not great ones (LHR, LIS, BOD).
And having been to actual third-world airports, there is no comparison between some of the gross ones (CAI is just awful) and the worst in the US.
Moving to Yeosu I guess? I pretty much always search Kayak for flights. Easy to use, lots of options to narrow or broaden your search, +/- 3 days search for flexible schedules which it seems you'll have. No great moving tips though. I moved there and brought basically nothing but clothes, but coming back I sold off as much as possible, and sent 5 big boxes via Korea Post. Shipping is expensive, and you may pay more to ship stuff than buy it new there. Obviously there's the convenience of having your stuff instead of having to go out and buy shit all over again though.
If you haven't been to Seoul in a decade, things are going to look very different in some places.
Yeah, what kinds of things have changed? I left just before they finished the Lotte tower, so I need to check that out. I used to live right next to Lotte World.