Name: What’s Your Biggest Culture Shock in South Korea? [2023 ver.]
Uploaded: 2025-02-03T02:46:54.000Z
Duration: 8 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

What has been your biggest culture shock in Korea?

Gerund

Some of the things I'm a bit like, nah, not necessary and it's maybe a bit too strict and maybe preventing freedom a little bit, but...

It's the same here as in Greece, where after you've been to the toilet, you throw the paper in the bin instead of inside the toilet.

That's the biggest culture shock, I think.

It was like 80-something degrees, 87 degrees.

Today, I asked people, what has been your biggest culture shock in Korea?

For lunch today, I was eating like a chicken soup and they had like a whole chicken in the soup.

I haven't used chopsticks a lot back in America and I was struggling quite a bit to eat the soup.

I'm used to seeing like smaller bits of chickens.

Like it's weird seeing the whole animal right there.

The meat came off the bone very well, so it was a little easier to eat with chopsticks.

Because I know there's a lot of foreigners here already, so I thought when I came here, I wouldn't notice it.

But people will stare a lot, especially the older people.

They'll stare and like look at you and if you look at, if you see them, they'll still be looking.

Like in the U.S., people smoke cigarettes, but not as much.

It's not that common, especially like inside the clubs or like the bars, like everywhere.

Especially during, like in the middle of the day, like during lunch or something, you'll see a huge group of people from the office or something all just smoking together.

And that's like, that was really shocking to me.

Like some of our friends will be hanging out with them for a couple hours and they'll smoke like five or like six or something in two hours or something.

Especially when they are drinking, like they smoke more often, right?

I would say the amount of couples that walk around.

You don't notice at home, like in the U.S., obviously there's couples, but you don't notice as much as here.

And sometimes I feel like people are just in a couple just to say they're in a couple.

Like, yeah, that's what I feel like sometimes.

Even like guys, they'll ask like, I don't know, it's like, hold your hands so quickly.

Like you just met them and I'm just like, I don't know you like that.

Yeah, some, a lot of people, they're more straightforward too here.

So like going out on a date, like usually I'll just like, if it's the first day, I'll just walk with you.

But usually they want you to hold their arm or like hold their hand.

And I'm just like, I need time to get comfortable with that.

It makes me uncomfortable, but I guess it's a different culture.

Also the buttons in the restaurant to call the waiters.

You just kind of like awkwardly look over and try to like call over a waiter.

Everybody wears pants here, even though it's scorching hot and super humid.

Yeah, a winter jacket in the middle on like a sunny day.

It was like 80 something degrees, 87 degrees.

Another thing is the driving around like drivers.

They don't seem to care about pedestrians as much as they would in the U.S.

I've seen cars driving up on sidewalks and there's mopeds driving around on the sidewalks.

And like even down this thing, I've almost been hit a couple of times just driving around.

They definitely just go on and expect you to get out of the way.

One of the other things that I noticed is like the customer service is way better here.

Like if they're not doing anything, they'll actually help you.

We mistakenly went to a CrossFit gym instead of like a regular gym like where we work out and stuff.

Instead of like just turning us away, the man there, he helped us like find an actual gym.

In the U.S., they definitely would have just been like, oh.

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What’s Your Biggest Culture Shock in South Korea? [2023 ver.]

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