Greetings from France to you, Noel96! I see that you're from Australia. I made 3 business trips to Sydney in the late '90s, before that gig in Korea. I had a great time, but twice (both times in June, your winter) caught the flu. Just a case of flu to the locals, but the plague to me. That was when I learned that flu bugs were different in different parts of the world.

I taught myself to read and pronounce Korean so I could read local restaurant menus, know what I was ordering and pronounce it correctly! Dozens of different kinds of bap (rice). Finding out that were were 20 different kinds of kimchi was a real eye-opener. Korean is easier than Mandarin or Cantonese or Vietnamese or any other the other tonal languages. Korean characters are easy to read (each is a syllable). 22 sounds. B and P are the same. G and K are the same. No R. No Z. Have you gotten to the point where you know that "dai" ("big" in English) is Japanese? In Korean, it's "dae". So the company name "Hyundai" is part Japanese?. So, Hyundai means "big hyun", whatever a "hyun" is. laugh

Your original post of the jazz duo was refreshing. A lot of Korean music is pop. Koreans are very much into the next new thing.

They replace their still perfectly good cell phones with the next new tech. I don't know about now, but back in '99 when I worked there, you got back about 95% of your car's original purchase price if you traded it in within three years. Korean auto manufacturers had a great business model where they'd drive consumption with that trade-in program and then sell the lightly used trade-ins in Eastern Europe, where the people couldn't afford new cars and didn't want anything to do with the East German Trabant (a '46 Fiat in reality) or any of the truly terrible Soviet cars.

But there is that minority subculture in Korean that loves jazz. There were regular jazz festivals there. An acquaintance of mine, Jens Bunge, a German jazz harmonica player, played there several times. I found out that the president of a Korean division of an American auto parts supplier with whom I was trying to do business was a jazz fan. Jens provided me with autographed copies of his first 3 CDs to gift to him. His first CD was long out of print, but his mother had two, so he took one of those. That gift was very well received.

Here's Jens playing a chromatic harmonica at a club in Japan from one of his tours of Asia.


Last edited by TheMaartian; 12/07/22 08:43 PM.
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