For anyone who may read these increasingly infrequent posts, I'm sure that you know by now that I have decided to begin an adventure and move to Korea. Things in that regard are progressing fairly well. I was able to get my passport in only a week and now have all that I need from my university to go ahead. All that is left is to get a quick check up completed by a doctor and a couple letters of reference and I'm good to go. I hope to have all of that done and off to the Korean consulate by June 5th.
What I thought I'd do with this post is talk a little about Korea, some things that make it unique, how it compares with Canada and a little about where I will be going more specifically. Of course anyone could simply go to wikipedia or some other resource and read up on it themselves, but I thought that this would be a good exercise for me as well.
Korea was apparently founded on October 3rd in the year 2333 BC. What else was going on then? Well surprisingly there is little written about the period but Akkad conquered Mesopotamia and in Egypt the first reference of book keeping is made. Unfortunately Canada is not mentioned.
One of the main differences between Canada and Korea is size. Canada is the world's second largest country with an area of 9,984,670 square kilometers. Korea, by contrast, has an area measuring 99, 646 square kilometers. Korea is slightly less than 1% of the size of Canada. Canada is so large in comparison that there is nearly ten times as much area taken up by water in Canada than the entire size of Korea.
Ontario has an area measuring over 1 million square kilometers. More than 10 Korea's could fit in Ontario alone. Where Korea has us beat though is in population. The estimate for Canada in 2008 is 33,273,000, while Korea's population is estimated at 49,044,790. Ontario's population only totals 12,861,940. So while 10 Korea's could fit in Ontario, Ontario has roughly only one quarter of Korea's population.
If we were to take these numbers and think about what they mean we could see that each Canadian could have 0.3 square kilometers all to themselves. Well what does that mean? Well one hectare is equal to 0.01 square kilometers, so each Canadian could have 30 hectares. Well how much is that? Well, one acre is 0.4 hectares so each Canadian could have roughly 75 acres to themselves!
How about Koreans? Well Koreans could each have 0.002 square kilometers for themselves! That's the equivalent of 0.2 hectares or 0.5 acres! Quite the difference. It's sort of a concrete reminder of what I'm told will be one of the major things I'll need to adjust to; the lack of personal space. Apparently Koreans haven't developed the same sense of personal boundaries that we have here in spacious North America.
To be continued ...
