What Visitors Think of Seattle -Korea (36 F)

J(Female-36) was from Korea. She was doing a 6 week travel around North America. San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Niagra Falls, NY, DC, Miami, Cancun,Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Vancouver. She had worked in Australia for 2 years and in Rome and London as a nanny. She currently works for a golf club in Korea and since the club closes for 6 weeks in the winter, she decided to take a trip.  

J’s Questions/Observations about the US: 

• She said she loves hearty breakfasts so the huge portions and heavy types of food(hash browns, pancakes, waffles, eggs, bacon, ham) in the US suit her more than Korean breakfasts back home. 

• The thing that stood out to her about Seattle versus the other US cities she visited were the amount of parks we have here. It’s also much “calmer” 
• Said she was thoroughly confused about US tipping at restaurants-“Why don’t they pay them a proper wage instead?”  Good question, J.  

J’s Questions/Observations about Seattle: 

• She loves coffee, so she was excited to be in Seattle since in Korea Seattle is known as the coffee capital of the world.  
• Shockingly, our dog who is very clingy to us, slept with J while she stayed with us. Funny side story: J took tons of pictures(5 memory cards worth) while in Seattle. After she left I told her to send me her pics. Within the hundredas of pictures she took, there were probably 15 selfies of her and our dog, while she only had one picture of us. 
• She saw the Seattle Parking Enforcement cart(the one that looks like a golf cart). She asked what it was the person who gives out parking ticket drives. She laughed and started taking pictures. “They make the police ride in that?!” 

 My observations of J/Learnings from J: 

• Gave me the origin of Gangnam style. Gangnam is an area in Korea that is hip/upper class, so the singer is saying, “I’m from Gangnam, check out my style. It’s better than yours.”  
• None of her friends want to travel far, so they go to China, Philippines and Thailand. She’s the outlier in her group of friends since she likes to travel to further destinations and often has to go by herself. She did convince one of her friends to travel with her, but since J wanted to cram as many sights as possible into the trip, it was too intense for her friend and so she never traveled with J again. 
• She made two or Korea’s most popular dishes for dinner-bimibap and Korean pancakes. She left instructions and list of ingedients on how to make it.  
• She said in Korea, people are very vain so it’s very common to have plastic surgery especially for women. She mentioned there’s a lot of peer pressure to get this done to keep up with your friends. She said even if a  woman is already married, they will still get pressure from friends to get plastic surgery. And if somebody is not good looking, people will wonder why she is not having surgery. This is a phenomenon that is recent-last 20 years. 

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