List of Things Korea Wastes a ton of money on- part 1

[Katherine]: Seeing as we're in a recession, and following on from my early post, I thought I would detail the key things that Korea wastes money on. I don't know much about the Korean economy (except its failing like all other economies) and I am amazed at how much money they spend on things whilst still having certain people living in tin like shacks in the country! Here is the list anyway:

1) Teachers - at home if a school drops in numbers then they close it down and send the students to a nearby school. In Korea, they just keep the school open FOREVER and end up having more teachers than students. One of my schools has 17 pupils and 10 teachers, and we know of a school with 9 students and 10 teachers!!! It's not as if they can't go to nearby schools - Korea is full of them, but apparently it makes the parents 'very angry' if their kids have to walk their arses for 10 minutes to another school!

Where IS everyone?!?!?

2) School buildings - All these tiny schools are house in GIANT buildings. They need to be maintained, powered and kept clean. It's a shame as most of my schools are really dirty and run down. If they closed down schools and focussed on updating the ones that remained, the students experience would be much improved.

3) Staff in general - Koreans seem to take a reallllyyyy long time to do a simple task. If you go into a bank or a shop and try to do a simple task, it will take about 8 members of staff to do it. They all have a massive and loud discussion, nothing gets done and then they all bow to each other and pat each other on the back. (This isn't just a result of our poor Korean, it happens to ALL customers).

4) Air hostesses - Specific example of the above. We were on a Korean airlines plane to Japan, it took 5 members of staff to shut an overhead locker and put a blanket on the knee of some guy (who was clearly capable of doing it himself). Again with the bowing.

Incompetent!

5) Maintaining Korean 'seen to be doing, but not actually doing' culture - Appearance is everything in Korea, kids stay at school until 10pm at night and people work 7 days a week. However, they don't actually DO anything. The kids are asleep more often than not, or just so overwhelmed that they cannot take anything in (who can blame them) and the adults spend all their time pretending to work on their computers and surfing the net.As they are all APPEARING to be working everyone is happy and stating that Koreans work the 'hardest'. They might spend a lot of time at work, but they are not actually achieving anything. Inefficiency means paying more members of staff to do less and keeping hostage poor students late into the night.

Knackered! (this is what most of my classes look like!)

6) Poor quality apartments - Our apartment is a piece of rank. It is covered in mould and is just generally gross, its freezing in winter and hot in summer and is generally falling apart. However, all Korean buildings are like this. They don't make them to last. They just build apartment buildings really quickly and cheaply, and then wait for them to fall apart in less than 10 years and knock them down and start again. Instead of investing in decent housing they waste money and time by constantly rebuilding! My old co-teacher was shocked when she went to the UK as they had 'many beautiful buildings that were many years old', go figure!

Mould!! :( (nb - ours isn't this bad YET, I really need my camera back!)