From an 아싸 that keeps coming back
How about meeting here on Wednesday, September 30th, sometime around 2–3 PM instead of tomorrow? I have a work meeting tomorrow, so I won’t be available during the day.I looked around and I think this place would be a good spot for us to meet and film. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Wednesday either. […]
For decades, if someone in Toronto said “Koreatown,” they almost certainly meant the stretch of Bloor Street between Christie and Bathurst. Today, that answer is more complicated. Christie Koreatown is still officially Toronto’s Korea Town BIA, and Korean restaurants, supermarkets, beauty businesses and Hangul signs remain part of the neighbourhood. (Toronto) But if you actually […]
There is a strange paradox at the center of my relationship with Korea. I am Canadian. I grew up with Canadian culture, and understand its social codes instinctively. Korea, by contrast, is a country where I am visibly and culturally a foreigner. And yet there have been periods when I have felt more comfortable being […]
Thousands of years before Seoul existed, before Confucianism arrived in Korea and before there was anything recognizable as Korean civilization, monkeys lived on the Korean Peninsula. Not metaphorical monkeys. Actual macaques. Fossils discovered in Korea reveal that the peninsula once supported populations of macaques closely related to species that still survive elsewhere in East Asia […]
BABYMONSTER’s “PSYCHO” is one of those K-pop songs where the music, concept, choreography and video all seem to understand exactly what the others are trying to do. Originally released on the group’s second mini-album WE GO UP in October 2025, it was strong enough to have reportedly competed for title-track status before eventually receiving its […]
Walk around almost any residential neighborhood in South Korea and sooner or later you will see the familiar sign: 태권도. Taekwondo schools are everywhere. For generations of Korean children, putting on a white dobok after school has been almost as ordinary as attending an English academy or piano lesson. But something interesting has happened in […]
One of the subtle cultural differences between Korea and much of the English-speaking West is that the word “friend” does not always describe exactly the same kind of relationship. In Canada or the United States, the word is remarkably flexible. You might say: “I met a friend at a party last night.” That “friend” might […]
If chakras are used as a symbolic way of understanding culture rather than as scientifically measurable structures, an interesting contrast emerges between modern Western individualism and Korean social culture. Western societies could reasonably be described as heavily training the solar plexus chakra — Manipura. Korean society, by contrast, seems to place much more cultural training […]
South Korea, Canada, and the Birth of Toronto’s First Koreatown in the 1960s and 1970s When people walk through Toronto’s Koreatown around Bloor Street and Christie Street today, it is easy to see the neighbourhood simply as an established ethnic district: Korean restaurants, supermarkets, churches, travel agencies and businesses that have existed in one form […]
Dating in Korea can sometimes feel surprisingly organized to Westerners. There is the first date. Then perhaps a second and third date. At some point somebody may explicitly ask the other person to become their boyfriend or girlfriend. From that moment, the couple starts counting the days. Then come 100 days, 200 days, 300 days, […]
