You Know You've Been in Korea Too Long ...

I’ve been hearing and reading these for years, so finally decided to put up a few of my own.

You know you’ve been in a long time (too long?), when:

• you see scissors and toilet paper on a restaurant table and … well, you don’t really think much of it
• you’re driving your motorcycle down the sidewalk and get irritated when people don’t get out of your way
• you have ever owned, or at least know the meaning of, the expression, “bee-bee”
• you hate going all the way out to Incheon Airport because you remember how easy, quick and cheap it was to get to Kimpo (and you remember when “Gimpo” was actually called Kimpo, Busan was Pusan, and Gangnam was Kangnam …)
• you think of dial-up modems as something that went out with leisure suits and 8-tracks
• you’re no longer surprised when your health club’s sound system spends most of its time playing slow love ballads
• you used to visit hidden ‘after-hours bars’ that secretly stayed open past the curfew
• you have seen 1-won coins in use
• even when meeting and shaking hands with non-Koreans you reflexively touch your elbow
• you go home and your friends look at you weird because you keep pouring everyone’s drinks
• you now cut up apples and remove the peel before eating them
• you go to SE Asia and think the Buddhist monks look weird in orange instead of grey