13 days!

Are you tired of my countdown yet? I hope not. Even if you are, I don't really care.

Right now we're in the midst of Lunar New Year, one of the big holidays in Korea. All of Asia, really. Most businesses were closed today so we just sat home. Most of the day anyway. We went out and had galbi with some friends, so that was good. Even BETTER is that we're off work tomorrow! WOohoooooo! I'm so excited about it that I'm not even going to make that "o" lowercase!

Did you know that marriage makes you older? I find it interesting that if my students know I'm married, they always assume that I'm at least 30 years old. However, if I haven't told them that I'm married, they assume I'm 23-24 but that I look like a university student. It's just because 30 is the magic marrying age in Korea. Here you can't get married until you have a stable job and can afford to buy an apartment. Because of the bad shape of the economy, they're putting off marriage and therefore putting off having kids, and even then they're only having 1, maybe 2 kids. Therefore, the population is shrinking and some government offices have ordered employees to go home and make babies. Seriously, you guys.

Also, Korea doesn't offer dual citizenship right now, but they're working on changing that because so many Koreans are in other countries but they're not Korean citizens and therefore their children aren't Korean citizens, etc. For example, a lot of Koreans that move to the US are quite happy being American citizens and while they'd like to retain their Korean citizenship, it's not worth it.

I'm not sure why I went into the plight of the Korean population--it's just interesting I guess. I've also heard that due to all this, prenatal care and whatnot is much cheaper to encourage people to have more children. The cost of giving birth is only like $1000, as opposed to $10000 in the US (assuming that everything's all normal and nothing goes wrong). It wasn't until I moved here that I realized just how expensive healthcare in America is.

Alright, I'm kind of tired of rambling. Marc's playing Star Trek Online (ahhhhhh!!!!) so I guess I'm going to watch TV. G'night!