I'm not a fan of personal threads, but after frequenting this site for a year and nearly 1400 posts later I would do it just this once. 

The day after tomorrow i'm going to Korea.  I have a contract with a school to teach english there for 1 year.  The pay and benefits are very good, and i'm looking forward to everything in Korea even though it might be a little shocking.  I already spent a year in Japan a couple years ago, the only difference was that I had already studied Japanese for 2 years at that time, and I hadn't studied Korean until recently.  I'm going to study hard so that I can hopefully at least be conversational before I leave.

I'm going to check out the gaming culture in Korea also.  I know computer games and arcades are very popular, and the people at the arcades tend to get quite competitive.  My friend told me when he was in Korea he beat a guy in street fighter 2 and a line started to form of people that wanted to challenge him.  This is exactly the opposite of Japan where nobody talks or interacts with other people in the arcade.  One time in Japan i put some coins in to play a soccer game with another guy and he just got up and left in the middle of his game. 

I know another thing that is popular is places where you pay per hour to play video games (consoles).  They also have this in Japan but I hear it is much more popular in Korea.  From what I understand most people in Japan don't even buy consoles, they mostly just play them at these places.

Perhaps i'll take some pictures of some video games stores and arcades or something and post them up here.  I want to give everyone on here a better idea of what gaming is like in countries like Korea.  Don't think we have any posters from Korea on here right now, not that I have seen anyway.

Anyway, I wanted to post this today so I could have some time to reply to a few posts before I left.  I don't know when I will get the internet hooked up in my apartment, I may not be able to go on vgchartz for 2-3 weeks.  I'm really enjoyed this site up until now and I hope I can contribute more in the future.  Thanks everyone.

Good luck and safe travels.

Good luck :)

A good friend of mine did the same thing (headed to Korea to teach English), and left after 6-8 months - just couldn't handle it. I won't voice his issues/concerns now, just wish you the best of luck with your attempt :)

I hope you are heading South...

edit: BTW is it true they don't wear socks when at home? 

i haven't heard about that kber, i'll look for it when i go there. Seems that would be cold in the winter though.

I think our X360's Soriku equivalent -> eugene should help you with some useful advices. He is Korean after all. Anyway I wish you luck. Definitely a challenging journey. Different language and totally different culture. Friend of mine who works for LG company were in Korea and told me there is a huge difference between cities like Seoul and periphery. Actually he was shocked. In bad way. It's always confusing... you can offend someone so easily by accident. Definitely you should do some research about their culture before take off.