Receive a free copy of Kaplan MBA Fundamental Business Writing (Kindle Edition).

eBooks are cheaper, and space-saving alternatives to the endless number of books that you can find at Bandi and Luni's and Kyobo Book Store.  Admittedly, it is fun to go to those stores and look around, and experience the energy in the stores.

However, Koreans are generally in the need for more space, and more time.  What could be more convenient than downloading a free book from the comfort of your own home/coffee shop (only if you have Alleh).  In addition, while this book may be an advanced version, it will not be error-prone like the ones that you will find in Korea.

Instructions:
a.  Look to the right column of this blog, in the "My Faves at Amazon.com" box.  Inside the box should be the title "English Learning Guides."
b.  There should be 2-3 books in the window.  One of the books will have a comment below it in red.  That is the free one.  If the book doesn't appear there, then you can go to the next page (there should be 2 pages of books in that window).  I cannot control the order of the books, but I am certain it is in that particular box. 

This book costs more than USD 12.00 and as a result something like KRW 15,000 at the minimum.  The Seoul Gyopo Guide has never asked for a donation, but in this case, it may be appropriate if only to pay for the domain.  In no way will that change the goals of The Lost Seoul or the Seoul Gyopo Guide.  Good Luck getting your free book!

Hasn't the South Korean Economy Already Been Down This Road???  Yikes.
Today, as expected, Hyundai Motor Group was named as the preferred bidder for Hyundai Engineering and Construction.  The JoongAng Ilbo had earlier reported on the Hyundai Group's potential lack of funding for a purchase of Hyundai E&C.  In August 2010, Hyundai Group announced its intent to bid for Hyundai E&C.  There were suspicions that the Hyundai Group did not properly secure funding for its bid.  As a result, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has now approved Hyundai Motor's selection as the preferred bidder.
Much of the press coverage in Korea has centered on the conflict among the members of the founding family of the Hyundai Group, whose affiliates once included Hyundai Motor Corporation and Hyundai Heavy Corporation.  In short, if the first word of a Korean company is called "Hyundai," then it was under the same corporate umbrella at one time or another.

The Hyundai conglomerate was split into two separate companies in 1997-98 following the Asian financial crisis.  Hyundai Motor Group, which includes Hyundai Motor, Hyundai Steel and Kia Motors, was headed by Chung Mong-koo and Hyundai Group, which includes Hyundai Elevator, Hyundai Securities and Hyundai Asan, was led by his brother Chung Mong-hun.  Chung Mong-hun committed suicide in 2003 following accusations of false accounting when he faced a prison term, leaving his wife to succeed him as chairperson. 

The Feud Isn't The Real Issue
If you can understood the previous paragraphs without reading it twice, then you are either a historian, or a member of the Chung family.  The real issue, however, is not the fact that there are warring factions of the same extended family competing for the crown jewel Hyundai E&C.
However, the fact that there is now again the possibility of the same type of cross-holdings of financial interests such as debt, and equity by the different entities is highly alarming. It is precisely this type of corporate structure that led to difficulties which threatened the entire Korean economy, and brought the Korean banking system to its knees.
Korea can ill-afford this type of situation again.  Hyundai Motor Group has made enormous gains in the most important markets in the world.  In fact, Hyundai Motor now enjoys an 8.7% market share in the U.S., which is greater than Japan's Nissan.  Many years ago, there was no quality comparison between Hyundai and its Japanese competitors.  That is no longer the case.  The same can be said about many Korean corporations.  This type of corporate infighting, and the financial mess that accompanied it, must be avoided at all costs.
To be fair, Korea's economy is far stronger, far more diverse, and far more able to fight off an individual corporate event.  Nevertheless, a single case can be used as a precedent for future ones.  It isn't the specific Hyundai E&C debacle that is necessarily critical;  it is the fact that this pattern of financial transactions should not occur due to the inherent problems these transactions create.
The FSS must make absolutely sure that there are no situations where the cross holdings of financial interests can occur, and that over-reliance for liquidity does not rest at one bank.  During the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, it became obvious that the largest chaebol were borrowing from primarily one bank, and when that chaebol was in financial distress, that individual bank was also distressed.  This can be avoided only if the financial authorities make sure that there are adequate rules, and enforcement of those rules.  Given the very spotty record of the FSS, perhaps it would be better to avoid this situation altogether, and disallow both Hyundai Motor and Hyundai Group from purchasing Hyundai E&C.

In one week, Shane got a tattoo, 






we signed our contracts for jobs in Korea,




and Shane proposed-- in true Wisconsin style-- in front of the Wisconsin capital building. We celebrated with hiking, wandering the farmer's market, watching the World Cup, fine dining, and soaking in sunset views. 

We both began to take better care of ourselves physically. This year, we've lost a combined 40 pounds. We also ran our first 5k. Well, Shane ran it, I "jog-walked" it. 




The 5k was a charity even for the Wisconsin Institute for Learning Disabilities/Dyslexia, Inc., my former workplace. It was a wonderful job that was hard to say goodbye to, especially when they threw me a surprise party.




He also got to sit courtside at a Milwaukee Bucks/Denver Nuggets Game. He high fived Luc Richard Mbah A Moute and Kurt Thomas. A very big deal for him. He also high fived Carlos Delfino, a very big deal to me.




The year was not without shenanigans....




Our families gave us a lot of reasons to celebrate: Sara & Nick's wedding (Shane's sister) and announcement of twins on the way, Shane's oldest brother getting engaged to Sophie, a new nephew, Baby Henry, and birthdays of nieces and nephews. We grew closer to our families and spent more time with them this summer than ever before.

Of course, the year was not without difficulty. We packed the collection of our lives tidily into boxes for storage, said temporary goodbyes to too many friends and family members before the move. Living miles and miles from home has at times left us tinged with heartsickness, and military tension on the peninsula made us question the leap of faith we had made when coming here. 

BUT YET. 

It has been the best year ever.

Recently I met a man on the subway who fought for Korea in the Vietnam War. When I'm old, the only war story I'll have to tell my son is how I fought in the Credit Crisis. It's not nearly the same thing, but I didn't emerge from the financial battle we traders fought unscathed; my keyboard was damaged when a wall hit it after one of my data providers failed at a crucial point in the conflict. So for the last three years the keyboard has been propped up on my desk by the handle of a screwdriver. In this life you should live with the consequences of your mistakes... unless you actually caused the Credit Crisis, then apparently, not so much.

The Financial Crisis was a little like the Korean War; it ended in a stalemate rather than a victory. But now relative peace has returned to the financial world and our thoughts slowly turn to the process of rebuilding, I've decided to buy a new keyboard. I write a lot, so I'd like a nice keyboard, but that's always been a difficult task. These days keyboards are often made to the lowest common denominator because few people care enough to pay for high quality mechanisms beneath the keys, and I rue the day I let go of one of the early Model M IBM keyboards that some university friends and I liberated a job lot of from a dumpster in the grounds of a large company we'd trespassed onto. IBM spared no expense in making keyboards back then – I think they charged $200 for them. That was a lot of money in those days – to put it into perspective if everyone who bought one of those early IBM keyboards had bought something cheaper and given the rest of the money to Ethiopia instead, there would have been no famine. Ten years later the Ethiopians were still suffering from hunger but these excellent and still very usable keyboards were sitting outside in corporate rubbish bins all across the Western world. And we're very proud of our civilisation.

When I first came to Busan, I only had my English laptop and I needed a Korean keyboard to plug into it, but in those early days the quickest and lowest common denominator option was buying a $10 LG keyboard from a branch of Hi-Mart. I believed that the quality of the keyboard must be reasonable because it was made by LG and they wouldn't put their name to cheap rubbish. I was naïve about Korea back then.

Admittedly, $10 seemed quite cheap for a keyboard, but I really had no idea about Korean prices just after arriving here. As it happens, the keyboard had a dead feel to it which I quickly decided I didn't like, and a couple of keys which either didn't like to be depressed, or if they did, didn't like to come up properly afterwards. That was one of my first cultural lessons in Korea – the chaebols really don't care what they stick their name on, and rather more oddly, neither – apparently - do Korean consumers. In fact if I was in any doubt, shortly afterwards I figured out that Daelim make toilets, and motorcycles. Worse, in our neighbourhood we have a Daelim motorcycle dealership and the Daelim toilet dealership is only a few doors away, so it's hard to avoid. The potential for parody is enormous and you'd never, ever, get away with that in a Western country. I still don't quite follow how any self-respecting Korean youth can sit proudly on their Daelim while not thinking that back home their father is probably in the bathroom sitting on his.


Later I bought another keyboard from another Korean manufacturer which was a bit more expensive but strangely developed exactly the same fault. Then I bought a computer, which came with another keyboard. This had the now unique quality of actually working properly, but unfortunately it was also the one involved in the Credit Crisis friendly-fire incident.

Because I spend a lot of my life living in the dark these days – it's a Korean social metaphor as well as referring to the lighting in my office – I'd like a backlit keyboard. It won't help my life in Korea but it will help my typing. Even though there are quite a few backlit keyboards around, it's apparently little too specialist to find in the local branch of my unnervingly-friendly electronics store, and there aren't nearly as many specialist computer stores here as you might expect because people use public PC rooms, their phones, and if they need a computer at home, the Internet to buy things from. There are two billion clothes shops in Busan – I know – I've counted them - but in all my time here I've only ever seen six computer stores, seven if you include a store that improbably just sells games for the 0.1% of people here who don't seem to pirate their software.

I can't really ask my wife to help me because she's so busy with our baby these days, and she's suffering from ICSF - Internet Comparison Shopping Fatigue - a serious health problem which big media is suppressing for their corporate masters. Fortunately I don't have one of those Korean wives that spends her life looking lovingly at her husband's wallet, but now I'm living in Korea with an insufficient level of Korean language ability, it does make it difficult for me to buy things too.

So my trick is to search through Amazon.com, find product codes, and enter them into Korea's shopping search engines along with the smattering of Korean I know such as '키보드' and '바보'. It usually gets results but the problem is too many results. Sites like Gmarket and Auction are just like eBay – so much so in fact that eBay bought both of them - with multiple vendors selling the same item at sometimes suspiciously different prices. But whereas eBay is just one option in the online shopping space in England and the U.S., this seems to be how the vast majority of Internet shopping is done in Korea. Back in England, I'd know exactly which specialist online sellers to deal with – and when you found what you were looking for – it was only one entry on a page with one price and one set of claims, not twenty. And crucially, my attention wasn't being sapped by fifty different flashing boxes on the web page while I tried to read.

And there's another problem. After browsing through Amazon I found one of the Logitech keyboards I was looking for in Korea. But then I took a closer look at the product pictures – and while they were small, there was no mistaking the fact that they were pictures of the American product. That's the thing about keyboards with letters which are lit – it's easy to tell that there's only one letter on a key, and the Korean letter is at best, not lit up, or at worst, not there at all. I've encountered this before with another keyboard I was thinking of buying – there were no Korean letters, which surprised me before my wife told me that Koreans didn't necessarily mind that much because they knew where the Korean characters were as long as the English letters were visible, which is no use to me. Are these people selling the American product or the local Korean equivalent? I'm not sure, but what I do know is that despite this being a very shopping-driven culture, a lot of the actual selling technique strikes me as being half-assed. You'd think people would care about what they sell, but consumer protection law isn't very strong here, so perhaps issues such as accuracy and putting the right product picture up aren't so important.

I think there might be a business opportunity there. After all, if a tiny minority of Koreans choose to actually buy software rather than copy it from their friends, I can't help thinking that there might be a few Koreans who would prefer a more Westernised Internet shopping experience, where visiting an e-commerce page doesn't make you feel like you're tripping acid. Plus, with so many people here these days using their phones, iPads and other CPU and bandwidth-challenged non-Windows devices, maybe – just maybe – the era of Internet Explorer-only 10Mb Korean web pages needs to come to an end.

Meanwhile, my search for a keyboard goes on.