안녕! It’s Ari, your talkative Korean friend and weekend reminder 🎉 Today’s newsletter is about a soup for dieters, how one tech company shut down South Korea, and why K-ARMYs are buying purple rubber shoes. Let’s start!
🎧 You can listen to me read on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or others.
Jjigye For Dieters
Doenjang-jjigye is one of the most poplar food in South Korea. It’s made with doenjang, fermented bean paste. Because of its strong smell, at first, you might hesitate to try. But hold your breath a sec and make a soup or jjigye with it, then you’ll taste heaven! Doenjang-jjigye is already healthy food with a lot of vegetables and soy-based ingredients like tofu and doenjang, but you can make it healthier and low-calorie by replacing water with chopped cabbage. As cabbage boils, it produces enough water to make soup. I recommend this food for dieters!
If you’re a vegetarian, skip adding beef.
How One Tech Company Shut Down South Korea
Imagine the following situation: Meta, a company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, controls practically every aspect of your daily life. You take a ride to work with Meta Uber. You pay a coffee with Meta Pay. You chat with family members, friends, and work colleagues on WhatsApp. On the weekend, you go to travel a neighboring city driving with Meta Map. And while driving, you listen to music with Meta Spotify. But then one day, Meta shuts down and your daily life descends into chaos. (End of the situation) I know it sounds impossible but this exact crisis just happened to tens of millions of Koreans.
Kakao is one of the biggest tech companies in the country which started as a chat app called KakaoTalk. Last Saturday, around 3 pm, a data center which power all Kakao services except for banking Yes! They also have a bank 🫠 It’s called Kakao Bank was set on fire and all services went down including KakaoTalk, Kakao Taxi (ride hailing service), Kakao Pay, Kakao Map, Melon (music streaming service), and many others. All services I mentioned are the most popular services in each category. Especially KakaoTalk is more than a chat app. Public offices send letters via this app. Almost all online shops send order confirmation or shipping status via this app. A lot of websites have “Log in with KakaoTalk.” You can’t live without it in this country.
Since the outage started, many Koreans are sharing their damages online. Among them, an user of Daum email which of course belongs to Kakao complained that he lost 3 job opportunities because he couldn’t receive emails from companies he applied and therefore he couldn’t take required coding tests. A Kakao Mobility 🛴 user complained that he couldn’t end his ride so his fee went over 500,000 KRW (350 USD). People who make a living with their services suffered the most. Online stores couldn’t send notifications to customers. Taxi drivers couldn’t take customers.
As of writing this newsletter (Tuesday night), most of services are back to normal but some of them are still down. It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest tech companies in the country doesn’t have even a single back-up data center 🙃 The company said they started back up only after they learned about the fire. But since the fire shut down the power of the data center they couldn’t back up well, they said. On Monday, their stock price plummeted. Several class action lawsuits await them. And the company’s co-CEO stepped down on Wednesday.
In South Korea, there’s practically no limit to company expansions. For example, Samsung not only makes smartphones and TVs, they also do insurance, credit card, medicine, and they even run an amusement park and art gallery. This is why Kakao could do all those businesses and therefore dominate Koreans’ daily life. This should be illegal but these big companies are so powerful that it’s impossible to stop them. All we can do is to find alternatives and not to rely on one company too much. Since the outage started, the number of downloads of Telegram skyrocketed.
Learn Korean With Ari
I heard a sad news of BTS Jin enlisting in the military later this year 😥 He’s releasing a new single that I believe ARMYs will be consoled by while he’s away. After his enlistment announcement, Korean ARMYs started buying purple rubber shoes 👆 or accessories that has a charm of purple rubber shoes. It’s because of this old Korean idiom,
고무신을 거꾸로 신다
Though it literally means “to wear rubber shoes backwards,” it actually means “to cheat on a boyfriend while he’s serving in the military.” When a girl cheats on her boyfriend while he’s in the military, we say “She wore her rubber shoes backwards.” On the contrary, 고무신을 신다 (to wear rubber shoes) means “to stay loyal? while a boyfriend is in the military or at least to show the determination of such.” So Korean ARMYs are showing their determination to stay loyal ARMYs when Jin is serving in the military by buying the purple rubber shoes.
No assignment today since I couldn’t come up with a good assignment with today’s lesson 🙏
Last thing for today’s newsletter is a viral story of a Japanese ARMY or BTS fan. While she was travelling Itaewon, Seoul, she encountered fire starting from garbage on the street. She rushed to a near restaurant to get help. Though she didn’t speak Korean, she remembered a BTS song lyric and shouted, “Jeogiyo, bultaoreune! Bultaoreune!” meaning “Excuse me, it’s on fire! It’s on fire!” People in the restaurant understood her and put out the fire with water and a fire extinguisher. Great job, ARMY! 💜
Thanks for reading! If you liked my newsletter, like, share, or leave a tip 👇 to support my work. It’ll help me a lot to keep writing 😘 I take a break next week. Don’t wear your rubber shoes backwards while I take a break :D See you the week after next. 안녕!