- They generally eat very healthily. Obese Koreans are very rare, even men.
- They tend to dress much more stylishly then Western women, and will rarely just throw something on if they’re leaving the house. It’s no exaggeration to say that an hour in a Starbucks here can feel more like watching a fashion show than simply having a coffee.

But the negatives are:

- An extreme lack of confidence about their bodies, teachers regularly telling students that they’re too fat, and common border-line anorexia. I’ve given up telling women with fit and attractive bodies that they’re not fat as they claim, because they never pay any attention to me.
- The corollary of not being able to just throw something on means an excessive amount of time and money spent on their appearances. They might even wear make-up to go to the gym. Given that you can’t really exercise with make-up on, not enough do, despite the number of gyms here.
- And their use of make-up is just bizarre. Whiter skin is considered more attractive, even though Koreans aren’t, well…white…so many will cake on whitening creams to the extent that they look like corpses. Considering that and their thinness, I serisouly can’t imagine ever getting some of them in the sack…their skin and bodies would simply break.

Women naturally look more attractive when they’re ovulating, their skin is redder and fuller, and make-up is primarily used around the world to make women look this way when they’re not actually ovulating. Instead, korean women use make-up in a way that makes them look less fertile and/or sexually available. Like I said, just bizarre.

As for sex and the media…things are slowly changing, for the better. Like I say in some other posts, there are plently of good Korean sex programs and/or translated foreign ones on TV now, albeit in the early hours of the morning, and I have personal experience of the very gradual but definite improvement in sex education here since I first came in 2000.

Furthermore, some of the pictures posted of those Middle-High Schools girls all look the same in my opinion. This in my opinion makes me doubt whether girls like Lee HyoRi are truly common in Korea or is she one in a million?

Sometime in the future, I’ll watch some of the movies and programs of all the actresses everyone’s mentioned and make some conclusions for myself, then write a big post about them.

In the meantime, I’ve started meeting my favorite tutors once a week again to get some much needed speaking progress, and this topic is certainly much better for small talk than Lee Myeong-bak’s plans for MOGEF! More seriously, it’s also made me realise how essential in any country it is to be familar with it’s TV programs, movies and actors to have normal conversations with people.

Shimshim Lee, I quite agree. The Korean system does have some logic, like a foetus being 1 month old at conception because of the woman’s missed monthly period for instance, but it’s really quite useless and so rightly disregarded for any situation in which a person’s age is important, like laws and passports.

I’m surprised that your friends said that their daughter was two, because like you explain, it seems particularly non-sensical for babies and children. Which is why my wife (who is Korean) and I say our daughter is 20 months, and all other Korean parents we know and Korean parenting books too also use months from the birthdate, just like Western parents.

If Korea wants to become more westernized surely they have to abandon this ancient practice of counting your birthday based on the stars.

I mean, let’s face it. Sitting with friends the other night at dinner, and I was introduced to some Koreans with children. I asked them if they had children, the answer was yes, they have a happy 2 year old girl.

This girl wasn’t infact two years old but more like 6 weeks old. She had been born on December 17th 2007. So to say that she is one year old at birth is false! She was born 1 month premature, at 8months old. And to cap it off, on Jan 1st she turned another year older 2 years old at this point, but only realistically 2 weeks old.

Other than Kim Hye Soo, you could easily make arguments against my picks since the latter actresses got really famous in their late 20s or at 30. Lee Young Ae and Kim Suh Ah seemed to have stopped acting once they finished their signiture roles.