Korea Times Copyediting Reporter
Jon Dunbar is a copy editor at The Korea Times, as well as editor of the Foreign Community page and curator of the Korea Times Archive. If you have suggestions for possible articles, or wish to contribute articles yourself, contact jdunbar@koreatimes.co.kr.
This week's featured restaurant is a throwback to the olden days of Seoul. It was 15 years ago, when if you wanted a burger, there weren't many options better than Lotteria or Kraze — not even in a lively, cosmopolitan place like the nightlife area in front of Hongik University, or Hongdae.
Reading is hardly a social activity. But try telling that to the people at Seoul Silent Book Club (SSBC), an expanding group of avid readers who meet up in a public space a couple times a month and ... read quietly for an hour.
Lotteria has been synonymous with a lot of what's wrong with Koreanized takes on Western fast food. With its overly sweet bulgogi sauce, odd condiment selections and insistence on giving most of its menu items an unnecessary Korean touch, it's still easy to have a bad experience there. But it may be time for a revisit.
Someone asked online a few months ago for the best kebabs to try in Seoul. The consensus was, "They're all pretty well the same." But I couldn't quite agree.
Fifteen years ago, the Seoul-based reggae band I&I Djangdan pushed the limits for experimenting with traditional Korean music, or gugak. The band has long since disappeared, leaving behind a rare full-length album and earlier EP, but some of its brilliance has been captured on the other side of the planet.
Jeff Moses still hasn't given up his ambitions of world domination. As one of the two founders of Seoul-based punk label World Domination, Inc. (WDI), he's been at it for 16 years. He shared various machinations for the new year that he hopes will bring his diabolical goal to fruition.
Bird strikes are a serious threat to aircraft at many of Korea's airports, and the problem is likely to worsen in the coming years with the introduction of more regional airports around the country, according to a nongovernmental organization (NGO) related to the study of birds.
Korea was a colony of Japan for 36 years, from 1910 to the end of World War II in 1945. However, there is a distinct lack of information available about this period, especially in English. One emerging resource is Japanese-language newspapers of the era, published in Korea.
Korea's pizza scene is having a golden age right now, as Detroit-style pizza joints are popping up all over the place.