Some white dudes do exceptionally well with the women in Korea. Even dumpy annoying Caucasians who know more about snowboarding gear than a woman's body rack up a lot of lays with really little effort. It's not long before a semi-FOAB (fresh of the annoying boat) ends up with a briefcase full of banging-the-local-talent stories.
Those dudes are not me.
I don't know if it's that I'm not really tall (only 5'10"/178 cm) or really wide (200 lbs/93 kg). I don't shave or comb my hair, but I do cut my own hair. I've got scars, body hair and tattoos. I don't cry when I read poetry or talk foreign politics. My face looks like I've slept in too many gutters, with too many broken glass pillows.
Despite the lack of bodies in my bedroom, I'm still enticed by Korean dating traditions.
There's the standard thing where you're supposed to talk (and listen) to girls for a while. Eventually you hold hands, and if you're really lucky you wear exactly the same outfits which we call "matchy."
(Korean "Matchy": Thanks to whoever's blog or Flickr I took this from)
Korean women desire lots of ice cream dates and give off coyness (translation: annoying foreplay bullshit).
What really cracks me up are the holidays. I thought the USA and Hallmark cornered the market with worthless holidays, but that's simply not true. Korea takes everything the States does and pumps it up a little.
Here are a few samples:
Christmas (December 25th) isn't a day for your family to exchange gifts bought at random from gas stations. Instead, you and your sweetie exchange gifts and enjoy a nice meal together, kind of like Valentine's Day.
However, Valentine's Day (February 14th) is for girls to buy chocolate for boys. Dudes don't do anything with roses, Power Rangers Valentine's Cards or dinners. They just get treated like cocoa-eating kings.
Then there is White Day (March 14th exactly one month after V-Day) which unfortunately for me isn't a celebration of everybody who is a paleskin. It's for boys to buy girls candy, not chocolate. In the Far East there's some sort of distinction between chocolate and candy.
Lastly in the Fourteens is Singles' Day which is April 14th. If you are such a bucktoothed slugbrain who didn't give or receive anything on Valentine's Day or White Day, you're supposed to wallow in shame as you eat some sort of Chinese Black Noodle soup which is supposed to bring you less shitty luck in your dating future.
By a loophole, I manage not to fall into the Singles' Day loserness. I received candy from a couple of students (minds out of the gutter, it's common for kids to give teachers sweets). I also gave some candy to girls for White Day (and received nothing in return.)
The only other day I can remember is November 11th, which is 11-11, which is Peppero Day—a totally corporate holiday where everybody buys a straw-shaped chocolate cookie and gives it to their sweetie.
So now that you're all culturally dating aware and stuff, here's an interesting anecdote my bud told me about Asian women.
"If you marry a Southeast Asian girl—Thai, Vietnam, Cambodian or whatever, during the hot days of summer, she'll take a fan and fan you until you fall asleep. And then keep you cool all through the night until she falls asleep.
If you marry a Chinese or a Japanese girl, she'll fan you until you fall asleep, then she'll fan herself.
If you marry a Korean girl, you fan her until she falls asleep. Then she wakes up and she'll yell at you for not fanning her as she's asleep."