Dear Fellow International Staff,

Issues that pop up in our personal lives become stumbling blocks for our professional and social lives. Living overseas only increases the complexity of living life and we know that our international researchers need additional support systems. This website was created after realizing that contents needed to be far expanded beyond what was published in the 2019 edition of Living in Korea and desiring that information to be more accessible, both to our global staff and to anyone else with an internet connection. The contents are specifically written to support the international researchers of the Institute for Basic Science and their families but we hope other expats will benefit as well.

Instead of each research center creating their own contents, it makes more sense to create one primary source for information and ask your Center’s admin staff or the Global Help Desk for help when necessary. As I am a fellow expat with over a decade of living in Korea, I hope that you can learn from my mistakes and avoid some of the issues I’ve had over the years. In the process of creating this site, I have learned more than I knew previously. But one person’s experiences cannot match everyone else’s so we do ask for your feedback both on content clarity and what you would like added to this site. That same contact page also has a way to email the Global Help Desk with any specific issues you might need help with.

To aid in your understanding of Korea, I have added Korean language where appropriate, their Chinese roots if they exist, and the phonetic spelling of the term. Knowing the term for something in Korean, or even being able to physically point to a word, will greatly help in communication. This is very useful when dealing with visa or government paperwork as there is one official term in Korean and frequently no unified term in English, meaning there are a variety of ways in English to describe that same document. Even if you cannot read Korean, it is recommended that you get the name of the paperwork you need written in the Korean language. This simplifies everything as Korean staff who will help you get the necessary paperwork don't need to reverse translate the English name back into Korean.

Sometimes it is much easier to show than to say, so we have included several hundred images to better communicate contents. We hope these also are useful if you enter a store and are having trouble describing an item; simply open the picture and point to it. Some pages do not yet have images, but we are slowly adding when it is possible and making notations for when images and contents are updated or expanded. If something would be better understood with a visual, please contact us and we’ll try to add one. A visual listing of all images with corresponding links to content is available as well.

While this website will contain primarily static information, the site itself is dynamic as contents will continue to be created. A long list exists of what else should be added, including information for families, food, shopping, taxes, and the four national insurances which will be spread out over several new sections with tabs at the top of the website. Beyond that, additional pages will be created as a direct response to the information users request, so please do take advantage and let us know what you want. I look forward to adding to the site to make it as useful as possible for you.

From all of us at the Global Relations Team in Daejeon, we wish that our efforts help you thrive while you live in Korea, not simply survive.

Sincerely,

Richard Moore

Content creator