Survey Says ...

When I first started thinking about coming to Korea, back in May of this year, the main things I associated with the country, the War and M*A*S*H aside, were LG (makers of my cell phone), Samsung and Hyundai.

Thanks to my old old college roomie, who was half-Korean, next came kimchi. She never once made Korean barbecue or bulgogi, that I can remember, but there was plenty of rice and kimchi. Anyway, below that on my list, and a long way down, would come the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

It turns out I would not be alone in these associations. The daily Dong-A Ilbo reports that it:

commissioned Google to conduct surveys on keywords that best represent 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and China ...
The names most associated with Korea were Samsung; LG; Hyundai; kimchi; StarCraft; porcelain; textiles; Boa (singer); taekwondo; and personal computer games.
Korea was the only country among major economies such as the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Germany to have the names of companies among the top three keywords.

I'm not sure what it says about me, though, this correspondence: am I just as ignorant and superficial as the average web user, or am I the distillation of the accumulated knowledge of billions of web pages? Perhaps the answer is best left as an exercise for the reader. The kind, generous, perspicacious reader.