Many have noticed that if you put Ireland on South Korea (or vice versa), it kind of fits. But

Many have noticed that if you put Ireland on South Korea (or vice versa), it kind of fits. But there’s more! 1. We both like tea. Granted, the Koreans prefer 27 types of wonky Chinese tea to the clearly superior Irish blend (mostly Assam - don’t tell anyone), but the phrase “Would you like some tea?” is as likely to be heard in houses in both countries.2. We both have a history of oppression by an imperial island neighbour directly to the east. During their occupation, [Japan/England] insisted that [Korean/Irish] schools teach their children the [Japanese/English] language instead of [Korean/Irish], among other parallels.3. We both have a “North(ern)” version which are internationally-celebrated war zones. They’ve calmed down a lot, but there are occasional unpleasant flare-ups.4. We both love cabbage. Irish people chop up cabbage and throw it in a pot for an hour or two, and then eat it - such is the limit of our imagination. This is regarded as amateurish by the Koreans, who have essentially managed to weaponise cabbage in the form of kimchi. Kimchi (the technical term for fermented, weapons-grade cabbage) takes at least three days to prepare, and is then stored in a special kimchi refrigerator, which performs the dual purpose of keeping it at the ideal temperature for fermentation and isolating it from the rest of the food.Kimchi comes in many varieties apart from cabbage, and is one of the healthiest foods on the entire planet. This is not an exaggeration.5. We both suffer from a wilfully blind hypocrisy when it comes to sexual morality. In Ireland, divorce became legal in 1993 by a referendum margin of 0.7% - think about that. In Korea, adultery is still a jailable offence. In Korea, public officials are terrified of talking about abortion in any way. In Ireland, the judiciary was so unwilling to state a position that no one knew what the legal situation was (until it became decriminalised in 2018). This became an issue in 1992 when a young girl got raped by someone known to her, and asked the police if she could use a tissue sample from her abortion, which she intended to have in England, to help indict her rapist. The Department of Justice’s response was to issue her with a court order preventing her from going to England.6. We both suffered from a curiously middle-class political corruption in the 1980s. As in Ireland, the Korean news was regularly peppered with shots of short, sensible-looking men in business suits, newspapers over their faces, attacked by snapping camera-flash as they walk from the court to the car that will no doubt take them to a comfortable cell in a recently-restored mansion where they can share details with their new friends of how they used their positions of responsibility and influence to defraud taxpayers out of millions.7. We both secretly believe that we should be running the world and that the Korean/Irish way of doing things is not just another way, not just our way, but the best way of doing things (despite all the evidence) for reasons even we cannot adequately explain. -- source link

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