Week four and I finally feel like I have been here long enough to really notice the cultural differences, not just observe them from the outside but actually feel them in my daily life.
But first, the best part of the week. For the Fourth of July weekend a huge group of us(12) made the trip down to Busan and it was absolutely worth it. Busan is South Korea’s second largest city and it sits right on the coast, so the whole vibe is completely different from Seoul. We spent time at the beach, played beach volleyball, wandered through a colorful hillside village called Gamcheon Culture Village which is basically a maze of painted houses and murals built into the side of a hill overlooking the ocean, and ate the freshest seafood I have ever had in my life. And when I say fresh I mean alive. You pick it, they prepare it. I was slightly terrified and completely obsessed at the same time. It was one of those weekends that reminds you why you decided to do something like this in the first place.
Okay now to the actual prompt because this week’s topic hits very close to home for me.
Adaptability and flexibility. Specifically, what parts of Korean culture have been hardest to assimilate into. And I have thought about this a lot because the honest answer is one word: volume.
I am a loud person. I have always been a loud person. I am the kind of person who walks into a room and immediately starts talking, laughs too loudly, and has approximately zero problem sharing whatever is on my mind at any given moment. In the United States, that is generally fine. People are expressive. Strangers make small talk. You can be big and enthusiastic in public, and nobody really blinks.
Korea is different.
Not in a bad way at all. Just genuinely different. People here are more reserved, more quietly composed in public spaces. There is a real culture of not drawing unnecessary attention to yourself in shared spaces and of being mindful of the people around you. It is actually something I find really admirable once I understood it better. It comes from a deep sense of collective respect that I think Americans could honestly learn from.
But for someone like me it has required constant recalibration.
The subway is the clearest example. In Pittsburgh or any American city I have been in, people talk on the subway. You hear music, conversations, and people on the phone. It is just background noise of city life. Here, the subway is almost completely silent. Like genuinely quiet in a way that still surprises me every single time. People are on their phones, listening to things with earbuds in, keeping to themselves. And I will be with my friends and want to talk and catch up, and I have to actively remind myself to keep my voice down. Not because anyone has said anything to me, but because I can feel that it is not the norm, and I want to be respectful of that.
That line, wanting to be myself but also wanting to be respectful of where I am, has been the defining tension of week four for me.
In the workplace, it shows up differently, but it is the same underlying thing. Korean professional culture tends to be more hierarchical and reserved than what I am used to. People are thoughtful before they speak. There is a care and intentionality to communication that I genuinely respect. But I am someone who tends to just say what I am thinking in the moment and ask questions out loud as they come to me. I have had to learn to pause a little more. To read the room. To be enthusiastic but not overwhelming.
And here is what I want to be clear about because I think it matters. I am not changing who I am. I am not becoming a quieter, more subdued version of myself. I am just learning when and where to dial things up or down. Which I think is a growth. Understanding that different contexts call for different versions of your energy is actually a really valuable professional skill, and I think it is one of the most transferable things I will take away from this experience.
Cross-cultural competency is something that gets talked about a lot in international business and development courses. But actually living it is completely different from reading about it. It is not just about knowing that cultural differences exist. It is about feeling them in real time and figuring out how to navigate them gracefully without losing yourself in the process.
I am still figuring it out. But Busan helped. Being able to get out of the city with my friends, eat something that was alive twenty minutes ago, and remember that adapting does not mean disappearing.
