Groups and community

Yesterday I was talking with a Korean woman during dinner after hiking. She likes to dance too, and I asked her about where to go and described my unpleasant experience at a salsa club in Seoul shortly after I arrived in Korea.

She told me the reason nobody asked me to dance was because I wasn't part of the community. It seemed like kind of circular logic to me--the way you can't get a job if you don't have experience and you can't get experience if you can't get a job. But it also "clicked"; this is what I'd been hearing about and reading about (the emphasis on group membership here and the invisibility or unimportance of outsiders to the group) put into action.

She said that Korean people won't approach strangers and ask them to dance. Apparently, it's necessary to first go to a dance studio to meet people before trying to go to a club here. Or be introduced by someone. So, I took her card and told her she'd be hearing from me so I could try to break into the circle of the Latin dance community in Seoul.