Election - Wednesday Dec. 19, 2007

All schools have today off for the presidential election. My host father also had work off, so we went out to lunch to a kalguksu restaurant; it is owned by one of his fish friends. We dropped my host sibs off, and I went with my host mom and host dad while they voted. They knew that I was interested in the process, so they offered to take me with them. It literally took about 2 minutes.

I was expecting the result all night. 이면박 (Lee Myung Bak) was in the lead popularity wise going into the election. I decided to do a little bit of research about this possible future president. As I did more and more research, I realized that I don't incredibly care for this potential president.

Well, at 8:00, we learned that 이면박 (Lee Myung Bak) was, in fact, the winner by a great deal. Let me tell you a little bit about this president. He will take over in February officially as long as the current investigation into the accusation that he tampered with stocks in 2002 comes up with nothing. He is a part of the conservative party; basically the opposite of the situation in the states is occurring. In the states, people are sick of the conservative president, so they are eager to try out the other major party. Well, in Korea the more liberal president Roh didn't do too great of job, so the people of South Korea are eager to try out the more conservative party for a while. In Korea, a president can only be elected once, and it is for a term of 5 years.

In addition to the awesome charge of stock tampering that the future president has going into his presidency, he also helped to pave over a river in the 1960's only to demolish the road and re-introduce the river after announcing that he had become "Green" in 2002 during his time as Mayor of Seoul. More in depth: So the Cheonggyecheon was a river running through Seoul that was paved over in 1968. In 2005, the Cheonggyecheon was re-opened, and with it, many people lost their jobs and homes without proper compensation.

Before politics, he was part owner of Hyundai and acquired near $40 billion dollars. He claimed two of his children to be employees of his to evade taxes on those individuals with more than 1 or 2 properties in their name. This is no rumor; this is something that he has admitted to. One of his main goals as president is to build a $16 BILLION canal from Busan to Seoul. He assures the people of South Korea that by building this canal, it will improve their 12th largest economy to the 7th largest economy and 7% growth in annual GDP. Many Koreans have been quoted saying that they don't care about Lee Myung Bak's past or if he is guilty as long as he does something positive for the economy. Besides the concern for the amount of money this canal is going to cost, what exactly is its effect going to be on the environment?

He is also going to have harsher restrictions on the funding given to North Korea.

So, I'm currently doing the only thing I can do; I'm waiting to see what kinds of things Lee Myung Bak is going to get done for South Korea. I hope he surprises me; otherwise, I sure as hell hope that these next 5 years go awfully fast for SoKo.