Research: A Limited Venture

This morning I decided to brew a second cup of coffee, because I knew that my intentions for the day consisted of staring at the computer browsing the same sites that I always visit.  This weather has made going outside less than appealing and I am under the assumption that there is no limit to the amount of research one should conduct before making a move overseas.  The wealth of information on the superhighway should last me until the day I depart for Korea, or so I thought.  I found that my ability to come up with different word combinations to feed the search engine has stifled my attempt at finding anything new.  Can that be possible?  Have I found all that there is to know about the place I am going, or just not the right wording for the search?

I have tried an umbrella search on Korea and there is a million pages of information on Seoul and North Korea, but I am not moving to Seoul and I have no plans yet to pay a visit to Kim Jong Ill.  He is not ready to meet someone like me.  Entering the specific province in Korea, I am greeted only with your basic government tourism pages, hotel reviews and travel writer forums.  A search narrowed to the city in the province I am moving to yields much of the same.  I have even bothered to sign up for a yahoo group specific to the location and have had limited success in response to my questions.  It seems the hippies are more interested in organizing an Ultimate Frizbee game.  Dave's ESL site people have been useless too.  Maybe my antagonistic responses to others' posts has made me a bad guy that nobody wants to play with anymore.  Oh well, thanks for nothing.

Upon more creative investigation, I turned to the blogosphere in hopes of finding a similar soul who has travelled to and posted about the place and the kind of information that interests me.  A nibble here and there is provided by a few visitors and resident bloggers, but with hardly the right amount of detail and gusto.  Not quite Mark Twain enough for me.  They chart the path commonly travelled by those who have bothered to write before them, probably unaware of their boorish similarities.  Unaware and without a care, they most likely satisfy whatever intent they had in their diarrheic appraisal of "one more place visited".  Like a notch on their belt, a check-off of their list.

 I imagine the people that follow, friends and family, for whom they have bothered to create the blog for, disappointed by their loved one's inability to convey anything about what it is like being there.  The kind of writing that allows the reader to imagine a place that they will most likely never see with their own eyes.  It is safe to say that what I have read so far won't be convincing any reader about making travel plans, ever.  Worse, I cringe at the notion that the author looks back fondly in their old age at the feeble attempt made at documenting their travels and feeling a sense of accomplishment.  Different levels of self critique I suppose, and who am I to judge.  I am only sad because I had high hopes before reading some of these blogs and feel let down.  

I have yet to find one blogger who satisfies that attention to detail and wonder that one should feel in a place so new and magical and different.  So far I have read a bunch of Book Report blogs and Tourist Guide blogs, Comparing This To That Which We Cannot Understand In Our Narrow Mindset blogs, Penny Pinching-Dirty Hippie Hiker blogs and the always popular, Look at Me and My Girlfriend/boyfriend Happily Traveling Together blogs.  Yuck!  So bland, so similar and all of the photos are exactly the same no matter what kind of blog it is.  Even the blogs that have been posted to help out Foreigner's who have moved to work there are sterile.  Is it inevitable that anything I write will turn out only a slight variant of the same?  Can there be only one collective POV possible about the subject matter?  I pray this lack of original thought doesn't infect my being upon arrival.

If by narrowing my search to specifics limits the amount of different and useful information these searches come up with, I may have something to contribute to the web once I get there and investigate for myself.  Maybe there is a job in it for me, or some money even, for contributing to the available knowledge about this place I soon will call home?  Maybe I will get the attention of some publisher or magazine and win the Pulitzer Prize of blogging?  Find my inner Robert Louis Stevenson perhaps?  Is it even possible that these questions have not been answered and information published somewhere in Web-land?  I seriously doubt that I am the first who wants to know the answers to these questions I have entered into my Google searches.  I must not have the right word combinations...