"For hundreds of years, women in the South Korean island province of Jeju have made their living harvesting seafood by hand from the ocean floor."

"Known as haenyeo, or sea women, they use no breathing equipment, although a typical dive might last around two minutes and take them as deep as ten metres underwater. Wearing old-fashioned headlight-shaped scuba masks, most dive with lead weights strapped around their waists to help them sink faster...."

Great photos by Hyung S. Kim.

"In recent years, a new Korean word, sung-gui, began to surface online. It means 'plastic-surgery monster.'"

It's "a person who has had so much cosmetic alteration that he or she 'looks unnatural and arouses repulsion,'" writes Patricia Marx in an excellent New Yorker article about the extreme popularity of plastic surgery in South Korea. Supposedly, "a third of all plastic-surgery patients were dissatisfied with the results," and there was a reality TV show called "Back to My Face":

I met with Siwon Paek, the producer of the show�s pilot. In the pilot, contestants who had had at least ten surgeries compete to win a final operation that promises to undo all the previous reconstructions. Paek emphasized that the aim is to help plastic-surgery addicts come to terms psychologically with their appearance. Those with lower incomes, she said, tend to be the most compulsive about plastic surgery. �They feel they have no other way to prove themselves to people and lift themselves socially and economically,� she said. Although the �Back to My Face� pilot was popular, Paek said that she will produce no more episodes. �I didn�t have the strength to continue,� she told me. The responsibility of changing people�s lives weighed too heavily on her, she said, and finding contestants was hard. �For one month, I stood outside a dance club,� she told me. �I solicited two hundred people. Most didn�t want to go back to the way they looked before.�