Hubba Hubba

Korea is fond of the word "hub." The media throws that word around like a short order cook juggles eggs in the morning. The main difference between those two is that after you have an omelet or a couple of sunny-sides, you generally feel satisfied and can carry on with your day...after reading the Herald or Times, you generally feel like laying down with a cool cloth over your eyes and listening to the pan flute until your headache goes away.

Click Here to see how many results pop up on the Korea Times website with the keyword "hub" from March 2006 to March 2007

Here are a few examples of the 210 uses of HUB in the past year...

• City Looking to Become Hub for Entertainment
• Cheju...planned for the island's growth into a Northeast Asian hub
• Foreign companies' research and development (R&D) centers are leaving Korea, undermining the country's scheme of becoming the chief research hub of Northeast Asia
• The Korean hub airport won the honor for the second consecutive year...
• ...hopes to be a Regional Business Hub
• Korea’s hopes of becoming the logistics hub of Northeast Asia...
• (About my University...Hongik) The spirit of the school is in keeping with Seoul’s project to make the city a cultural hub of Asia.
• (About my former employer...HUFS) Through the center, the school will help the city, whether it be Seoul or Inchon, become an Asian cultural hub and boost the image of Korea in the international community
• Yonsei University has joined a biomedical hub project in the Inchon Free Economic Zone

In most cases, articles are not about businesses or places being hubs, rather that they hope to be a hub, or are trying to be a hub, or planning on trying to be a hub, or hoping that they might try to make an effort at considering being a hub or hub-like hub. I guess you could say that Korea is a hub of potential hubs.