Year-End Dinner

December and January are probably the busiest period for most people as lots of people are preparing presents for Christmas or settling the company’s year-end finance accounts or planning where to go for the holidays. When I was in Japan, December was the time to have year-end dinners to celebrate the ending of one year and to put the past away and January was the month to have New Year parties and to celebrate the New Year. Korea is pretty similar too with many people having year-end dinners with friends and company workers to celebrate the ending of one year and also to patch up any bad relationship between people so that they could look forward to a new start in the next year.

Of course, we also had our year-end dinner last Wednesday to celebrate the achievements of our clinic for 2010. The menu was Korean beef as Korean beef is actually the most expensive beef in Korea and on such occasion, it is important to provide the best for the employees to show thanks and gratitude for their hard work in 2010. During dinner, presents were also presented to many co-workers for their hard work including The Early Bird Prize for 2 workers who arrive to work early every morning, The Best Idea Prize for 3 workers who contributed successful ideas to provide better service for our patients, The best Worker in December and another team leader was elected for our surgery room. Congratulations to all of you and keep up your good work!

One of our directors, Dr. Lee, also made a speech that in the New Year we would all stay healthy and work hard to ensure the clinic would continue to prosper under our hard work. As for Dr. Kim, he moved around the tables, making sure that he gave a toast to all of us and presented a short speech hoping that we would continue to cooperate and work as a team in the clinic, mentioning that without team spirit, the clinic would not be able to prosper and flourish. He also emphasized the importance of team spirit so that our personal knowledge would improve and help each other as a team, not just for ourselves. Finally he thanked everyone for the hard work and hope that we would all have a good year ahead.

Personally I would also like to thank Dr. Kim and all workers for their patience since I am not Korean, they need to spend more time to explain things to me and try to understand my broken Korean^^. Thank you all very much!!