Why is Korea not flat?

Korea is a strange place. For so many reasons there are these little things that happen here that are funny, ridiculous, infuriating, and downright goofy. Seeing how the week after week, weekend after weekend monotony so far has not produced any real linear stories I’ll talk about some of the weird idiosyncrasies (anyone who has spent time here can tell you there are far more than a few) that have stuck out so far. These are some things that maybe I had forgotten about in my time away either by choice or through the normalcy of life back home.

In a city with eleven million people crammed into a relatively small space one might think it would be imperative to pay attention to where one is going. Not so, not so, not so. I am constantly amazed that there aren’t flattened Koreans all over the sidewalks as no one watches where the hell they’re going! Not only are they completely, and I mean COMPLETELY oblivious to their surroundings but they also will suddenly change directions without looking to see if anyone is coming. You would think in a crowded city on a sidewalk with people walking, running (yes, Koreans love to run through crowds), riding bicycles, and motor scooters (that’s right, on the sidewalks) that it might be important to say, glance over one’s shoulder before making a sudden turn in the opposite direction.

Last weekend I was riding my bike down the sidewalk and there was a little boy standing on the far right side of the sidewalk facing the building. Having years of experience navigating these sidewalks on The Falcon I knew instinctively that this child would walk directly into my path, even though I was riding on the far left. As I came within 20 feet of the kid he jumped backwards as far as he could, never looking around to see if there was a scooter or say, a person on a bicycle coming, directly into the path of my bike. Knowing somehow this would happen I braked and steered around him, shaking my head as I passed the oblivious should-be-flat boy.

This isn’t exclusive to children here, though--the adult children know no better. Later that day there was a young woman who walked out of a store, straight across the very busy sidewalk, directly into my path, of course. Not only did she never look in my direction at all—I was coming directly at her—she actually walked toward me, head pointing opposite direction, absolutely oblivious as I slammed on my brakes and skidded, narrowly avoiding hitting her. Even as I yelled: “Holy SH*T!!! Watch where you’re going!!!” after nearly wrecking my bike trying to avoid running her over, she still took no notice and never even turned her head. It is a living video game riding a bike down a sidewalk with so many bizarre obstacles and people that seem to instinctively move towards the path of oncoming traffic but somehow walk away unscathed and completely unaware of how close they came to getting run over.

Speaking of getting run over, a fellow teacher and I were discussing a bizarre situation when it comes to traffic laws here. Although unaware to other pedestrians, scooters, and bikes as I just explained, Koreans are really aware of crosswalks. I have never seen a Korean cross the street when there is a don’t walk signal even if there is absolutely no traffic at all. They will wait for the green walk signal no matter how slow the street is and do not infract on this rule at any time. However, when they get behind the wheel of a car a red light becomes not a rule but an arbitrary suggestion. So the pedestrians can wait all they want for the green signal but it is common and almost expected for someone to blow through the red light in their automobile. But then again, somehow, miraculously, there are no flat Koreans.

Oh, the small ironies in this country. I remember the time when I lived in Suwon and I shook my head perpetually for 65 straight days. How is it that a kid can solve complex math equations and spend his/her whole life studying yet lacks the common sense to look before crossing. How does a person who earlier in the day spent five minutes waiting at a crosswalk completely ignore a red light and try to beat a pedestrian through a similar crosswalk? These logic-defying enigmatic behaviors and many other like it can do a couple of things to a person: Infuriate them or make them laugh. I’ve been taking the route of shaking my head, laughing, and saying: “Oh, Korea!”.