Random #26: Under-compensation in a Dark Blue Package

[Part II of the previous entry will have to wait until next week. Aside from a hectic work schedule, I’ve been busy with an other, more materialistic, superficial matter.]

I bought a car.

Seoul, this crazy, dirty (in so many ways), bustling metropolis, bursting at the seams with a plenitude of hard-working, hard-studying, hard-living and hard-dying flesh, jumbled together with a mess of concrete, steel, smoke, and alcohol, is probably one of the worst places in the world to have a car. Even Cambodia, with its muddy, red clay highways rife with potholes and cyclists and wandering livestock, might be a more practical place to be a car-owner. The several hour-ride from Poipet, on the Cambodian border, to Siam Reap was nauseating and dizzying, our brazen driver squinting through a thick coating of red over the windshield, and yet I wonder as I drive through the Western districts of Seoul if this is really any better.

At first sight, the roads in Changchun, Beijing, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh, and Saigon are far worse than those in Seoul, pure chaos, a complete lack of order, an engulfing wildness. But there is an order in that chaos. A family was walking across an eight-lane road in Beijing. My taxi cut it close, blazing past the Chinese couple and their two small children holding hands, cutting it to mere inches, and I looked back from out the rear window to see them calmly walking the rest of the way, holding hands, stopping to let the unyielding cars pass before proceeding on. No crosswalk, no traffic signals, and yet no fear. In Saigon, watching the traffic from the second-story window of a McDonald’s, the movement, the flow of the countless scooters and beaters reminded me of a documentary film on the ocean—schools upon schools of fish of all shapes and sizes running in all directions and yet never an awkward collision. Synergy.

In Seoul, there is a lack of this synergy. Traffic is horrendous at all hours of the day (and night), sucking away any joy of being behind the wheel. The average person does not know how to drive, does not know the joy of the open road, never has a chance to. They learn how to drive while in college or even later and then put their license in the wardrobe until years and years pass* and they marry and have a family or get transferred to a branch office in the countryside and then they dust off the license, buy a car and hit the road. You don’t have that synergy because fish don’t need to be taught to swim.

And in addition to these wardrobe-drivers, you have the “professionals” zipping around at breakneck speeds to make a few extra won. Food delivery guys on little red scooters, weaving between cars and behind cars and on the sidewalks while clutching their tin boxes in one hand and steering with the other, maniacal taxi drivers, ignoring all traffic laws and etiquette to get their passengers to their destinations the longest route possible in the shortest amount of time, and even hardened bus drivers, feet heavy on the gas and brakes, jerking and trudging along to get in a few extra rounds. Bballi, bballi. Faster, faster. On the streets of a Seoul is a pure wildness, a dog-eat-dog wildness. There is no courtesy, no after-yous and no Ps and Qs, because that sort of chicken-shit, human behavior has no place in the wild.

When comparing Seattle and Seoul, cities proper, Seoul has only 1.6 times the area to hold 16.5 times the amount of people.** Stick a school of fish in a household fish tank and see how well they move around.

Nevertheless, all this stagnation means this chaos is only frustrating, not dangerous. You’ll get to point A to point B in one piece. You’ll have aged, but you’ll get there in one piece. I assume the handful of people who die in the city in traffic accidents everyday are either motorcyclists or pedestrians. You’ll get there safe but you’ll never really get there. Instead, you’ll circle and circle like a carrion crow over a battlefield. When it comes to parking, everyone becomes a predator.

It occurs to me that Koreans don’t believe in building parking lots. The few pay parking lots are skinny, steel monsters that pick up your car and carry it up into the air to hover precariously in its slot over several stories of cars. There are no parking meters on the streets, you park where you can, on the sidewalks and in narrow alleyways, at bus stops. You hope the place you move to has some sort of parking arrangement and you pray that the place you’re taking your date to has valet parking. Your decision to take the car out at all is influenced by the slim possibility of parking.

Yes, I bought a car. I have never denied that, most of the time, I’m a dumb-ass. A used car, because I’m also a cheap-ass.

I bought a car because my mother lives in the countryside and I’ll have a taste of relatively open road on the way there, and even when the major highways are an unmoving mass of automation during the holidays, I won’t be suffering through it on a cramped inter-province bus, sitting next to an elderly man smelling of fish and mothballs who decides to take care of his hygienic and grooming needs en route. And when I go out in Seoul, I won’t have to be pushed and shoved into an over-capacity subway car, face inches away from the face of a stranger with another even stranger hand brushing against my ass. I also bought the car because I have a dick and as much as age, indolence, and hard times and living have taken away my desire to give a damn about my own mortality and virility, I like cars.

* Korean licenses don’t expire for ten years.

** I couldn’t find an area statistic for the greater Seoul metropolitan area. Seattle–area: 369.2 sq. km (142.5 sq mi, city proper), population: 617.3 thousand (city proper), 3.4 million (metro). Seoul—area: 605.25 sq. km (233.7 sq. mi, city proper), population: 10.2 million (city proper), 24.5 million (metro). [Wikipedia]