The rainy season has started here, and each night I go to sleep with the sounds of it wetting my window and clattering down our roof. Campus is one if the few places in Seoul where trees exist; there are no parks here and no room for greenery on the sidewalks. The drizzle brings out all the greens against the glass and brick. Of course, it’s acid rain. All the locals use umbrellas even in the slightest mist, as the chemicals in the condensation will bleach hair and mush clothing. On a sunny day Seoul is never really sunny; a thick haze fogs over the sky. If I so desired I could stare into the sun with little fear of repercussions, and after days outside my skin shows no signs of tanning. It’s an eerie effect, and one of the girls in my class claims it’s setting off her seasonal depression disorder. The students from Pittsburgh and Los Angeles swap smog stories and settle on this being the worst they’ve ever seen. As a good Midwestern boy I can pretend that this is humidity.
My class work does keep me plenty busy, which reminds me how much I’m experiencing Korea as a student rather than as a traveler. Most of my cultural experiences take place around trying to do really ordinary things here, like buying bananas at a fruit stand or using the subway. Most of the Asian-American students have some kind of family or family friends over here, so they have someone to sherpa them around town. This also means they get to take part in more cultural activities here, which for everyone under thirty means hitting the nightclubs 5-7 times a week. I’ve been avoiding this scene like the plague.
Already the population density bothers me here: every street and store is crowded with people; it’s on par with maneuvering around the Minnesota State Fair. Now imagine if the State Fair took place around one of the onramps to I-94. Calling the drivers here aggressive is like calling a pitbull attack uncomfortable—it doesn’t really capture the severity of the situation. Everyone runs red lights here and I have yet to see a single stop sign. A bus may try to turn left from the far right hand lane to the far left hand lane of a perpendicular street, then get caught in traffic and completely block an intersection.
To balance this people have started driving motorcycles on the sidewalks. Any normal person would just drive on the shoulder of the road, but space is at too high a premium to have a shoulder here. This also means that cars will pull onto the sidewalk and park. Sometimes people move, sometimes they are pushed forward like the cowcatcher on a train might move them. Walking the four blocks to buy cereal means twenty minutes of knocking into people and breathing in their body heat while cars lurch past and around you with little to no conception of traffic laws. Factor in the smog, the neon billboards, the ooze of music out of every story and the rumble of a thousand conversations and I have no reason to head out to a bar: I have every unattractive quality of the night club scene at my doorstep. At least that makes me feel better when someone spills their drink on me then pats my ass, though.
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