While drugs are apparently rather hard to come by in Korea, they sure do love their alcohol. Any school or social function you go to, the beer and soju flow freely. Both are dirt cheap, especially soju, which is rumoured to have something like 20% alcohol. A bottle of it (not sure how big it is, I think 350-500mL) is less than a dollar. This means that you can get wrecked for next to nothing, and get wrecked they do. Also, drinking in public is A-OK and everyone drives like maniacs, so picking out a drunk driver in traffic is next to impossible...so the incentives to not get smashed drunk before 2 p.m. are pretty few around here.
Yesterday when I was on my daily run, I just about tripped over some guy lying in the middle of the sidewalk. At first, I was concerned and thought that he was sick or something, so I went into the restaurant a few feet from the guy to tell people about it. They seemed more annoyed with me bothering them than happy that I cared enough to stop and they simply told me/showed me (making the drinkie-drinkie gesture) that the guy was okay just drunk as a skunk. This was at around 6 p.m. I'm not sure what's worse...the fact that this guy was so ridiculously drunk by 6 p.m. that he passed out in the middle of a sidewalk or the fact that no one seemed to care...(sorry for the crappy pic, I just took it as I was running on my way back and didn't want to stop and draw attention).
Drinking is also huge in the local parks. There are tiny little parks (about as big as an apartment building) everywhere, which is really nice. They usually include a few bits of exercise equipment (which I love!), a playground, a few trees, and a little pagoda-type shelter. Unfortunately, 99% of the time the shelters are used by either old men and women to drink heavily in the middle of the day (I've seen ones that had 30+ 1L beer bottles and a liberal sprinkling of soju bottles scattered everywhere) or by teens to smoke at. Every now and again (especially at the nicer ones in real parks) you see families having lunch or just people chilling out and chatting at these things, which is really nice, but sadly that's the minority.
At first I couldn't pick out the drunk people (though I've heard that there are tons of them around), but now I'm getting pretty good, and man there are a lot of them staggering around! It's funny because the bus drivers drive pretty violently...they fling people back and forth as they grind their way through the gears (I swear to god most bus drivers are getting kickbacks from local transmission shops...it's like their wives just left them and they're determined to take it out on the poor gearbox). Anyhoo...one of the funniest things to watch is drunken middle aged men trying to stay upright on a bus. Oh yeah...I had another interesting encounter (besides the drunken man who kissed me)...in Jeju City.
I was walking around when I heard this big slap-crash, looked behind me and saw two cops who had just finished tossing some drunk dude out of their squad car. It wasn't too late, around midnight, but this guy was so drunk at first I thought he was dead. I just looked stunned for a second before I realized what happened (that the cops just threw the guy out and he landed face-first on the pavement, so drunk that there's no way he could have avoided the harsh landing). Once the cops saw me, they realized that this might be bad for Korea's image and expressed their caring by poking the guy with their feet and looking at him with less-than-sincere concern.
So, on the one end of the social spectrum we have the drunken old men, on the other we have the sweet schoolgirls. I swear they constantly make my day (I'm trying not to sound like Humbert Humbert from Lolita here haha).
Not only do they come up to me EVERYWHERE to say "Hi, how are you?" and giggle as I smile at them and tell them I'm great and ask them how they are, but they get all excited about taking pictures with me, give me little gifts (the girls in the next picture gave me a little box of cookies, other girls in my school have given me candy and other sweets), and generally are genuinely happy to come up to me and say hi.
The girls also tend to be more enthusiastic about English (my afterschool club is 99% girls, only one guy shows up about once a month, and the upcoming speech contest entrants from my school are all girls), which also puts them in a little more special spot in my heart. I love it when anyone around here gets enthusiastic about English and try to encourage and help them as much as possible. Yesterday one of the girls in my English club told me that one of the boys in her class was saying how he hated me and that she jumped to my defence and told him to stop talking like that. I mean how cute is that? (To paraphrase Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye...that kind of stuff just kills me :)).
Moving on...since today has been heavy on the typing and light on the pictures...here's a random picture for you guys. Yet another reason to love Korea...it's so safe and theft is such a small problem, that this is how they deliver pop:
Back home, this thing would be robbed (or at least randomly picked away at) inside of 20 minutes. In Edmonton, 20 seconds.
That's it for me today...I've finally started cleaning my apartment...because Mark is going to be in Korea in just over 48 hours!! This is freaking exciting! I think I'll take the 6 a.m. bus up to Seoul on Saturday and spend Sat/Sun/Mon (long weekend, baby!) up in the capital city with Mark. Should be an amazing time :)
Cheerio!
T
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