Driving me mad

He’s a little late, my boss, I’m very aware of it as I anxiously wait for him. I have no idea what to expect and I’m about to get my first decent meal since I left South Africa. The banana I had hasn’t quite hit the spot after all the airline food I’ve eaten. I’m especially nervous about the food, I’ve heard varied opinions. Mostly that it’s spicy which I don’t mind, being my father’s daughter. It’s the kimtchi and the seafood that I’m wary of though.

I’ve decided to wait outside because I’m not sure if my boss will come upstairs to my motel room, so the cold is biting into me again and making me all the more aware of my watch. When he arrives I hastily get into the warmth of his car. “Oh, next time I will come up, you no need wait outside,” he tells me. Clearly he has no intention of being on time in future. As he drives off he tells me we will be meeting Alex for lunch. The teacher who I am to replace. I’m relieved, I find talking to my boss to be a strain, and not just because of the language barrier.

I’m very aware of how he’s driving, and utterly confused. If I thought crossing roads here seemed complicated, driving seems even more so. Like a true backseat driver I bite my tongue and tense up every time he turns a corner because I think we’re going the wrong way, because I don’t realise we have right of way, because to me, we’re driving on the wrong side of the road. He also seems to be going through red robots, I mean traffic lights, I must remember to say traffic lights, I think to myself. I assume there must be some traffic light exception that I don’t know about. That’s not the case though, after walking around the streets of Daejeon and taking taxi’s it’s not long before I realise that Korean drivers, day or night, go through red lights if there is no oncoming traffic.

Their driving frightens me a little, and everyone seems to have big, bulky cars. When I read a paragraph in the book, ‘Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles’ by Simon Winchester, that refers to the Korean driving back in the 1980s I’m grateful for the little improvement there has been. I’m also pleased to know it’s not my road skills that make walking along Korean roads daunting.

“But my strong impression then on the road to Kwangju [Gwangju] – and it was an impression that didn’t alter very much en route - was that the Korean driver is a very dangerous animal indeed, a beast totally without understanding of speed, pathologically incapable of steering, utterly ignorant of the width of his vehicle, and eternally forgetful of such luxuries as the brakes and mirrors with which his car is invariably equipped. He knows only one device, and that is the horn, on which he seems to spend most of his time sitting if not standing.”

Now to South Africans this description doesn’t sound altogether unfamiliar, as a certain mode of public transportation springs to mind, so you should have a relatively good picture of Korean driving. It is no longer as bad as this paragraph depicts, there certainly are improvements and the cars don’t appear to have suffered many accidents as Winchester goes on to describe in his book.

It goes without saying, I arrived safely at my destination that day, and every day that week. It was not driving that became my growing concern, however, it was walking. Crossing roads without the guidance of the little green man seemed a grave risk. I was never sure which side the cars would be coming from and while the robots, I mean traffic lights, may have been red it certainly didn’t stop the cars. The little green men, however, rarely appear, and there’s no button to summon them. I become impatient as I wait, so I’ll attempt to cross but just as I do, a car careers around the corner. I step back in line, with the rest of the Koreans, waiting to obey the light, waiting for it to turn green, and when it does I rush across as it counts down the remaining time I have. I now know why we call them robots, the traffic lights that is.