Highlights in June

Highlights from this weekend:

Played beer pong outside of a GS25 (basically a 7-11). Set up our cups on a picnic table and played for hours. People came and went, watching the crazy waygooks tossing a ping-pong ball into cups of beer. What I loved most about this was that no one came and told us to move along. Loitering is a national past time here. This goes back, I think, to something I said earlier about shared space: everyone's space is everyone's space here. So, why wouldn't you be able to hog a picnic table for 4 hours, treat the area like it's your own back yard, and share beers with passersby?

People in hospitals do not stay in hospitals. And by this I mean that you can walk past any given hospital on any given day, and you will see bored-looking patients socializing just beyond the hospital doors. Some of them are sporting IVs, others wheelchairs or crutches, and all of them are wearing the requisite hospital gowns. They sit/stand/hunch and smoke cigarettes, have fights with family members, wander in and out of convenience stores buying beer or snacks. One such hospital escapee sat down with his buddies on Friday night and watched our spirited game of beer pong. Somehow, Joe ended up buying him a beer, and was then instructed on how best to give something to an elder. Apparently, Joe had just set the beer down in front of the man, one-handed, which is a no-no. He was told to present the beer, with both hands, and bow slightly. Lesson learned.

Our bus ride on Friday was a rollercoaster adventure. Most bus drivers are older here, and have an air of disinterest about them. Their eyes rarely meet yours as you step onto the bus, and they only sometimes mumble a half-hearted hello. They get animated and even irate if a patron is being disruptive, but mostly they focus on maneuvering their rigs at breakneck speed through a quagmire of city streets and bad drivers. On Friday, our bus driver was young. He was chomping on gum, his shirt (which I'm pretty sure was not regulation bus driver attire), was unbuttoned, revealing a t-shirt that quite possibly could have had been a neon Gecko t-shirt, circa 1988. He had a baseball hat on, a North Face bag at his feet, and the general look of someone who should be mountain-biking through Utah or kickin' it beach-side in Busan.
And then there was the music. Bus drivers here listen to an eclectic mix of music. Sometimes it's just Korean news: a steady background drone. Sometimes, traditional Korean music. Sometimes, Christina Aguilera or Ke$ha (yeah, that's right, I know how she "spells" her stupid name). But this guy was blasting the rich, mournful tunes of one Miss Edith Piaf.
So, there we were: piled onto a surprisingly packed bus, standing, holding on to the bus handles above us (our hands going numb), listening to Edith Piaf, and being wildly flung from one end of the bus to the other as our beach bum driver swerved, jolted, and careened us through Daegu. I'm pretty sure the guy slammed on the breaks just to watch the entire busload of people lurch forward and back. When passengers got onboard, he hardly waited for them to swipe their fare cards before hitting the gas and flying forward. Same goes for one particular old lady that made the mistake of getting on this bus--she was flung back and forth, bouncing off other passengers like the ball in a pinball machine.
This bus ride turned people into vultures: greedily eyeing possible seat openings. One old man was about to push me over and had begun to display anger face when he realized that I was motioning him to the seat that had opened in front of me, and not (as he assumed) stealing it from him and being both disrespectful of elders and a snotty waygook. When he realized his mistake, he laughed, smiled, and stopped pushing me.