Cruizin' the Burbs

We have been lucky enough over the past week to have had a car at our disposal. Don (my running buddy) and his wife have gone to Guam for the holiday break, so they said we could use their car while they were gone. Driving has been quite an experience, and we have actually seen some things first hand that we previously thought were only folklore.

The first thing that we discovered is that the traffic lights are only put in place because they look nice – no one really pays any attention to them. This is a little scary when you are used to thinking that on a green light you are safe to go. Another novelty is when you are in a line of traffic waiting at the lights to do a u-turn. Generally you would follow the line of traffic down to the lights and everyone would make the turn from the same place. Here however, as soon as the car at the front starts to make a turn, then all the cars in the line (often 15 or 20 cars) make their u-turn from wherever they are in the line. It is quite comical to watch, and I’m sure it would make a dazzling performance from an overhead view.

Parking is another facet of driving that has been given that special Korean touch. We had heard stories that people often park their cars behind other cars and just leave them out of gear, the assumption being that when the person who has been parked in wants to get out, they will simply push the other vehicle out of the way. I wasn’t sure how true this was, but sure enough, when I came out of the supermarket the other day there was a car parked right behind ours in a perpendicular position. Luckily, the guy parked beside us was also leaving and he had already started pushing the offending vehicle out of the way. Of course the only place to move the car was behind other cars that were parked beside us – needless to say, that one particular car would’ve been moved back and forth quite a few times during its driver’s little shopping trip. Just last night, when we came out of the restaurant, we were parked in again. The car directly behind us had left their mobile number on the windscreen, so we got a passerby to call them for us. Within 30 seconds the owner emerged from a nearby restaurant to allow us to get out. I’m not sure how this system would work in Australia – I could just imagine where your car would end up if you parked behind someone and left it out of gear.

The Koreans have only had major highways for about 20 years, up until about 10-15 years ago, a lot of people didn’t have cars. Nowadays everybody has a car, and they love to drive them. It’s like having 40 million adolescent drivers on the road at once. The highways have not kept up with the increase in traffic volume, and traffic jams are a regular occurrence. A couple of weeks ago I drove to COSTCO, a large wholesale supermarket. The trip there took 30 minutes, but the trip back took 2 hours. Nothing like driving 35 km at an average speed of 17km/hr. The driving experience has been good for us because it has convinced us that we don’t need a car, we’ll be sticking to public transport – at least for now.