Wed Jul 30, 2003
Shudder. I just witnessed a guy on his scooter getting whacked by a car. I was just looking right at him when it happened too, thinking how dangerous it is to ride around on scooters without helmets. Everybody whips around on their scooters without protection, it’s a death wish, especially considering how c-r-a-z-y Korean drivers are. The insane traffic took a while to get used to, when I first got here I stood waiting at a Zebra crossing for five minutes until Sean explained to me that cars never stop at crossings. They’re just painted on the the road for insurance purposes apparently. Don’t worry, the guy wasn’t hurt too badly, he was hopping around with only one shoe swearing at the car driver, so I think he’ll live.
I added some more poems to my poetry page, but they’re so terrible. My latest stuff is so bad, I wish I’d bought my old poetry books with me. Anyways, yesterday, after waking up in a groggy Soju-inspired state, I hooked up with Nardus in Seoul. We walked around Itaewon a bit. I tried to buy a cheap phonecard from these Jamaicans in one of the side alleys, where I got it before, but they totally ignored us. I guess there are some sub-cultures we can just never be a part of. After drinking some overpriced bubble tea, we headed off to Yeouido, an Island in the middle of the Han river, Seoul’s so called “Manhattan”. It turned out to be quite a nice sunny day so we walked along the river, checked out the National Assembly building and were going to go up the K63 building, which I STILL haven’t been to. We didn’t make it though because we were sucked into this great Japanese restaurant and then into the Beer Hof. We tried to order decent drinking snacks. First they offered us tinned peach slices. Peaches? With beer? Then the owner promised us “chicken”, but what he brought out was, yep you guessed it, a whole dried up squid, tentacles and all. Today, I went hiking up Bhukansan again, it was an awesome hike but I barely made it up the first peak. It’s just too damn hot, once again the sweat was cascading down my torso in continuous rivulets. I fell asleep at the top after my Kimbap picnic and woke up nicely burnt.