Holy crap I've been here a month?! I genuinely did not realize that until I typed out that sentence. Thirty days ago I landed in Incheon, and three hours later passed out in a hotel in Gangnam after writing this incredibly stupid thing. I can't honestly say that it doesn't feel like a month has passed. If anything it almost feels like more time than that. My exhausting and terrifying training week feels so weird and foreign when I think about it that it might as well have happened on a different planet. An incredibly shitty planet. We should blow it up.
Okay, back to stories about driving. Like I was saying, I've been here a month (gasp!) and I've seen about a dozen accidents. In fact a few of my friends and co-workers were recently involved in one just this past weekend. For the most part everyone was fine, but there were a few injuries and enough concern to go around. Hopefully this is the only time I'll have to talk about that.
I went to Suwon today to pick up my Alien Registration Card (Yipee! I'm a real boy now!). The cab driver there did something that I've heard about from a few different people: he deliberately drove a further route in order to hike up the rate. I wasn't sure this was happening at first, but then I remembered someone saying it happens to foreigners from time to time. Oh, also, he set the dashboard GPS before we left the train station and I saw him drive off the route about fifteen times. Every time he did the GPS would beep at him a lot and try to correct the route but he would ignore it. It's kind of irritating since there's nothing I can really do about it; as of today I have yet to learn how to shout, "I know what you're doing you son of a bitch!" in Korean.
Oh, then the cab driver on the way back to the train station fell asleep in traffic. Yeah. Basically he was old. Old enough that I'm pretty sure he presided over the unified Korean peninsula back in the 7th century. We stopped at a red light - incidentally, red lights here take about seven or eight years to switch back to green - and he shifted the car into park and, just...promptly fell asleep. Fortunately I do know enough Korean to get someone's attention. The proper phrase is 잠시만요, which is pronounced jam-shi-man-yo and translates literally as "little time stop." It's the Korean way of saying "excuse me." To be clear though, I knew this when I got in the car and said exactly none of it, because when you're in a car with a driver who has fallen asleep and the traffic starts moving around you, basically you just yell, "HEY, UM, CAN...UH..." which translates universally.
YES, that all absolutely happened.
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