Jucha

Korea has developed extremely quickly over the last few decades. The standard of living has risen rapidly, and Seoul has become a major metropolis with a good modern infrastructure (including the subway).

But in some cases what looks modern and Western is a thin veneer. There's a fair amount of "third-world" structure and behavior lurking beneath the "first-world" surface. (There's also a lot of stuff that is truly first-world, stuff that works better than in the US.)

To take one small example, the sewer system isn't really able to handle toilet paper. There are signs in public bathrooms instructing users not to put toilet paper into the toilet. So the soiled paper goes into little trash cans in the stalls, and the bathrooms smell.

Another example is traffic. Driving habits are scary and dangerous. There is essentially no place you can walk as a pedestrian where you are not in danger of being struck and killed by a motorized vehicle. It's imperative to keep your wits about you at all times. Motorbikes, often carrying wide crates behind the driver's seat, drive up onto sidewalks and weave in and out among pedestrians with impunity. (This is probably illegal, but if so there is no enforcement.) Cars are constantly making dangerous U-turns, or gunning through intersections, or inexplicably backing in and out of alleys for no apparent reason than to make life interesting for pedestrians. Walkways, sidewalks, staircases, and building entrances are often blocked by cars, forcing pedestrians out into the street.

Erma and I have found that trying to move out of the way of cars is often more dangerous than just plodding ahead in a straight line. Cars often give the impression of trying to go one way, only to change course right after you've moved to where you thought was a safer place.

As far as I can tell, there are no parking laws at all. Drivers will park wherever they think they can get away with it. On sidewalks, blocking lanes of traffic, up against doorways. I've never seen a parking enforcement officer or a parking ticket.

The businesses on our alley, in an attempt to reserve spaces for their customers, place large plastic jugs weighted full of sand out on the street with "No Parking" (Ju Cha Geum Ji 주차금지) handwritten on them.


You see a lot of other interesting parking-related phenomena when you walk around. Here are pictures of a few of them.

These are cars parked in the alley on which we live.


The front two cars in the pictures are parked in marked spaces, but the third guy isn't. It seems that almost all cars sold in Korea have side-view mirrors that fold in. Drivers often park in very tight spaces -- spaces that would be deemed unparkable by Americans -- and are perhaps also concerned about reckless drivers coming into contact with their parked cars. So many of them fold the side-view mirrors in when they park. The first and third cars in the picture here have theirs mirrors tucked in. (Maybe this is common practice in other countries as well. I don't know if cars sold in the US have foldable mirrors, but if so I don't think they get used much.)

Here's a close-up:


In the background you can see an orange "No Parking" sign. This one's a bit more sophisticated than the sand-filled jugs, but serves the same purpose.

Quite a few cars have their cell phone numbers visible in the windshield:


Perhaps this is so an errant driver who crashes into the parked car can call the driver to apologize. More likely, it's so that whoever's business, driveway, or door is blocked by the parked car can call the owner and tell them to move.

Because parking is so hard to find in the city, some businesses have installed very innovative space-saving parking structures. This one is right next to Princeton Square, our favorite cafe about a block from our apartment.


This is sort of a ferris wheel for cars. The structure holds five cars. The black car has been rotated up to the left, making room for another car to enter.


And there's a second car.


I've never seen this thing actually moving. I hope I will one day. Just the idea of trying to back a car into it seems terrifying.

At a fancy restaurant downtown, I've seen a car elevator that takes cars down to an underground parking garage. The elevator compartment was exactly the size of one car. Between the driveway and the elevator was a large lazy susan embedded in the concrete. The driver would move the car onto this large circle, which would then rotate it 180 degrees. The car could then be backed into the elevator, and driven out facing forwards once it reached the underground parking structure. Coming back, the car goes head first into the elevator, comes up to the surface, backs out onto the lazy susan, and then gets rotated around so it can drive down the driveway into the street.