South Korea - Chapter 2: It's the little differences
It's the things that are different that make visiting another country interesting.
In the movie Pulp Fiction, the character of Vincent Vega was played so well by John Travolta that it earned him a well-deserved Academy Award and restarted his career. In the movie, Vincent Vega had just returned to America after an extended stay in Europe. As he rides around Los Angeles with his work partner Jules Winnfield (played equally well by Samuel L. Jackson) he talks about how different America and Europe are. He says, “It’s the little differences.”
That’s certainly true of America and South Korea as well. While there are areas of South Korea that remind you of how old a country it is, there’s nothing that provides a greater opportunity for modern renewal than a civil war. The Korean Peninsula experienced this in the early 1950s. South Korea struggled at first to find its footing after the armistice was signed. Poverty and corruption where widespread causing my in-laws to leave behind the only place they had ever known, with both hands on their young children and almost nothing in their pockets except the hope that the roads of America truly were paved with gold.
While they were away, the new country of South Korea went through a second childhood and adolescence. The benefit of having one’s country destroyed is that there are no sunk costs. You get to rebuild with the latest and greatest from day one. I didn’t know it as a kid, but I grew up in the very first master-planned community in the United States: Irvine, California. To me this was just life in America. I had no idea that most of my fellow countrymen didn’t live in such a manicured city. Where rebuilding has needed to take place it seems that South Korea has taken to urban planning like a duck to water.
The newer the area you visit, the better planned it is. Incheon for example is a suburb of Seoul that has grown considerably after Incheon International Airport opened in 2001. This new and much larger airport not only brought in businesses but it’s also an area that has room for more residential skyscrapers than Seoul.
The little differences are what interest me the most. Rather than expect people on bicycles to risk their necks being within feet of large and powerful machines that outweigh them by an order of magnitude, the sidewalks and crosswalks in Incheon are divided into a section for bikes and a separate section for pedestrians.
Additionally, the pedestrian area is divided into two halves by a slightly raised area that looks like it was designed by the fine folks at Lego. This seems to encourage people to walk on the right.
These bumps however also appear at curb cuts and in other places which seems to be designed to help those with little to no eyesight to know where they are.
Even in front of the elevators.
And the soda cans have braille on them.
This is one of the dichotomies of South Korea. For a place where one’s physical image is so important that anyone who can afford cosmetic surgery has probably had it, it at least appears that there’s thought going into helping those who’s eyesight is failing or is now nonexistent. On the metro, safety videos explaining what you should in various circumstances have a braille interpreter.
Like so many modern and wealthy nations, Koreans are equally uncomfortable with their place on the color spectrum. In America, caucasians can be found doing their best to get a few shades darker to signal that they can afford to spend time outside. In Korea, the darker you are, the more time you spend outside which in this culture is a sign that you earn your money with muscle rather than mind. Thus many Koreans go to great lengths to avoid getting darker. At intersections in Incheon there are retractable awnings you can stand under to get out of the sun while you wait to cross the road.
There are almost no public trash cans anywhere. Here you are expected to take your trash with you back to wherever you are staying. The irony is that cities in Korea are extremely clean by American standards. The public restrooms cannot always be counted upon to provide the convenience that is toilet paper. This is another item you’re expected to have on you. And while Americans feel like they have done their part by simply placing anything in a recycle bin (whether it’s recyclable or not), recycling in Korea is at a different level entirely. You’re expected to sort your recycling. That usually means carting your recycling down to the basement of the building in which you are staying to a special room where you’ll be astonished by 10 or more recycling bins each dedicated to a specific type of material.
Expectations here are so different. Everything is clean. There’s no trash on the ground except the occasional cigarette butt, a habit that regrettably Koreans have not shaken. There’s no graffiti in Incheon though there are parts Seoul that have it. However, regardless of where you are in the city, metro stations and trains are clean almost to the point of looking brand new. Walking around at night with no one in sight isn’t alarming. The feeling that you are safe is not a delusion. Our daughter lived here with a host family for 6 months and said she never felt anything but safe. No doubt this is both because there are CCTV cameras everywhere and also because committing a crime here does not only bring shame upon you, but to your entire family as well. Politicians at the highest levels are not sacred cows either. The Korean people have sent several of their recent Presidents to prison for crimes such as misappropriation of public funds.
Many that commute into Seoul for work, ride their bikes to the local metro station and then just leave them outside. They do put a lock on them that would prevent someone from pedaling away but they are not locked to any structure. Thus one could just pick up an expensive bike, put it in a car or truck and drive off with it. And yet, this does not happen.
They have a criminal justice system not unlike the American system. Criminals are not caned or sent to hard labor camps. That extra layer of potential shame is enough to deter the petty thieves. We even happened upon an ice cream/snack store which was entirely self-served. You walk in, pick out the items you want, scan then, pay, and walk out. There is no one there to stop you from stealing. That works here. It’s hard to imagine it working in America.
When deliveries are made to homes and businesses, they are just left out front. The odds of them being stolen are close to zero. When we were here in 2017 we saw a box of brand new dishes sitting on the stairs leaving a subway station and yet it seemed almost invisible to hundreds of people going through the station every few minutes. Eventually if the owner doesn’t come back looking for it, those that manage the subway station will take it and hope the owner comes eventually.
It’s so important to show you know how to at least read English that younger people often wear shirts that have some English on them now matter how inexplicable. I walked past a shop selling woman‘s clothing. One outfit included a white shirt that had an ad for Uncle Ben’s rice on it. I saw a woman with a shirt that had “FRENCH TOAST” across the front. New York Yankees baseball caps are popular and really anything recognizably American. Unlike Japan, in Korea to have spent time in the US signals only positive things as does one’s ability to speak English, a language they are required by law to learn in K-12 education.
There are some very practical choices that have been made as well. At some point the Koreans decided that they’d drive on the right, use the metric system and adopted the European standard for voltage and power outlets.
I mentioned in the last post about how Koreans are very conscious of conserving energy. The escalators that take you in and out of the metro stations don’t run continuously. They come on when they detect someone needs to use them. This is also why they don’t generally have central air in homes, choosing instead to have room-specific AC. In tall residential towers you can actually open your windows so that you don’t need to use your AC if it’s a nice day outside.
There are so many little things that are different. That’s what makes traveling fun.