HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR!
To blog or not to blog, that is the question before me now. Nothing much has really happened here but by the same token I need the release. I am sitting here now with my arm in a sling, once more, one week and 2 days after I was liberated from the last one. Not to worry, my right collarbone is fine. It’s the left shoulder this time, again. Obviously this is due to a lack of circumspection on my part, but the less said of my own lack of common sense the better. So I have decided to dedicate this blog to the lack of sagacity of the inhabitants and participants of the culture within which I dwell.
The first of which, not actually my story but the story of my great mate Pat, is the story of him crossing cheongyecheon. Cheongyecheon is a newly reupholstered dump-cum-cesspit-cum-toxic effluent receptacle of a stream, which back in the day used to be a prominent feature and tourist attraction of Seoul. The Seoul city council has spent, literally, billions of won cleaning the water and paving the banks, floodlighting the area, and making it wend and wind at totally unnatural angles along approximately its old course. It is now finished and really is a sight to behold, so I am told. But the amount of people visiting it is absurd. Seoul has a population of 12 million, and apparently each and every one of them go down to cheongyecheon at least once per day. Furthermore there is a unidirectional two-lane-highway on each side of the recently re-beautified stream, and they have been blocked off to motorised traffic with gigantic concrete bollards to allow the sheer number of pedestrians to pass unencumbered. (please forgive me if I giggle, that sentence re-reads to me as if they are allowed to pass the bollards only under the proviso that they are not carrying any number of cucumbers. But I am on my second bottle of wine.)
Be that as it may, me old mucker Patski was crossing the afore mentioned vehicle-less highway the other day, up from cheongyecheon to an ATM and back again, as a matter of necessity rather than choice. (foreign card accepting ATM’s in Corea are a catch-what-catch-can scenario). When he got to the (vehicle-less-concrete-bollard-blocked) highway he noticed a strange phenomenon. The redundant traffic lights were still in operation. Not so surprising perhaps, given meagre the two months that the stream has been open to pedestrian traffic. More surprising maybe that the “walk” and/or “don’t walk” signals were also in operation. Most surprising of course was, on a 4 mile stream, that only 15 metres from the bollards themselves there was a mob of 30 to 40 people who were waiting at the signal for the “don’t walk” light to change to “walk”. Pat, feeling a bit strange, proceeded across the intersection only to look behind to see that nobody had yet realised that for two bloody months there had not been a single bloody car down that road and the bloody concrete bollards, only 15 metres away, were testament to the fact. They were all standing there looking expectantly at the light.
Now I’ll admit “most” does not have a greater superlative. A superlative by definition presumes the greatest amount. I will also admit, that in it’s more functional days this was a very busy road. And following that line of thought, a simple zebra crossing wouldn’t have held much currency in the grand scheme of traffic flow over such a grand thoroughfare. Hence, it would be a while between the lowly crossings of the pedestrial set, given the automotive activity of the higher tax bracket that used to zip past it in it’s days of glory. But upon returning from the ATM (around a minute, over the footpath and back) I would bet my hat, that if there were a most-er-est superlative for ‘most surprised’, that that would be the one that Pat would have used to describe how he felt to see the exact same proselytised posse of do-gooders, waiting at the exact same traffic light, on the exact same 15-metres-hence balustraded street, only to cross it again and look behind him too see their glare of “OH YOU BELLIGERENT ANTI-RULE-OF-LAW WEIGUK, YOU JUST WAIT UNTIL THIS LIGHT CHANGES! WE’LL BE OVER THERE TO GIVE YOU A PIECE OF OUR MINDS!” and they may well have acted upon their instincts had the light not remained red for a further 15-20 seconds and by the time they crossed, he had disappeared into the crowd of locals that so frequently frequent the chongyecheon.
I may have embellished here upon a point or two, but I swear the story, in essence, is true. And may I sign off with a familiar “anyone who has lived here will know what I mean”.
Part 2 will come when I am sober.


0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home