Automotive Stories Abundant

It's been a while since the last blog, but we are as busy as all hell at the mo'. With trying to get the winter/summer camp up and running and moving house and all it has been quite a month. Nothing much to report. I guess the fact that we bought a car is one thing. We have been looking for a while and we decide with the bollocks of moving that it wasn't financially the right time, but as one of the old sayings must surely go 'When it's not the right time to buy a car because moving house has cost you too much, that's when work will insist that you need one'. If that isn't an old saying I’m sure there must be one similar to it. I have exaggerated a little though, work didn't insist we get one but it did put across that it would be worth my while to drive myself. I immediately took this to mean that the taxi they pay to drive me from Gimhae to Changwon and back every day was going to stop and I was going to have to fork out the $0.75X per day from the $X they pay me to pay for it myself. This thought occurred to me for perfectly logical reasons. Those being that the taxi that takes me used to take 3 teachers and drive all over the shop on a 120km round trip journey to get them (us) to this remarkably (by Corean standards) out-of-the-way-place where we teach. I was the last teacher to be picked up on the journey, but even I required a 60 km round trip. The silly thing was that the taxi driver was contracted and therefore even when the other 2 teachers fell by the way side the driver was still doing a 120km round trip just to take me there. (The wankers in Seoul were amazed when I told them that it is so far. Amazed because it “looks so close on the map”. It is only about 15kms each way (from our new house) as the crow flies, with 2 FUCKING HUGE MOUNTAINS in the middle that the crows fly straight over.)

Parky and I talked it over and decide that even with a 60km round trip it is still well worth my while to drive, teach and get paid there because X is a pretty reasonable figure. As we have been looking at either (9 seat) diesel Kia Carnivals or (7 seat) LPG Hyundai santamos as our cars of choice (we want something to carry students in, in anticipation of Parky’s business going mad dog style next February, after camp) we figure it would cost 0.05X in juice to make the 60km round trip, two toll gates of 0.005X each. By any standards, it’s still worth doing. What we had never considered was having the purchase of a car thrust upon us. YOU MUST BUY A CAR TO KEEP THE JOB AND YOU MUST BUY IT NOW! I asked for leeway of 2 weeks and got it straight up (although he did ask why I don’t just use my motorcycle until I get a car. 5 degrees at night and 1 hours travel seemed to convince him that taking a motorcycle is different from taking the subway, (fucking Seoulites)). We started looking for cars in a hurry, jobs (cash) like this don’t (doesn’t) come along super often and I was reminded of an anecdote from a while back. Another sage piece of dad’s work, of which there are so many.

We were hunting for a Subaru forester in 1997. I love Subaru, but I was trying to talk dad into looking at other deals like the then new Honda CRV, which I thought was a classy looking car. We did this and then I asked him if he wanted to look at the new Suzuki or Kia offering in the same class. He refused to even look at them, his rationale ‘I know what I want, why confuse myself with all the other shit I know I don’t want. I’ll may end up buying a Toyota Camry because it is an excellent deal and them be disappointed with it (good deal or not) because it’s not what I wanted’.

I thought he was being a bit of a pussy at the time, why not have a look? It can’t hurt. But now having been in the business of buying a car (having already explained what we had wanted in the best of worlds) we got all frazzled I am starting to understand what he was on about. Panicked about the time pressure put on us, we found ourselves looking at prices and then seeing what kind of car it was being offered at the price we were willing to pay.

Upshot was that we rang about a Daewoo Nubira (Frosty L’Hood’s “No Root, No Toot” 24 hour guarantee got to me) and something similar in size to a Holden Barina. We were in the process of going to look at a Retona (2 seater jeep-wrangler style thing) when I looked at Parky and she looked at me and for all intents and purposes we simultaneously asked, “What the fuck are we doing?”

The story ends well. We pulled our heads in and fingers out and sucked up the week of taxi fares that were almost equal to the wage I made to pay them and stumbled across a cracking deal on a 1997, LPG, manual, 7 seats, air con, central locking, blah blah blah …. …. ….. (crescendo) HYUNDAI SANTAMO. Now we are happy as clams and thanking dad’s sage words of 9 years (and seems like many centuries) ago.

The whole car buying mission aside, when I finally responded to my employer (in Seoul) that I would keep the job and drive myself there and back I asked for at least something to cover the fuel and tollgates and so on, we to-ed and fro-ed a little, but finally he got conformation from head office that they are willing to pay me 1.5X now that I am driving myself (now that they realise how far it REALLY is). I hope they are not reading this when I write; I planned to and would have done it for X.




This is a 1997 hyundai santamo but it is not ours. Ours is green, has no snow under it and is as of yet unphotographed.

For the mathematically inclined, my fuel and tollgates combined come to AUD$9 per day and the car will pay for itself in 4 months. I leave you with that and an oddly perverse kind of feeling that everything is right with the world.