Day 221: The Top Ten: Worst Of Korea - Part 1

You know me, I'm all about balance (or atleast attempting to have balance in my life) so to counter-balance last week's Best Of Korea, here's a list of what I consider to be the Top Ten Worst things about Korea. This will give you an idea of some of the struggles, challenges, and daily frustrations that one experiences as an expat here in Korea. Check it out:

10) TRANSIT'S HOURS:

Seoul does have an excellent transit system - very extensive and inexpensive and definitely user-friendly. However, for whatever reasons it all shuts down quite early. The subways stop running around 11:30pm, and the busses around midnight. What's up with that? For a city of 20 million people you'd think they'd run it a little later than that! 24 hours would be nice but hey I'd even take 1 or 2am like what sleepy Vancouver does. Considering that Seoulites love to go out and party on the weekends and that it's not uncommon to go home from the bar at like 4 or 5am you'd think they'd wanna have some transit running then to keep the drunks from getting in their cars. Hell, half the time you don't even go OUT until after midnight so you gotta take a cab right at the beginning of the night. And that's just lame!

9) KOREAN SUMMERS:

Korea's summers definitely leave something to be desired. April and May are a treat, and so is September (well, except this year's) as they are often dry and warm with clear sunny blue skies and low humidity. July and August, the heart of summer, is like Mother Nature's cruel, sick, masochistic joke on Korea. The monsoons arrive and when it rains, it *fucking rains!!* I've never seen torrential downpours like I have here - it's like the heavens left the bathtub running on full blast or something! Having weeks and weeks of rain wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the humidity. HOLY FUCK is it ever humid in Korea!!! It's not uncommon for the humidity to not dip below 95% for weeks or even months at a time and it's enough to make a man go mad. Seriously, I'd walk home from work everyday and if I was lucky and it wasn't raining and I didn't get washed away by the cloud-born tsunamis, I'd be soaked to the gills in my own SWEAT cause it's so bloody humid outside! I'd collapse into my apartment and all I'd wanna do is just sit and make out with my aircon for a few hours. Ugh.

8) CITYSCAPE DULLNESS:

Korea does have some really splendid architecture, but it's all historical structures. There may be some really beautiful temples and palaces here in Seoul, but the rest of the city leaves something to be desired. Korea's modern architecture is completely bland and uninspiring and all about cookie-cutter development. Downtown's skyline looks less exciting than Tulsa's (with the exception of Dr. Evil's HQ's - aka Jongno Tower) and all the buildings seem to be completely about low-budget function and nothing about form. Seoul is one block of high-rise apartment building after another. It literally is a sea of thousands upon thousands of apartment towers that look *exactly* like one another. They're all about 20 or so stories tall and completely square and boring and unoriginal. They're so identical that they have to paint giant numbers on the sides of the buildings so that people can recognize their own building. Looking at Seoul from above is like looking at a sea of dominoes. It's very foreign and different when you first arrive, but gets real old real fast. And as an urban planning geek it just makes me wanna rip them all down and rebuild with some creativity!

7) CRAPPY APARTMENTS:

The standard of living in Korea is definitely less than Canada's. We're absolutely spoiled with the amount of space and fresh air and privacy that we have with our homes back in North America, but that's no surprise at all. Land is scarce and expensive in Asia, and so everybody lives in a shoebox. My apartment back in Vancouver was quite small as well, but at least it was up on the tenth floor with a fabulous view and lots of natural light (and a pool on the roof!) Apartments in Korea are extremely small and plain and lack natural light or air flow. And when you look outside your window all you see is another apartment building. They build the apartments so close together you swear you could jump from one to another. Now don't get me wrong, my apartment is actually pretty cozy and I'm quite fond of it, but it sure is a jump down from the housing stock back home. And plus in Korea there's no ovens, dryers, carpeting, separate showers, and plus foreign teachers almost never have a bedroom - it's always just bachelor apartments. You sure learn to live with a lot less space here!

6) CROWDS & TRAFFIC:

Seoul is a very, very crowded city! Greater Seoul is about the same size as Los Angeles, only with 20 million people living in it instead of 12. Despite the basic laws of physics, they manage to squeeze all those Koreans in to this city. More than 40% of Korea lives in Seoul and it sure shows. The central city is perpetually crowded and you almost never get a reprieve. Streets, markets, malls, busses and subways, grocery stores, parks...*everything* is crowded. Sometimes you can barely move and honestly have to PUSH your way through a crowd just to get through. And you can't even fathom what rush hour is like on those subways. It's like sardines in a can! When the subway car rocks back and forth, everyone rocks back and forth together as if they're one single entity, it's *that* crowded! And in correspondence to this, traffic in Seoul is a friggin' nightmare!! Streets and freeways are perpetually crowded - regardless of whether it's rush hour or not. I don't mind the crowds of people so much but I HATE getting stuck on a bus on in a car as it C-R-A-W-L-S through gridlock. And as for the weekend traffic on the freeways in and out of the city...words cannot even describe the horror! And until they invent a way to instantly beam people to their desired destination just like on Star Trek, I don't see any hope for it getting any better.