taxis & faces

Well, first I want to say a word about Korean Taxis. Scary! I was coming home from hanging out with the Nakayama sisters (which was really fun, by the way, they are cool women!) and I get in a Taxi with an old man. He asks me (in Korean) where I wanted to go, and I say (also in Korean of course) "Guri please." (Guri is the city I live in) and he says "Huh? Wheres that?" So I tekk him Walker Hill Hotel, which is close to me. He takes off, having a hard time accelerating smoothly. Like speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, a classic sign of an old person driver I guess. We get to Walker Hill Hotel and I say "Oh, not this. Go that way." in my bad Korean. He starts getting mad, saying I said the hotel and he doesn't want to go so far away or something. (Not sure why he was worried, he was making money from me! Further we go, the more money he makes!) And now he starts driving aggressively because he's angry. He pulls into a one-lane road, with an arrow pointing the opposite way. I think "Uh oh" and ahead we can see cars driving towards us! (It wasn't like the movies with thousands of cars on a highway though, just two cars stopped and honking at us in front of us.) He swears and drives over the median and into the correct lane of traffic. He's really mad now. Nonstop swearing, angry aggressive driving. We turn onto a bigger three lane road. Finally I think it's too dangerous to be in his car, so I decide to walk the rest of the way home, and I tell him (in Korean) "Here [stop]." He pulls sharply from the middle lane towards the side of the road. I instinctively look behind us, and see the headlights of a car and think "Oh sh--" but can't finish my thought as he SLAMS into the car and my head snaps to the left. Screeching sound of metal against metal and both cars stop. And in an instant both drivers (the other car was a taxi too) jump out and start yelling at each other. I get out, hand the money to the driver. I let the crazy old man keep the change. For a long way, I can hear their voices echo in the cold night air.

I was watching a show on CNN about the new face transplant surgery. And one of the reporters asked if they really needed to do the operation on the woman who had lost her lower face when a dog attacked her. And the answer was "Imagine a life where if you tried to talk to anyone they wouldn't be able to understand you. Imagine a life where whenever you went out, people would turn their heads and stare at you." And although I don't want to reduce her suffering, I was surprised how much that seems like my life in Korea. Most of the time people don't understand my English or Korean, and Koreans staring at me when I walk anywhere is quite common.