scooters

There's a ton of restaurants here. There's so many restaurants here that one wonders how they all manage to stay up and running. Everyone I know, including myself, lives on top of a restaurant. I guess Koreans dine in/order out a lot.

Since there's a bunch of restaurants, there's an exponential amount of delivery drivers. Deliveries aren't done in cars though, they are done in these:

Walking the streets for any amount of time here I'm bound to see a handful of guys tearing through town on these scooters. From what I can tell, the requirements for this job are, 1. Can you operate a scooter?, and 2. Are you willing to sacrifice your well-being and the well-being of all those around you in order to deliver food?

These guys must not be paid by the hour, because everyone of them is in a constant, frantic rush. They come out the door of the restaurant with a box of food, slam it into that compartment on the back, and take off like a shot.

Now, in Korea driving is like a chaotic ballet of some sort. It's a hell of a lot different than the States. For one thing, there's some intersections that have no stop lights or stop signs at them. Four way intersections, on busy streets, with nothing to mediate or designate right of way. How do they do it? Well it's simply a matter dropping the speed a few mph and giving a few toots of your horn as if to say, "Watch out I'm coming through!" There's no order to it.

There's even less order when it comes to the guys on the scooters. These guys drive like they're playing GTA4. There's a little congestion up ahead? Hell, just drive on the sidewalk. The other day I stepped out of a convenient store with a pack of smokes and almost got taken out by a scooter tearing down the sidewalk at about 20mph, and it wasn't the first time. Even if these guys come up to a red light, it doesn't stop them. They creep out into the intersection and gun it through a gap in the traffic.

So since I've gotten here I've just been waiting for one of these guys to slip up. Everyday I would look for it, expecting and anticipating it, sighing when one of them would come this close to losing it. But Saturday around noon I got to see the payoff.

I had planned on only stepping out to grab some food to help nurse a hangover, but on the way back I bumped into a few people I know and found myself standing on a corner for ten minutes talking. Being around lunchtime there was plenty of delivery guys racing around, and the intersection I was at had no light or stop sign. Just as I was saying my goodbyes a delivery driving came tearing down the road. His plan was to take a left at my intersection, but as he went into his turn another scooter coming from that way was also entering the intersection. So the one turning left had to try and straighten out so as not to sideswipe the other, but he couldn't. He and the scooter hit the ground and slid on their left side, sparks flying, and slammed into a parked car, into a white Lexus. It made a hell of a sound.

The guy was fine, though he probably felt like an asshole standing there with everyone staring at him. The owner of the car, who works at a glasses store across the street, came running out to check the damage. The rear bumper was torn up and hanging off, so he wasn't too pleased. The driver stood around for a minute or so, gave the guy his information, and hopped back on the scooter and took off again.

I felt bad for the guy, but that's the risk they take I guess.