Today was almost the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of my tolerance for big city livin’.
It’s Election Day and most people have the day off to go choose the country’s next president. Of course, we can’t vote. So David and I spent the day at home with a fussy Susana (she got her four-month vaccines yesterday afternoon and was running a slight fever most of the morning.) But that wasn’t the problem.
That would be the neighbor who spent the better part of an hour in a parking lot just below our window leaning on his car horn. Why? Some considerate genius had parked his or her big black sedan in the one entrance/exit to his lot—and left the scene.
Now this, in and of itself, is really not even a cause for raised eyebrows here. Seoul has 10.4 million residents in the city proper, 23 million in the metropolitan area. As you might imagine, drivers get creative when it comes to parking. They use the sidewalks. Frequently, they also use the right lane of whatever street they happen to be on. And, in parking lots, latecomers routinely park perpendicular to a line of cars and block several in. It’s actually not much of a problem as long as the driver adheres to some simple, albeit unofficial, rules of the road … er, space.
This has already made the rounds of most of the Korea blogs, but I still thought it deserved a mention here.
The presidential election is this Wednesday and supporters of United New Democratic Party candidate Chung Dong-young are hoping to revive interest in an investigation into some allegedly shady financial dealings of the frontrunner, Grand National Party candidate (and former Seoul mayor) Lee Myung-bak.
To prevent this, GNP legislators “occupied” the main chamber of the National Assembly and tried to lock out UNDP lawmakers attempting to pass a bill calling for a new investigation.
Last Friday, an 11,800-ton crane-carrying barge owned by Samsung Heavy Industries broke free from the tugs towing it and collided with the Hong Kong-registered oil tanker the Heibei Sprit. By Sunday, the resulting oil spill had covered six beaches in Taean and inundated many of the area’s fish farms. Cleanup has been very slow, with some news reports indicating the South Korean government was woefully under-prepared for such a disaster.
The spill has damaged some 170 farms in a 2,108 hectare area or 37 percent out of the total of 445 oyster, clam and abalone farms on 5,647 hectares in the county. The provincial government predicted that in a day or two, all fishing grounds in the area will be affected. With damage escalating to enormous proportions, the provincial government on Sunday asked the central government to declare Taean a disaster area.
