Doing the
60% of the population
of
I love the subway, and the
For me the subway is a
place where I can meet people too. You can’t talk to people on the streets very
naturally; they will think you are crazy. In that way
But in the subway it’s
a different story. You stand and sit next to people. You have time to watch
them and sometimes say hello to them. If you get a seat, you might look at them
and smile or nod. If you are reading a book, they might glance over at you and
take a peak at what it is a foreigner reads. If you are studying a Korean
textbook, they might ask you in Korean if you are learning well. No matter how
badly you mangle your answer, they are sure to say, “You speak Korean very
well.”
However
there is a down side to the subway. That is the bumping that goes on. If you
are unlucky enough to be walking down the stairs just after the train has
arrived, you will be swarmed. Then you have to literally fight your way to
safety. Something about Koreans, they don’t seem to mind bumping and getting
bumped. There are a number of kinds of bumps. There is the near miss bump,
where even though there is a lot of room on either side, someone coming the
other way will walk so close to you that they brush your clothing. There is the
come from behind, knock you in the back bump, a vicious one indeed as there is
no defense for that. If you do it in an American football game that is a 15
yard penalty and first down, but in the
The worst bumpers are
the old ladies, the ajummas. They seem to go out of
their way to bump sometimes. Many of them are built like the proverbial brick
shithouses. This comes from a lifetime of working hard. Something about Korean
women, when the turn 40 they sprout massive shoulders and their arms grow to
the size of linebackers’ arms. They will charge through a crowd leaving a trail
of sore arms and shoulders 3 feet wide. If you are unlucky enough to be
standing in a crowded subway, there is no escape and you are at their mercy.
For some reason, many people are in the habit of walking through the crowded
subway car to get to a car that will be closer to their exit. In order to do
that, they walk through everyone in their way.
My
first few weeks in Seoul I was getting bumped around pretty good and it didn’t
take very long before I started getting angry and bumping back pretty good.
Then one day I had a revelation. I was lucky enough to have a seat and I
decided to watch how the Korean people handled the bumps. I was surprised to
see that even though it was crowded and that some ajummas
were walking through the crowd, no bumping was going on. I watched closer and
noticed that the people who were standing, were not
really standing in one place, but they were slightly moving around, rocking
back and forth, leaning this way and that, and they were avoiding getting
bumped. One man was reading a book and holding onto a strap with the other hand.
Somehow without looking up, he knew when someone was coming and he shifted his
weight and the potential bumper passed harmlessly by. He did it even when
someone approached from his backside. How he did that is beyond me. Are
After
that day everything changed. I realized that I was getting bumped because of my
attitude. My attitude was, “This space I am in is my space. I was here first,
don’t come into my space. If you do, you will bump me and I may bump you back.”
The