Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[music]
hwangboel from Ontario YAY ONTARIO MY HOME PROVINCE asked the question
What are some of the cultural things you still can't get used to no matter how hard you try.
OK ME FIRST! I know what I want to talk about.
Ok go ahead.
Ok. Korea. We need to have a talk.
Come closer.
A little bit closer.
Come on, a little bit closer ok that's too close back up a bit.
Ok. Korea, if you can't tell by now, we love you.
You're a wonderful country. We feel very very safe here.
In the middle of the night we can walk through Central Park
and the worst thing we'll see are two people playing badminton.
So we feel very, very safe here and we love it.
BUT...the one thing that we can't get used to is how dangerously you drive.
Oh yeah.
Actually, if you're a pedestrian, you have to avoid being smushed by like
taxis and busses blowing through red lights.
Or if you drive a car - in our case we drive a scooter
you have to avoid being smushed by people who don't check their blind spot
It's like, it's generally just a death trap.
Red lights here are more suggestions than they actually are laws.
I swear to you, just go to an intersection and watch for a couple of minutes
you will see a few scooters and a few buses, even a few taxis
blowing through red lights at their convenience.
We're not joking when we say this:
you gotta look both ways when you cross the street,
EVEN if it's a One Way Street.
Because people will be driving on any side of the road that they want.
It's really scary. Korea: please stop trying to kill me.
I'm not joking here: I do feel in danger when I go outside.
So I'll tell you something funny: we have our scooter now for two years,
and it's very easy to get a scooter license in Korea,
but to get your license back in Canada
you have to go through very many different levels and tests
and I feel like saying to the instructors, "there is no test that you can give me
that is equal to the dangers and the perils that I have faced
while I was driving my scooter. Your little closed circuits MEAN NOTHING!"
Alright. I feel like I'm in a level of Frogger meets Contra meets Duke Nukem.
And actually I think that inside of the buses are worse than outside of them,
I don't know about that,
Ok well I used to take the bus before I had the scooter,
and when you get on the bus you've got to beep
and, like, run, and latch onto a pole
because that bus driver is gonna gun it,
he's like an INDY 500 racer, and you will launch yourself across the side of the bus.
We've been on buses in which an old lady would get on the bus
and before she even sits down the bus is gonna gun it
and she, like, winds up falling over
and it's so inconsiderate and scary and we really dislike it.
Yeah, I've caught, like, three old women from almost smashing their faces on the ground
so...oooh! Scary! They're out to kill me!
Korea: great country, very nice people: not very good at driving.
I remember when I was a kid in Canada,
when you were learning how to line up for something, butting was a huge problem.
I mean, if someone tried to cut in front of you in line,
BUTTER! BUTTER! YOU'RE BUTTING! *** HIM! ***
This lineup process that we learned as children
didn't really seem to transfer over to Korea,
So you're waiting in line on a hot summer day for a bus [HOT HOT SUMMER]
for about 20 minutes or so, you're in a nice lineup,
everything's going well, and oh! There's the bus pulling up!
Oh and look! There's that random Korean girl that just showed up 30 seconds ago
and she's like "IS THAT THE BUS?" and she just cuts all of us off
and walks straight on because the bus pulled up in front of her.
This is what my face looks like:
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Now, this isn't only for buses. You see this for subways as well:
if you're not pressed up against the subway when it's coming
people are gonna butt in front of you.
So, we've learned a new technique to help us combat this.
It's called boxing out.
Have you ever played basketball? Need to go for a rebound?
What you need to do is you need to squat down low,
put your legs wide, put your arms out wide
and make a little fence to let people know not to go around you or in front of you
Now since Martina and I are together it makes it a lot easier
because we can both form a fence together
and nobody is gonna butt in front of us!
But we feel kind of ridiculous that we've had to resort to boxing out,
but you do what you gotta do to survive son!
It's a dangerous world out there.
So that's it for this week's TL;DR.
If there's a question you want us to answer for next week's segment,
head over to our Google Moderator page
and leave a question in the question box.
Or, if you don't want to leave a question
you can vote up or vote down the questions that you like
and hopefully we'll answer it next week.
Huzzah!
Box out!
GONG!
[Sexy intoxication music]