Getting a Korean Driver’s License (or: May God Have Mercy On Us All)

After just having returned from the beautiful Jeju Island just south of mainland Korea with Eunjin (pictures in a forthcoming post), I felt compelled to share with everyone a source of great sadness and frustration to most visitors of Korea: driving.

Now, I’m sure you’ll say, drivers are bad everywhere.  You are from Atlanta for chrissakes Ogles!  But in Atlanta I feel like I contribute to the problem so it’s difficult for me to really criticize other drivers that like to go faster than the people in the other lanes.  Trust me when I say that Korean traffic is an entirely different beast.

Perhaps one signal that the road etiquette of the people here is substandard (forgive me for a moment as this section is geared towards generating Google hits) was the ridiculously easy process of getting a license transfered from America.  As long as you have your American license (even from New Jersey!), you have to pass a physical and a written test.  Sounds daunting?

The ‘physical’ consisted of an eye test and what I like to call the “demonstrated ability to use bathroom without assistance aptitude exam.”  Or basically, they have you squat and stand back up.

The written test was thankfully in English, and required careful deliberation over questions like:

“Which of the following is NOT a proper way of loading a vehicle:
A: Secure items in trucks with rope if necessary
B: Make sure items in backseat do not obscure view
C: Carry babies and small animals in the driver’s lap

Hmm..

“Which of the following is NOT a proper way to change lanes”
A: Avoid changing lanes unnecessarily
B: Check your mirrors to avoid oncoming traffic
C: Accelerate and brake rapidly to punish other drivers for getting in front of you

Ok so my dad would pick choice A on that one, but I think you get the idea.  Fill out a few forms, sign your name, pay about $25 bucks, and bam Korean Driver’s License.  It’s good to be an American sometimes.

However after that challenging ordeal, you’d think I would have thought to take the opportunity to take a picture in one of the pay booths provided by the DMV to immortalize a striking, Korean license into posterity.

But instead, my cheap ass decided to use the pictures from my Chinese visa back in February.  The results, kind of a cross between Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men and a reprisal of my high school role as Prison Lesbian #3, perhaps give me cause for no small measure of regret.

Anyways, I have a license from another country now, so that’s the important thing.  Of course this is a curse in disguise, as I was not exactly prepared for the, let’s say, liberal measures taken by Jeju city planners to control traffic.

And by that I mean that stop lights, signs, and basically stopping in general are pretty much non-existent.  I don’t think I’m alone in channeling Dennis Farina when I come across not a 4 way, not a 5 way, not even a 6 way, but a SEVEN WAY intersection with NO traffic signals.  Not to mention that none of these drivers predictably yield with any certainty.

What measures do exist are blatantly disregarded.  In Bundang, its common to see taxis and BMWs running red lights through crosswalks, with people actually crossing them.  (Driver’s calculations: If I speed up, the pedestrian probably won’t intercept me by the time I make it, as long as I can get up to 120 km/h on these city streets.  Plus, its dark so no one will be able to catch my license plate since I don’t drive with my lights on at night.  FUCK.)

In Jeju, on a half-dozen occasions drivers behind me honked wildly because I wouldn’t run through a red light on a one-lane road so that they could turn right.  Not to mention the reckless abandon that buses and the dreaded autobikes (kind of like tiny delivery motorcycles that drive on the road but also take the sidewalks when they are running late or feel like terrorizing children and old people) ignore all common sense about their own physics (buses with turning radius, autobikes with mass).

(Notice how I refer to these drivers as the machines themselves.  That’s because the notion of believing that human beings are actually operating them is both incoherent and inconsistent with observed phenomena.)

(You know it’s koreanunderground when the parenthetical statements make up 50% of the content.  And when arbitrary numbers masquerade as statistics.)

(Ok, seriously, I’ll stop now.)

Anyways, that’s not to say I’m the greatest driver.  As anyone who’s driven with me (or gone out to clubs with me, talked to ladies with me, spoken in public with me) can attest to, I’m not exactly the spitting image of smooth.  I’m the John Favreau of driving.  Ok, I’ll give myself a little credit, maybe the Jeremy Pivens.

Regardless, the whole stopping-gradually-before-the-red-light-and-accelerating-at-a-reasonable-pace-so-as-not-to-induce-motion-sickness-among-half-of-my-passengers-and-manifest-fear-soaked-paranoia-in-the-other idea hasn’t quite come around since I began driving at 17, afraid of oncoming traffic, overly-anxious of the parking lot and never quite remembering the way home…

It’s good to know that some things never change.

~ by David Ogles on May 15, 2008.