The Grand Narrative

After 2 posts about Lee Hyori, I thought I’d try and surprise you. What could possibly be as far removed from Lee Hyori and her breasts (hits people, hits) as possible, but still interesting, no matter how tenuosly? I think I deserve congratulations, for that would be none other than Daylight Saving. Or rather, Korea’s lack of it.

Seriously though, if you’re male, and the last posts haven’t convinced you to come to Korea, then you’re either gay, a eunuch, or dead, and although this issue probably isn’t high on your list of considerations for securing your ESL job, once you’re here, and your after-school institute’s hours and the expat lifestyle has inexorably turned you into a night person, then you’ll soon learn to miss DS. Because without it, you’re going to have to drink a hell of a lot every night to avoid being sleep-deprived in the summer. Sure, no problem you say. But not for nothing is this nicotine drink not only legal in Korea, but has adverts targeted at school children and is available for only 60 US cents a bottle in every pharmacy in the country.

(Not being a smoker, nicotine is one of the few legal drugs that still has a discernable effect on me, so I always have a few emergency bottles of this at work and in my apartment!)

Having DS back in Auckland, New Zealand was just great, especially if you’re a University student living downtown in an apartment building (there’s not many in NZ, at least when I left in 2000), and I have many wonderful memories of summer nights that seemed to go on forever, with sunsets from my apartment window like the picture below, and I was young and time seeming to have so much meaning it was almost palpable, like something you could grab and twist and work magic with…sigh…

 (This stunning volcanic island is Rangitito, which can be seen from most of Auckland)

But back to reality. At present, not having DS means that the sunrise is at 5:10 in Busan, and almost the same in Seoul (virtually the same longitude come to think of it). I know this because a) I’m a geek, and have paid attention to sunrise times ever since I was a kid, for it always saddens me slightly once we reach the longest day and then the days start getting shorter again, regardless of the actual weather conditions; we just reached this day last week (5:08, if you’re curious) and b) because I’m bloody woken up by the sunshine every morning. And I’ve finally finished watching all of Lost and was being diligent by going to bed early, but not early enough to wake up at bloody 5am…

Fortunately I live on the 14th floor, and only next to a major intersection with 6-lane roads; the noise is high, but a constant you can get used to. BusanMike, however, lives on the first or second floor I think, and in a less busy neighbourhood. This means that at 5:30am there are bongo trucks rolling into his neighbourhood (”bongo” actually means “truck”, but if we’re being picky, the correct English is actually “those fucking bongo trucks”), extolling the virtues of their products in the back with loudspeakers. Usually fruit or fish, but sometimes salt. Yes, salt. As BusanMike explains, who the bloody hell would buy salt at 5:30am? Not him, who wants to shoot them instead, and they alone may well drive him (and you) out of Korea…not for nothing do those trucks figure prominently in all Korean expat blogs.

Personally, when I’m sleep-deprived in class, I tend to make decisions along the lines of how benefical it would be for my 19-year old students to learn what something being “fucked-up” means or something like that (actually, that’s relatively mild for me when I’ve forgotten to bring my coffee). In that case, I first give the example of “When it comes to looking after old people, Western countries are fucked up”, because once your Korean is good enough you learn that what most students are talking about in Korean in ESL classes is a) their hair and b) how their bloody teacher is always complaining about Korea, and so this self-depreciation gets a lot of brownie points. Then I go on to say that “When it comes to sleep, Koreans are seriously fucked up…Jesus Christ, like you just wouldn’t fucking believe…“  Why this is the case will be the subject of another post soon (link here when its up), but indicative of Koreans’ attitudes towards it is that there’s so many people who think its perfectly acceptable to wake entire neighbourhoods up as soon as its light, being 5:30 am-ish because theres no DS. Jeez, even with DS and at 6:30 it would be bad enough.

 Not only are noise laws in cities a tad lacking…to be polite…but in the past couple of years they’re changed the law to make it legal for campaigning politicians to drive around blasting their loudspeakers in the morning too, the logic being that the previous restriction of 9am meant that they were playing to empty apartment buildings. And yes, that means that they must think more people are going to vote for them if they play scratchy recordings of patriotic songs to them at 7am(!??), in practice driving slow enough to give you enough time to be woken up by them, but too fast to see who the bloody hell it was.

It could be worse. If you look closely at this map on the subject from Wikipedia, you’ll notice that Japan doesn’t have it either. Japan is east of Korea but in the same time zone, which means that sunrises are much earlier; for my friend in Osaka at the same latitude as Busan, sunrise is currently at 4:45, and north and east in Tokyo its 4:26. I often wish I had gone to Japan instead of Korea, mostly because its difficult to find what you’re looking for on Japanese pornsites if you can’t read the language (but it has meant I’ve accidentally learned some amazing things about what can go into and come out of the human body)  but, to coin a phrase, Japanese people appear to be even more fucked up on the whole sleep thing than Koreans, and I didn’t think that was possible.

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