The next blog I’ll make it a full fledged picture blog. Regretfully I don’t have pictures of strange Koreans because a) I don’t think I could ask to take pictures of them, and b) there aren’t really any strange Koreans. They all try to dress really nice. There isn’t even any grafitti anywhere. I did see a dog with it’s ears dyed blue though. And I saw the saddest looking homeless person. He was laying down on a rolling cart that was about 6 inches high, and he shuffled around with his arms on the ground. There are also plenty of military people around. I guess there’s a military base nearby. I’m in a city called Ilsan which happens to be right on the border between North and South Korea. I’m not too worried, I figure they wouldn’t want to bomb anywhere so close to them, it’d affect them too. Here’s something about ilsan, I haven’t actually read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilsan

If it didn’t say it in that little write up, you should know that Seoul’s subway system is extended to Ilsan, however I was told that it’d take about an hour to get to downtown Seoul. So that’s that.

I walked around, and I wrote a list of things to comment on.

Mean girls…

I was told that because of the loose copyright laws they sometimes use some western images without care. For example, there was a blown up image from the cover of the movie ‘Mean Girls’ used out front of a strip club.

Smoking…

There are also no laws prohibiting smoking that I know of. So far I’ve only seen one restaurant with no smoking signs, and they had to draw them themselves. This is something that really really sucks. Although, interestingly girls generally don’t smoke in public. Someone told me that he once saw a girl have a cigarette ripped from her mouth by a strange because she was smoking in public.

Water…

Apparently I’m not supposed to drink the water.

Walking across the street…

I still haven’t figured out when I’m supposed to cross the street in some places. I guess I’ll just follow everyone else. But so far my impression is that Korean drivers are a little crazy, and traffic is ridiculous.

Singing…

Koreans love singing. I’ve seen at a couple different Koreans just singing outloud as they walked. And they don’t care if they’re out of tune.