My foreign coworker and I have our dinner break today at the same time. We make it a point to go out to eat and chat about our day or week. It’s better than sitting around in the office since the Korean teachers don’t really talk to us much, and there are lots of cheap, quick restaurants around. We walked out today wearing our coats because it was a cool autumn evening.
As we were crossing the street to go to one one of our usually eateries, we saw a bizarre sight. A middle aged Korean man walking in the middle of the road, shouting at people wearing boxer shorts that were wet on the backside. He didn’t appear to be crazy, only seriously angry about something. Whatever he did to get into this state, he was shouting at people nearby.
He walked over to a van that had pulled over to pick him up, dropped of the clothes he was carrying, then went to pick a fight. There were five guys in nice suits that kept holding him back. The nearly naked man was pissed off at something they had said or did, and one of the suited men was taking off his coat and was stripping down in a challenge to fight as well. Before anything happened, someone took the man wearing the boxers back to his van and sped off. The suited gentlemen sat around looking thuggish and tough after their victory.
I thought I had witnessed all the craziness I was going to see for the night, but then when I was walking Yoshi with my wife, we stumbled upon another fight near our apartment complex. There are vendors that set up to see things just outside apartment complexes. The park near our apartment is a popular place because it is near an intersection and two apartment complexes, so it has people selling things on the sidewalk every day of the week.
The vendors vary by day and time. Weekdays it will be fruit vendors. Weeknights, clothes vendors or cheap bulk crap from China. I don’t know how they work out their rotation, but they don’t sell clothes and cheap crap on the same day, and they don’t sell fruit when they sell other stuff. Something happened tonight where two vendors showed up at the same time, and both of them had set up their things. The cheap crap guy was threatening the knock off clothes vendor, and vice versa. They were cursing at each other while someone tried officiating between them and trying to pull each of them away.
Since there aren’t guns in Korea, lots of fights look like middle school brawls where someone is just waiting for the first punch to be thrown so they can claim self-defense and start swinging. With Tae-kwon-do being taught in the armed forces, and military conscription mandatory, fights can get nasty very quickly from what I am told. I don’t want to stick around to see.
