Brrrr...

Clear but icy cold..

A nice change from Sunday and Monday's snow. Sunday night the snow hit and all the roads turned to silly mush. Koreans don't seem to have tires that deal well with snow, so the main road outside my neighborhood (which is on a rather steep hill) as a skating rink of cars fruitlessly spinning their tires and drifting here and there on the road and in parking lots. After seeing Yvonne off to the tube-station I sat outside for about 20 minutes and watched the show.

Monday morning, there were few taxis available and non on my street which was still snowy and (yes) still steep. Korean don't know how to drive in the snow, and there doesn't seem to be a civic response to snow at all. I did see some trucks driving around dropping off bags of artificial salt, but that seems to be the extent of the official response. Kind of lame, considering snow isn't exactly a surprise. Homeowners and shop owners do clean 'their' sections of the sidewalk, and sometimes the road, but that is an iffy response. Taxi drivers are not about to get up in the early cold and wreck their livelihoods, so in general on days like this they take an extra couple of hours of sleep. I had to walk all the way to Noksapyeong station to grab a cab.

The other thing that happens is that the large amount of polished granite, marble, and other stones used on floors, stairs, sidewalks, and entry halls, becomes incredibly slick with freezing. This is the season all the TV channels are running alarmist adds with halmoni and halbogee falling over and breaking their hips, but those ads are based in observance. Everyone except the very young tiptoes carefully about - everyone except the violently smashed Ajusshi I saw last night. Remarkably, his lurches, stutters and stumbles seemed to be equally met by the treachery of the ground, and although he could barely stand up when in one place, his semi-epileptic mode of walking seemed adequate to the weather.

Oh well - another storm may be coming in tomorrow, so we are all girding our loins and other historical phrases..