Yesterday, I decided to go to Haeundae beach with a friend of mine as both of us had the day off from our schools. We met up in the early evening and flagged a cab to take us from our neighborhood in PNU to the beach.
From entrance, we both noted that this was not a typical cab. The seats were upholstered with this garish faux-leather-type material and the car’s ceiling was decorated with more fake leathery stuff that resembled the outside design of a cheap purse.
Now, with cabs in Korea, the amount that a cab driver will try to talk to you varies from a brief hello and then silence to a full conversation about the driver’s family and his hobbies, all in Korean mind you. This drive began the conversation pretty routinely, as the driver asked about pretty usual conversations about our jobs (we are teachers) and where we live (Jangjeondong area).
The conversation took a strange turn though when our driver began telling us a story of his upstairs neighbors, an American couple, who are always having sex all night and waking up our driver in the process. While the story was told entirely in Korea, he did repeat somethings he heard coming from upstairs such as “Oh Baby!” and “Fucking baby!”, so I hadn’t any questions about what was going on upstairs in this guy’s apartment. He even gave us the fist-to-palm hand gesture, commonly used around these parts to talk about two people doing the deed.
Anyway, we gave the driver a nice chuckle, thinking the story was funny enough from the driver and assumed that this would be the extent of our communication with him. No. Driver proceeds to ask my friend and I about our own sex lives, which we sort of laugh off and give a “no comment” to, with a wink of course.
Feeling amused but somewhat uncomfortable, my friend and I again go back to conversation when the driver looks back at us, raises his finger to his lips and nicely asks us to be quiet as he reaches for one of his CDs. Well, my friend says to me, “He wants to play a cd for us,” but as the screen of his navigation display switched from a map to an FBI warning typical of a DVD, I had an idea as to what the driver wanted to show us.
TITLE SCREEN: Red Light District 22, Barely Legal Babes!
The driver begins fast forwarding through the adult video to find his favorite parts and also declares that he has been able to learn lots of English from these kinds of video. My friend and I don’t really know what to do now. The situation in the cab is as funny as it is uncomfortable We decide to just let the driver play out the porno for the last 15 minutes of our cab ride as we laugh at the whole scenario and make jokes about the ways in which pornographic acting is really funny, most though because there is a discomfort in watching porno with your guy friends.
The driver adds further comedy to this whole scene by turning off the screen–BUT not the audio–as we pass a bus as he was worried that the bus passengers would see the raunchy things he was watching.
Five minutes before we arrive at our destination, the Paradise Hotel Haeundae, the driver abruptly ejects the disc and replaces it with another one, this time a video of a recent Eagles concert.
People are strange.
Tony in Korea 