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The scorching heat of the Korean Summer is here. Motorbikes and trucks fumigate the city with mosquito smoke, children run behind the trucks breathing in what I can only assume to be deadly poisons, ajumas shelter under their parasols and people are very happy to own air-conditioners for their homes and cars. It's funny how you can sit in a refrigerated restaurant or taxi and completely forget how hot it is outside.
This kind of heat is new for me, but it's perfectly normal for Koreans. How do they cope? Well, the Spanish have a siesta and then party on into the cool night. Koreans, industrious as they are, don't take naps in the middle of the day. But they do party into the night with no regard to how much sleep a person needs. And they don't just party. It seems that with their long working days, night-time is family time. If you head to E-mart at 11 in the evening, you'll find it packed with shoppers, each with a sleeping child in their shopping cart.
I decided to check out these nocturnal habit of Koreans, so one blisteringly hot Sunday I left the shelter of my warm, fan-cooled apartment as the sun was setting and wandered down to the Gapcheon river for a little walk. The wonderfully cool taxi dropped me at Expo-Park and I crossed the recently re-opened 'Big M' bridge just as the nightly firework display started.
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| Families stand at the edge of the river watching the nightly Expo Park firework display. |
The grass beside the river was littered with families eating the best food in Korea; grilled meat wrapped in leaves. Kids were running around and screaming while adults were drinking soju from paper cups. Dotted throughout were entrepreneurs selling flashlights, ice-cream, dried squid, toys, balloons and fireworks. Every now and then a small firework display would start up and lights would flash up into the air or out across the river.
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| Dinner over, parents relax while their children are off playing. |
I had spotted some kind of concert going on down the river, and in the distance I had seen dancing and heard singing. I wandered down to see what I could see.
The concert had finished, but a large screen had been fixed up and one of the ubiquitous Korean dramas was playing. There are two types of Korean Drama as far as I've been able to gather. Most commonly we have dramas about young men and young ladies watching each other from afar, talking to their friends about each other, chasing each other, talking to each other, ignoring each other, phoning each other and sitting next to each other while shyly not looking at each other. Oh, and there's usually two girls after one guy. These drama usually climax in a scene where the woman walks away crying and the man looks a little confused, waits a few minutes, jumps in his car and finds her at a bus stop.
The drama playing by the river was not this kind of drama. Due to the high number of children sitting out by the river at 11:00pm, we had a kids' drama. This kind of drama involves kids and/or gangs of kids (boys and girls, none more than 12 years old) beating the crap out of each other for no readily apparent reason.
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| A crowd of Koreans watch a drama unfold. |
The movie screen was set up near a bridge, under which there was a small handful of food stalls, and a well lit area where people were playing paduk, the Korean equivalent of chess. It's the game with lots of small black and white round pieces that seem to be spread randomly over a board with far too many squares on it. On the other side of the bridge the river stretched out into the distance where the lights of Yusong revealed families out on the grass as far as the eye could see.
After a couple of hours wandering about, I was hot, sweaty and tired. It was time to head home. It seems that even when the sun has gone the Korean Summer is still too hot for me.