Crash, into me

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Hello everyone! We hope the winter blues aren't getting you down too much!! It's almost March and that means that Spring is around the corner, or at least we can hope!

It's been relatively quiet here since our trip, just catching up with friends and getting our blue belts in taekwondo! Mike is at school currently, but my school is still off so I have been spending my days watching the Olympics and relaxing!

This weekend we went out to a new foreigner-run bar in Yangsan to say goodbye to a friend, James, who is leaving Korea. We met up with another James (Ashwell) to catch a cab to this bar, and the short drive to the bar turned out to be a 30 minute affair complete with police, ambulance and blood (not ours tho, luckily!)

So there we were sitting in the taxi, driving down the road, thinking that the taxi was driving really quickly, but we had a green light (as this was per usual), so we didn't think too much of it. Ashwell is in the front seat and he turns to us to say "Why do those guys gotta do that?", referring to the motorbike drivers who never wait at a red light and always try to scoot out and beat the other cars, when we suddenly felt brakes slamming and a crash coming on!

What happened was that two motorbikes, crossing the street perpendicular to us, decided to beat the red and go through the light. However, not judging how fast our taxi was going, the first bike made it through, but the second bike got his back end clipped by the taxi. The driver was thrown off the bike and his bike went for a spin, taking out the first bike in it's path!

Stunned, Mike and Ashwell were out of the taxi, running to help before the car had even come to a complete stop! They went to help the man laying on the ground while I worked on picking up the trash and bike parts strewn about the road. Once I had the road cleared so the traffic could continue to flow, I went to see how Mike and the driver were doing when I noticed that not one Korean person had gone to this man's aid! Mike and Ashwell were the only one who were helping him, trying to keep him from moving, and they didn't even speak his language! Finally we got someone to call an ambulance who arrived shortly to pick up the injured driver. Mike said it seemed like the guy had a broken arm and was in lots of pain but seemed ok otherwise.

Our taxi driver made motions for us to stick around for the police to show up and after about 15 minutes (and all the mess and injuries had been cleared away), the police show up to take statements and pictures. The word for "foreigner" in Korean is "waygook" and all around us we could here people going "blah blah waygook blah blah" hahah! The police took one look at us and walked away, not even wanting to deal with us! He eventually came and took down one name and phone number, but we are sure we will never hear from them!

Finally, after about 30 minutes we were ushered into another taxi (ours had the front bumper smashed and torn up) to finally get to our destination! We were lucky that we were not injured in this accident and were happy to help the victims as we could.

An interesting thing we noticed (and that doesn't seem to make much sense) is that the police officers drive around here with their blue and red flashing lights on constantly, yet when they pull over at an accident or to pull someone over, they turn the lights off! Kinds of seems backwards to us, but what do we know!!!

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