Just one thing. What is a “Semi blind” corner? You can either see around it, or not…

Every Saturday for the past little while I have been going to Jeonju to play basketball. This last Saturday as I was getting off at the Jeonju IC and racing up towards the World Cup stadium I drove under and overpass going about 90km/h. What that equat…

Asia by Blog is a twice weekly feature, posted on Monday and Thursday, providing links to Asian blogs and their views on the news in this fascinating region.

This edition contains the consequences of unpaid wages in China, an American nuclear scientis…

Well…Maybe it’s just my luck. I have seen a UFO and been in close proximity to a Sasquatch… So I guess seeing a Korean traffic cop should be expected.

(I’m serious about the UFO and the sasquatch by the way….but those are stories for a different day… Into my goofball mix, you might wan’t to throw in the two evil spirits and two ghosts that I have seen)

Not only have you (allegedly) seen Korean traffic police, you’ve also (allegedly) verbally interacted with them. I wish you’d have taken some pics, because I’ve put Korean traffic cops in the same category as UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch.
Lots of people claim to have seen them but…

There’s the baggage from the days when cops were little more than ball-breakers for the Japanese and whose only other skills were collecting fees, picking informants, and torture. I also remember a time when a teacher left after a nasty few months of quarrelling with everyone in the office, Koreans and expat, and going to the labor board. He decided to steal equipment to compensate himself for the money he claimed he deserved. Now, honestly, we never saw him take the stuff, but he never turned in his keys, and the only place missing equipment was from where he had keys. Anyway, we told the professor, who we had a good relationship with and who had worked in the States, call the cops. He refused, because he didn’t want the university to get a bad name for hassling foreigners. We told him we didn’t care. We wanted our good name cleared, and we wanted to know the truth. Truth is, we hated the guy’s guts, but we didn’t want our Korean colleagues thinking we condoned stealing. This prof, and he was a stand-up guy, told about about how much the cops were low-life scum and the best way to deal with situations like that was to take the law into his own hands, ie, he would call around to the other universities and institutes and blackball the teacher if he tried to get hired.

Third example when I was a soldier. I saw this husband pounding on his wife outside a bar with a beer bottle. She was lying in the gutter. Soldiers were walking past, trying to stop him, but the husband was screaming and fighting them off. The cops were standing outside their car about a hundred feet away jawing with each other. The American MPs came, and told the soldiers to stay clear.

I’m sure many expats could recount similar stories ad nauseum. Honest cops have a lot of work to do to prove themselves with civilians. And, the government needs to end conscription, pay the cops more, and train them all better.

After watching me fumble frantically for my registration for about thirty seconds, the officer asked me what my record looked like. I mumbled something like, “Perfect…up to now…” He told me that he’d check my record, and if I was telling the truth, he’d leave it at a warning, and otherwise I’d get /two/ tickets. I’m really glad I was telling the truth.

Cost: The humiliation of being behind the dump truck again.

And like any good joke the punchline is saved for last. This made me laugh out loud…