99 bottles of beer on the wall

Sitting in Incheon Airport in Seoul, having arrived over 3 hours early. Wasting time on the Internet. We gave ourselves 4 hours+ for our trip to the airport and check-in, the reason being that Seoul has traffic, or more appropriately city-wide constant gridlock. All the time. I wish I had a picture to illustrate - I might, but I'll have to look for it later when I get access to my computer. You see I had to remove my laptop battery from my laptop and check the battery. New regulations, or at least regulations flying into the US, dictate that ALL Dell and Apple laptops, regardless of their model of battery, must not have a battery accompanying the computer onto the plane, thus rendering them useless unless you are lucky enough to have an outlet at your seat. Of course last time I saw one of those near my seat on a plane, I was sitting in First Class. So that would be never. But I see the wisdom in it, since dell laptops, and apparently apples now as well, are accidental bombs of fiery death. I'm sure THIS wouldn't be so comfortable happening on your lap.

Anyways, the streets of Seoul, for the most part, are always jammed. And drivers are all pretty impatient, ballsy, and most of all extremely aggressive. It's unlike any US city I've been too, even NYC. The driving is not crazy due to any excessive speeds, but more so due to peoples adaptation to the lack of speeds, thus turning every street into a slow-motion game of bumper cars. And to their credit, most drivers in Seoul know their cars lengths and widths to an inch, or should I say to a 2.54 centimeter. What I learned is that the mentality of driving is completely different. You are out for yourself, and only for yourself when you drive in Seoul. The only way you'll get yourself into a lane is if you wedge enough nose of your car in front of another that they can't physically move past you. Otherwise, nobody is letting anybody into a lane. So with this in mind, the streets rarely have a straight line of cars in any lane. The intersections are often a criss-crossing mess of cars trying to get from the lane they are in to the lane they want to be in, which as you can imagine doesn't allow for much forward progress in the traffic. But with all this chaos, I don't think I ever saw anybody seem to get mad at another for deliberately sticking their nose in front of another, or for not being let into a lane. It is accepted and everyone doesn't seem to mind, or at least they don't show it. If you imagine this scenario in the US, there would be cars being rammed and fists being thrown. But then again, perhaps the small bit of driving courtesy that some have retained and try to use helps maintain a little bit of movement in the traffic. Or not.

Either way, having experienced this all week led Haejin and I to give ourselves a load of extra time to get to the airport. But naturally, the one time we plan for traffic, we don't find any. And so here we are, wasting time in the airport. But now that I have wasted the time, it is boarding time. See you all in the states.