The Korean Government Is Trying to Kill Me

It was another miserable day in Seoul when I woke up this morning – cloudy with a hint of 90% humidity in the air – and I headed out the door mentally preparing myself for the 10 minute walk to the bus stop and the subsequent commute (see earlier post for all the gory details). I was unaware, however, what Seoul had in store for me this morning, and wasn’t quite prepared as I set off down the street towards the bus. I was about two minutes into the walk, fiddling with my ipod trying to find a song suitable for the dreary morning, when I first heard it; a loud buzzing, that initially resembled a helicopter or something airborne, though it became quickly apparent that it was much closer. The next thing I noticed as I looked down the street ahead of me was the huge, white cloud expanding quickly and moving up the street towards me at speed that I was unaware clouds of any sort could move. It was still early, so it wasn’t until then that I made the connection – the noise, the cloud – and shouted at no one in particular, “FUCK! ITS THE DEET TRUCK!”

The Deet Truck is the Korean answer to the admittedly absurd amount of mosquitoes that somehow manage to survive here for nearly ten months out of the year, and it is exactly what it sounds like – a truck with a large pipe extending off the back that emits deet into the air in a thick white cloud. I had only seen the Deet Truck once before, but luckily I was in my house and able to shut all the windows before it drove by. This time, unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky.

From the behavior of the Koreans around me – those outside sweeping the street in front of their homes, walking their dogs, etc – you’d have thought that this huge cloud of toxic chemicals posed absolutely no threat whatsoever. Luckily, another foreigner walking behind me and I knew better, and dove for the first taxi that drove by. We had to force the cab driver to roll up the windows – even with the deet cloud coming ever closer he was completely clueless as to why these two foreigners were in his cab acting like lunatics, banging on the windows and gesturing with flailing arms – but we managed to barricade ourselves inside before the cloud engulfed the car. Our cab driver has no idea that picking us up this morning probably added five years to his life.

Once safely in the cab, the other person who doesn’t want to die inhaling toxic fumes and I acquainted ourselves, and commiserated over the obliviousness of the people around us, who were still making no move to get inside and away from the airborne deet. “They used to do this in the small town that I grew up in in the States”, he said (didn’t elaborate on which town that was though), “But they outlawed it”. Well of course they did! It’s DEET for christs sake! On the other hand, this may just be the Korean government’s way of driving the foreigners out, since I’ve only seen the truck around my apartment, which is where the majority of the foreigners in Seoul live. Hmmm…

So my new foreign friend and I made it safely to the station and I headed off to the bus where I would spend the next thirty minutes inhaling kimchi fumes off the breath of whatever passenger was smushed up against me for the duration of my commute. For the first time since arriving in Korea, I didn’t complain.