more bubbles on the street

this august has been unseasonally wet. Most augusts are really really hot and humid in Korea, after a couple rainy weeks in July, but rainy season is all out of wack this year.

but if life gives you lemon, make lemonade, and if August gives you rain, take more pictures of bubbles on your street.





living where I do, there are a few hobos I see running around regularly. I've started to get to know some of them.

There's the one who keeps knives taped on his walking stick. Don't mess with that one. There's the one who's dressed in black and has a gangster moustache. He looks kind of young, he's always at least half-cut, but he also has a tendency to take a few steps that look as if he's about to go into a pretty darn powerful taekwondo jump-spin-kick. I wouldn't want to tangle with this one. I think he's a gangester, he looks like a tough old bastard.

My favourite is the one who looks just a bit rotund still, and every time I see him he's carrying a newspaper. I like to imagine he's a poet, composing poems in his head. He has these bookish looking glasses, and he always has a coy half-smile that makes it seem like he's perfectly content to be a hobo, as long as he has a cardboard box to sleep in and a newspaper he can sleep under after he reads it.

The nice thing about hobos is, even the gangster-looking one isn't intimidating or menacing in the least. In most western cities, if there's a public park known as a hobo hangout, people go out of their way to avoid walking through it, for fear of being mugged for drug money or something. In Korea, even in downtown Seoul, if you leave the hoboes alone, they'll leave you alone. I love this country.