Seoul's subway system is marvelously efficient and comfortable. About the most complicated thing you ever have to do is look as a subway map at your point of origin, find your destination on it, and read the price of your trip. Announcements are made in English as well as Korean, station names are displayed in both languages (and Japanese too), the seats are cushioned, the people are reasonably courteous and sometimes downright friendly — recently a middle-aged lady with obviously expensive sparkly hair clips gave Jenny and me sticks of cinnamon gum for no special reason. There are flaws, of course — neighborhood maps in the subway stations are designed with north oriented pretty much at random, so that sometimes you'll notice that it's pointing toward the bottom left corner or something — but on the whole it's pretty darn good.

Well, tonight I saw a man literally hurled from his seat and onto the floor of a local bus that had done nothing out of the ordinary, and it got me to thinking. In a country that is often called the most Confucian in Asia, where reciprocality is so culturally essential that the yin-yang is on the flag, perhaps it is inevitable that the sensible subways will have their inversion, their opposite. And Seoul's buses clearly fill that role. The drivers are surly and listen to the radio at high volume. The interior designs are usually elaborately worked out so that there are as few seats as possible, with just one seat on either side most of the way back, and each seat is placed as close to a wheel or some other obstruction as possible, so that your knees are usually close enough to your face that you can smack your nose on them during one of the many sudden stops. And not only that, but the seats are covered in a slippery plasticine material, so that you're constantly gripping the dangerous iron bars of the seat in front of you in an effort to stay in yours and keep all your teeth. And all this is if you're lucky enough to get a seat, because otherwise you swing wildly on straps that hang long enough for you to look like Tarzan being badass every time the driver rounds a turn, which he (never she) inevitably does without slowing down.

In fact, just getting on the bus in first place is a death-defying adventure. First of all you have to determine which bus to get on, which is difficult because there are no bus maps at all. None. The only maps that exist, as far as anyone knows, are the cryptic route maps in the buses themselves, and then only in about every sixth bus. They mention the names of the stops, and about one in every five names corresponds to a name printed on a bus shelter where you stop. To get anywhere by bus, you have to know which bus to take or ask the driver, and the driver might lie. When we discover a new place, we usually know one bus that will get us there, and then we write down the numbers of the other buses listed on that stop and see if they correspond to buses we recognize from elsewhere. And just because the 9-3 runs from Seoksu to Gwanak Station does not mean that it runs from Gwanak Station to Seoksu, because most of the routes are elaborate loops. Nor does the route of the 9-3 share any obvious relationship with the route of the 9. Likewise, the 8, 8-1, 8-2 and 88 buses all have several stops in common, but are no more obviously related than the 1-2 and the 37-1.

When your bus comes, you wave at it and hope the driver feels like stopping. If there are too many buses already bunched at the stop, the driver will pretend that he doesn't know the stop is there and zoom past it. Sometimes the drivers stop near you, while at other times they hurtle a good ten yards past and make you run. Then you climb on board and pay, which you can do in one of four ways. You can drop 600 won in coins into the box; you can drop a 600-won bus ticket into the box, and these are available from newsstands near bus stops; you can pay with an electronic badge, which is a prized item because you can no longer buy them anywhere, even though every bus is equipped with a reader; or you can drop a 1,000 won bill into the box. When you do, you are sometimes given your 400 won in change when the driver presses a button and the coins pop out of this other little box. But in theory different distances on the bus cost different amounts. In theory the driver asks each passenger where she's going, the passenger answers honestly, the driver quotes a price that is correct, and the passenger pays it. In practice, 600 won allows you to ride to what the driver considers the end of the line, but to make up for it the drivers sometimes refuse to give change. All of this amounts to a battle over 36 cents, but it's amazing how nasty it can make you feel at the end of a difficult day when the bus driver simply refuses to give you your change and instead sort of smirks.

Change or not, you are now on the bus and must find your way to an available seat. The bus is of course in motion, but it's not a smooth, steady acceleration or anything. It's more the sort of motion you use on a bottle of vinaigrette just before you pour. The driver brakes suddenly and you find yourself pushing hard up the aisle, but then the driver hits the gas again and you're launched headlong into somebody's lap. The other day I watched a little girl go hurtling face-first into the front of a seat and collapse in a wailing sprawl on the floor. And once you're in your seat, each turn and each stop is a new opportunity to go flying out of it, as demonstrated by the man I saw tonight who had somehow managed to fall asleep and paid the price for it, tipping over and thumping to the floor in a sort of fetal position.

When it's time to get off the bus, you press one of the buzzers that is located conveniently within reach of someone else's seat but not yours. Sometimes the nearest buzzer is on the ceiling somewhere, which means you have to stand up, which means the driver has an extra chance to throw you around, and he will take it. When the driver gets to a place where he feels comfortable, and which may correspond to an actual bus stop, but which might also correspond to the middle of an intersection that is sort of near a bus stop, he comes to a halt or something like it and opens the back door, which is what doors on the starship Enterprise would be like if in this particular episode the ship had turned carnivorous. They slide open with a whoosh and then slide shut again, sometimes before anyone has managed to make a first move toward passing through. I've watched them open and slam, open and slam like some kind of masticating jaw of busly doom. Jenny has confessed to a fear of getting her ankle caught in one and being dragged along for blocks, which I must admit is, while not exactly likely, not as inconceivable as it should be.

Now I have traveled in India and Nepal, countries notorious for their third world buses. They are overcrowded with people and chickens and goats and extra passengers on the roof. They run at utterly mysterious intervals, or start five hours late, or don't run at all, or run for a while and give up and turn around and go back to the start. They make frequent stops so that incense can be lit at roadside shrines, which is a good idea if you're passing trucks on a two-lane road and therefore expecting to die pretty soon. There is horrible blaring Hindipop and internal design is completely unpredictable. But India is the third world and Korea is not. Poverty is an excuse for chaotic services and low-tech equipment. In Korea they've got those snazzy electronic badge readers on every bus, and also radio receivers that broadcast location announcements as you move around the route. The buses run even when empty, and they run frequently. The violence and opacity of bus travel is completely unnecessary and completely unaccountable. But perhaps the buses give the people of Seoul a focus for otherwise dangerous feelings of fear and disgruntlement. Maybe the government keeps the buses bad so people will gripe about them instead of about the ruling party or the six-day work week. Or maybe it's just that you can't get everything right when you build a nation this fast, and so far no one has gotten around to fixing the buses. It's like the buildings that go up in four days: they might fall down in six years with a bunch of people in them, but in the meantime they look pretty much like buildings, and be careful not to trip on those exposed wires as you come in.

Considering how friendly everything else is here, and how cheap the buses are, and how often they get us quickly to our destination for either 54 cents or 90 cents, perhaps I shouldn't complain. In Marin County, where I grew up, the buses were lovely and clean and comfortable and the nearest stop was five miles away and the buses stopped there during each solar eclipse and on alternate equinoxes and the only people who rode them were children and vagrants. In San Francisco I would wait three hours for six buses to arrive at once. In India I was awakened at 6 am by snapping fingers in my face and a man shouting, "Tea! Toilet!" In Nepal I rode on the roof of a bus that tottered around dangerous curves on the edges of cliffs. But for all the surliness I was sometimes showed by the drivers in these places or in New York, I never felt like they were trying to kill me, or that they enjoyed toying with the bodies in their fuselages. No, only in Korea are the buses specifically evil, a dark dangerous yin that flings you about from one sunny, friendly yang to another. I suppose, considering how flung about the Koreans themselves have been in the last 150 years or so, it's only fitting that they should commemorate their whiplash somehow. Buses are part of the fabric of daily life now, the way Shamanism and brutal classism were in 1850, the way endless Japanese humiliations were in 1930, the way mortar shells and death were in 1951. Like a Korean quilt, the fabric of daily life is stitched together from disparate scraps, and maybe the bus drivers swerve so much because they're stitching things together.

Or maybe they're just mean.

Addendum:

According to Min Byoung-chul's Ugly Koreans, Ugly Americans, a book about "cultural and behavioral differences between Koreans and Americans":

Bus companies specify a number of round trips per day for drivers. The heavy traffic in cities like Seoul makes it difficult for the drivers to keep their tight schedules and this often leads them to skip stops when there is no one to drop off. While it may be understandable, it causes great inconvenience to people who have been waiting a long time for the bus.

Or maybe the drivers are just mean.