I took my dog out for a walk today and came across a nice hurl-pile in the park. It never fails: once every week or so, someone gets hammered in one of the many pubs here in the neighborhood and ends up having a nice technicolor yawn, spewing out his dinner. Last night was the night, because this morning, there was a huge pile. Sometimes, if you’re vigilant, you can catch the poor sod who drank too much. I’ve seen them a couple of times. Once, a guy was face down on the curb just in front of my apartment. He laid there for what seemed like hours, groaning and spitting before he finally moved on and made it the rest of the way home.

I ordinarily wouldn’t take a picture of stuff like this, but its a nice little way to encapsulate something that came up (pun intended) in class. We talked about zoning laws with the middle school kids. They don’t have many laws about zoning, but there’s a few. You can’t, for example, have a “love motel” (a hotel for illicit trysts) near a school area. But little else is disallowed.

In my little corner of America, zoning laws are everywhere. You can’t have a business in a residential area. Makes for nice, quiet little neighborhoods with row upon row of houses. Somehow, that made sense to folks at some point, but the end result is you have to drive nearly everywhere – stores, restaurants, gym – resulting in the car culture. Here in Korea, since businesses and residences intermingle, you can walk to the grocery store, banks, gym, restaurant, pubs, etc.  Its very convenient to walk to everything you need. And since a pub may be just around the corner, you needn’t worry about drinking and driving.   Walk, and if you need to puke on the way home, there’s no need to stop the car, roll down the window or even ask your taxi driver to slow down. Just bend over and  laugh at the ground. The end result is hurl. And people seem to be ok with it. I’ve seen kids simply walk past it in the park without muttering a word.

I snapped this picture later this morning of a young couple in love on one of the park benches . Its not like they could be oblivious to the hurl. It’s too damn big to say you just didn’t see, not to mention smell the horrid pile. They just carried on, hugging and cooing with each other as if this enormous pile of Korean rice wine and undigested noodles didn’t exist mere feet from them.

So, the conclusion I’ve drawn from zoning laws is that they contribute to the car culture: traffic jams, green house gases, global warming and urban highway blight. A lack of zoning laws creates hurl.

Let’s see…hurl? Or traffic,  global warming and endless highways?   Hmmm…..you decide.