The Beat September 2002

I had been in Korea about seven months when I saw this little gem in the toilet at Tongdosa temple. It froze me in my tracks…I whipped out my camera and started snapping, only later realizing that people thought I was maybe a bit “special” for taking photos in a public toilet. After all, they were urinating. At that point, my time here had been very rich and full of new discoveries, but this sign very eloquently captured the way I felt about getting along in Ulsan as a guy who then spoke only enough Korean to get on a bus, order a beer, and say “If you do that again, I‘ll kill you.”

How do you get a sign like this? I theorized that the creators were beginning to providehandicapped toilets at tourist sites (this is outside a Culture Museum near the temple) out of the knowledge that providing such facilities is something that many Westerners care about, so they built one here to better serve their foreign guests. Of course it is also possible that somebody simply had a sublime sense of humor. Either way, it was one of my early clues that there would be no lack of teaching work here in the foreseeable future.

Submitted by John Bocskay