An uncle next-door small shop

"I feel you are the person who seem like came from a distant past!" Are you really living in New York?"

This was the word hear from a friend when I visited Seoul without a cell phone. I didn't prepare it because I didn't visit as a business and I didn't have anyone to meet.

While in Seoul, I tried to go to Hana tour agency to buy a air plane ticket to meet my younger son in Japan. I went near Hakdong station in Nonhyeon-dong no matter how much I looked around, I couldn't find it. Even there is no pay phone. Gangnam, which used to be just rice paddies and fields, is now a forest of buildings with no soil. In the past, it was a mistake to think that if I could just stand on the street and turn my head once, I could find Kim.

I had no choice but to go in a Nonhyeon 1 police station. I couldn't even open the door because of dizziness, whether I shook my head too much looking for a travel agency. As soon as I tried to look inside the glass door, a policeman inside jumped up and welcomed me, opening the door. His attitude was like he'll help anything at any time. He looks was totally different from the New York Police officers. Ah, this is the Korean-style democratic police!

He kindly found the address of Hana tour on the computer and told me where to go. I was so unfamiliar that I asked him to write it down on paper. A policeman who used to draw a map suddenly leaps up and said to me to follow him. A little higher police man in the back seat said, 'why don't you take her there.' I stood there in a daze, not knowing what was going on. He opened the front door of the police car and told me to get in.

Oh, my God. For the first time in my life, I sat in the front seat of a police car! I said thanks him with embarrassment. He even humbled, "I've been cursed and offended by a drunken man since early in the morning, but it's worth helping a citizen like me." I don't know where to look. I looked out of the car window. Suddenly, Seoul, which I didn't like very much, looked nice and warm.

The moment I was so moved by the kind treatment of police officers, I wanted to live in Seoul Korea. And I came to mind the brutal New York police officer as fierce as the strong winter wind in Manhattan building forest. The moment I'm off guard in my life, I got a ticket of fine. I am miserable living in a police state that handcuffed me to the slightest mistake.

Unlike the some of the New York police officers, such as the vampires who blow their eyes, the Korean police were kind as the uncle next-door small shop.