Korea: day 3 - a day on the Seoul Train
I mentioned yesterday that today was a day off. Seems a little weird since I've only worked one day here, but ok.
As I grabbed my coat and hat this morning I found that I've lost my glasses somehow in last night's drinking. I swear I didn't have THAT much, but I can't find them. Phooey.
I met Tony at 10am and grabbed Krispy Kream in the train station. Got a subway token card (like credit card) and we were on to adventure!
As we travelled from Anyang to Yongsan and Seoul Station it became more and more clear that I really had travelled into the future. A sort of cramped, condensed, high-tech future where the company you work for also owns your apartment.
Where there isn’t enough room in the streets for the cars anymore, but people still have them so they have to park them wherever they can, and the resulting one-lane roadways necessitate new rules of politeness. Where whole new cities are built all at once from the ground to the top of the 10 new high-rise apartments in construction crane farms. I don’t know how it all works, but it’s a very strange and alien future world.
To say that Seoul is a shopping mall is an exaggeration, but not by much. Once in the subway system I realized I was in yet another mall, with rows of stores down each hallway, and other sellers set up in the hall. From the subway we entered the streets of central Seoul to see the biggest street market Tony said I would ever see. I believe him. It was sort of like when 6th street is closed for a holiday market, only there’s twice as many vendors per square meter, and you’d have to close six city blocks downtown to compare in size. And, oh yeah, these streets aren’t closed. There’s still cars trying to drive through what are now walkways where shoppers are. It’s a sort of mad chaos that you only really understand once you’re there.
Moving forward, I don’t think I can go with Tony and hope to actually shop. He strolled through the space too fast to actually do shopping, and I couldn’t afford to loose him when I didn’t really know where I was. We don’t have cell phones that work here, so if I get lost I’m totally on my own. Even so, I didn’t really see anything really “Korea” that I could pick up. Most products are very much like at home. Clothes, though styles are different, shoes, watches, sunglasses, cheap plastic toys, this and that. And the same items come up every block or so. I guess I’m looking for touristy stuff, but not cheap looking junk. I dunno.
Anyway, through the streets of Seoul and the megamall of Yongsan I didn’t see anything I wanted, and though we ended up walking miles and miles I had nothing to show for it. Very tired, we returned to the train back to Anyang. But there was one last experience before the end of the trek today: rush hour on the subway. Even though it was Saturday, at 6pm everyone is going someplace, and I had my first experience with being crammed in a subway car where you can’t move. If E were here she might flip out. It was pretty hot and humid in there for a while, but not as bad as I hear in Japan where people stand outside the car and push people through the door.
After that Tony and I stopped at Elvis Bar, which is actually a comfortable little pub where we had a couple beers to literally decompress from everything. We grabbed supper and retired early, around 9.
Tomorrow, we faced the mountain…