For the Chuesok Holiday (Korean Thanksgiving), I went to Seoul with three fellow teachers: Gary, Mike, and Brandon. We left from Masan on a bus at 1:00am on Tuesday, and I arrived back in Masan at 2:15pm on Saturday. These were our adventures...
Our bus hit the road at 1:00 am bound for Seoul. You knew it was going to be a long ride when Mike and I got yelled at by some guy for talking and laughing too loud after only 3 minutes. Oh well, I guess we wanted to try and sleep anyways. The seats were huge and quite comfortable, all should have been well. I put on my headphones and turned on Balmorhea, ready to escape into whatever sort of deep slumber one is able to on a 1:00 am bus across Korea. However, I kept getting distracted by a constant, yet completely random beeping sound. I had listened to Balmorhea countless times, and I couldn't remember hearing that in the music before. I looked at my iPod to see if something was going on with it, but everything looked normal. I spent the next two hours trying to figure out if I was hearing things or if there was something in my music that I had never heard before. We pulled into a truck/bus stop at 3:00 am, and I staggered off the bus behind Mike, Gary, and Brandon. I heard Mike tell Gary, “If I hear that damn beeping sound one more time, I'm going to kill somebody.” There it was, I knew I wasn't crazy. I told them that I thought I was hearing things, but now I felt better knowing that I wasn't going nuts. None of us could figure out what it was though. I had to make two attempts to get back on the correct bus. There was another bus that also said Masan-Seoul, I guess it was coming from the other direction. I didn't recognize any of the people though, so I hopped off and walked down a few more buses until I found mine. That would have been a shame to get off the bus 2 hours later back in Masan. I thought I'd be able to sleep better with my headphones and music off, so I didn't put them on when we pulled away from our pit stop. Two minutes into the trip, what did I hear? Beep, Beep....Beep. I just started laughing, what else could you do. Mike started laughing when I did. We looked over at Brandon, he literally looked like he was going to kill somebody. That made us laugh even harder. The weirdest thing about it was that the Koreans on the bus, everybody but us, were sleeping just fine. They acted like nothing was going on. I guess it is a common noise. The only thing we could come up with was that it was a sensor designed to beep when the bus driver drove into a different lane. It was too random to be a phone or radio. Our bus driver was apparently just a terrible driver.
We got to Seoul just after 5:00 am, tired and annoyed after four hours of beeping. Our first goal was to find the subway. Mike had a friend living in the Sinchon area of Seoul who he was staying with. We were supposed to take the subway there to meet him. Once we figured out which lines we needed to take and where to transfer, we were off. The Seoul subway system was really remarkable. It has 13 lines spread throughout the city. All the stops are written in Korean and English, and announcements are made in both languages as well. It is quite cheap, and it is easy to buy tickets for the trains. The terminals all have city maps to show you where you are and places to shop for food or whatever else you want while you wait, which is actually never very long as the trains run quite frequently. To think they went under an existing city and built something that large is quite remarkable. It is almost another city, Seoul part 2 if you will, given the amount of stuff they have underground, which is all supported by subway traffic.
We met Mike's friend, Matt, in front of Burger King at 7:00 am. We were all pretty hungry, so we decided to eat at Burger King. They didn't have a breakfast menu, so we settled on burgers and fries at seven in the morning. After we were finished, Mike and Matt were heading back to Matt's place, while Gary, Brandon, and I were off to find a motel to stay at. Matt told us we should head down to the next subway stop. It was a college area, and he thought there were supposed to be a lot of motels in the area. The problem is, there weren't. We walked for three hours up and down street after street. In the end, we found two really expensive high-end hotels and one really run-down place that wanted to charge us 60,000 Won ($50) a piece to stay in one room together. We were not happy as we stood back in front of the Burger King, wet from the rain and suitcases in tow, three hours after we started looking for a place to stay. Gary and I were almost ready to head back to Masan. We decided to take the subway to another area of Seoul that our guidebooks said had plenty of motels. We walked around the corner of Burger King to get back to the subway and what did we see, a huge motel. We walked over to the motel and looked down the alley it was on. What did we see? We saw an alley with 7 different motels down it. As it turned out, the whole time, all we had to do was walk behind the Burger King. Instead of walking for three hours in the rain with our luggage, we could have been sleeping in a motel.
We found a motel with rooms on the third try. The reason it took three tries had nothing to do with a lack of availability, but with a refusal to rent us a room. Motels in Korea work a little differently than motels in America. In Korea, it is not enough for a motel owner to know that he or she will have a room booked for four or five nights. This is because if somebody rents a room for four or five nights, then the motel owner cannot rent that room to people who want to use if for a few hours for extra curricular activities. Whether it is a boyfriend and girlfriend, a husband or wife with somebody besides their spouse, or any other possible combination, motels in Korea do huge business renting out their rooms as many times as possible during one day. This is why motels in Korea are known as “Love Motels.” You never know when you may have to do a little extra searching for a motel here, as you may be cutting into somebody's fun time.
Once we got into our rooms, we all got cleaned up. We wanted to go shopping for a few things we needed, so we decided to head to a nearby Home Plus (a Korean version of Wal-Mart). We got on the subway and headed to the World Cup Soccer Stadium, which the Home Plus was located inside of. When we walked out to the Subway exit and encountered what you would call a bit of a torrential downpour. We waited around for about 20 minutes hoping the rain would subside. It didn't. In fact, it started raining harder and it continued for the next 4 hours. It turned out to be quite the story in Korea for the day. It was all over the news. Many parts of Seoul flooded. They had to shut down the subway in certain parts of the city because of the rain. It only rained in Seoul though, which seemed to be on par with the way our day was going. The rain would make our day quite interesting. Brandon and Mike ended up having to buy new shoes because of it. Both of them only brought one pair, and they got soaked due to the water that was 6 inches deep in some areas. Gary and Brandon went through two umbrellas. It was raining so hard that the water was soaking right through them. I just gave up and dealt with getting soaked. Thankfully I had sandals on, so I didn't ruin any shoes. The highlight or low-light if you will occurred when Brandon, Gary, and I were walking to the Korean War Museum to meet Mike and Matt. We were getting completely soaked and had been walking for a while. We finally got under an overpass where we could stop getting poured on for a moment. Brandon just lost it. He said, “Guys, what the f*** are we doing here? This is just ridiculous. ...” He went on for a little while longer. Gary had his umbrella blocking his face from Brandon while staring at me. He was laughing hysterically. I had to try and keep a straight face while looking at both of them. Though there really was nothing positive to make of the situation, I did attempt to get Brandon to cheer up. It didn't work. We walked the last 15 minutes to the War Museum in a quiet state of annoyance.
The War Museum turned out to be pretty interesting. However, we couldn't enjoy any of the stuff outside due to the rain. After we left the museum, we headed for dinner. We went to Itaewon, the foreign neighborhood of Seoul. We found a place called the All-American Grill. They had excellent hamburgers. I know I had only been in Korea for a month, but I can't tell you how much I missed the food from back home. As it turned out, the whole time we were in Seoul we ate non-Korean food. It was excellent. We had hamburgers, Quiznos, Subway, Burger King, pancakes, and Kebobs. I felt as though I were eating like a king. It is funny how much your perspective changes. In America, I don't even eat a two of those places, and I rarely eat hamburgers. However, when those foods aren't even available, they become one more thing that you crave. The pancakes were by far my favorite thing.
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