FINDING OUR WAY

It’s a rainy Saturday morning here in Seoul. We have the windows open instead of the air-conditioner on, and the sounds of rain, birds chirping (sparrows?), tires on the wet street, and from further off the low mutter of trains wash into the room, all of them soothing. Such a pleasure to have no place one has to go! We even laid in breakfast supplies last night.

Experiences pile up, confusions clear, then more arise. Consider the subway: we figured out how simple it is to buy subway tickets from the machines and get our deposits for them refunded at the end of the trip, but why tickets sometimes don’t open the gates when we try to pass through remains a mystery and occasions a thump on the legs as the gates swing shut against you. The trains run very smoothly, at least for the distances we’ve ridden them. The cars are spacious and air-conditioned so we step into them with pleasure even when no seats are empty. Stops are announced in Korean, then in English, as well as flashed in both languages on liquid crystal screens hanging from the ceiling, so it’s hard to get lost.

Well, hard so long as you can remember the name of the station you’re heading for—we did get off at a wrong one once. Getting the hang of names is a real challenge. They are multi-syllabic, don’t come with pronunciation keys, and our ears have no context for them. Having mixed up names of stations beginning with “j” and “n” (don’t ask how…) on one trip it was a delight when a woman attendant who was helping us work a machine that didn’t have an “English” label to push (it did have a US flag but we didn’t see it) started looking for City Hall stop under “S”.

Have I mentioned there are few street names on signs, and fewer still in English? We make our way on foot through lanes and narrow streets that run off at all sorts of angles, turn here and there, slant up and down, threaten to become cul-de-sacs then open out again. So far we’ve managed to get where we’re going, thanks to Peter’s ability to navigate by rooflines, light, and who knows what landmarks, as well as to read maps.

And we’re slowly managing to find the things we need—my coup being the plug adaptor (eodaepteo according to Lonely Planet) for my computer. I bought it two days ago from a small dingy shop crammed with electrical cords, boxes, plates, etc. No English spoken, except for numbers to do with voltage—but I’d remembered to take the cable with me to show its plug. Oh, and the dishcloth in the basement of the large convenience store at the corner was a good find, too. So was my new umbrella.