Sunday, August 20, 2006
Biking ???
We headed out in the early afternoon...around 2 or so. We knew the route to Jamsil required 3 different trains...the dark blue line, with a transfer to the light blue line, and a transfer to the green line. Now, I know you're thinking that since we've been in Korea now for almost two months, we should be getting pretty good at taking the subway, right? Wrong!! Yesterday we learned about the difference that the letter "e" makes. For example, "Sincheon" and "Sinchon" are not the same place, even though they look the same when you don't understand the word anyways and are just glancing at it as you run to the next train! Unfortunately, we got on the green line heading towards "Sinchon" when we really wanted to be heading the other direction towards "Sincheon". After about 8 stops we realized that the station names weren't matching the names on our little guide (we're pretty quick, eh - only took us 8 stops)...and finally figured out that we had to get off and head back the way we had come. Here's the sad part of the story - about 45 to 50 minutes after getting on the wrong train we finally arrived at the right station, ran up the stairs to get outside, and found that...the bike rental stands had already closed for the day!!
Sam at the closed and "locked down" bike rental booths.
Fortunately, Sam and I would never let a little something like getting lost and finding closed and locked bike rental stands ruin our day, so we decided to explore that part of the city. We saw some cool things...there was an amusement park on an island, so we watched the rides for awhile. We'll probably go back and ride them sometime! Then we walked around this great little lake, which just so happened to be date central! Everywhere we looked we saw couples on the park benches...the girl sitting up, and the guy lying on the bench with his head resting on his girlfriend's lap while she played with his hair. So, we did that for awhile so we could fit in with the locals! We found a Burger King and splurged on burgers and fries for dinner, which was fabulous (sidenote: here's a great thing about Asia - the serving sizes at fast food places are smaller...the fries are small, the drinks are small, and the burgers are small...so you don't leave feeling like you've got gut rot from all the grease...end of sidenote).
We found this pretty pagoda when we were walking around the lake.
We had just decided to head back to the subway station, when we started to feel a few sprinkles of rain...perfect timing! The subway ride was pretty uneventful on the first two trains...it was when we were waiting for our last train that the "fun" began. We were approached by a short, drunk man who wanted to practice his English on us. We get this everywhere we go - adults want to see if we understand them, teens want to see if we'll talk back, and parents want their kids to say "hi", just so they know that the English lessons they're paying for are actually doing some good! Anyways, this man walks up to us and asked us where we're from. We told him and then he started talking away (we understood probably 1 out of every 10 words), telling us about how his "English is very short" (we think he meant that he didn't speak a lot), and that "comnication" was his big problem (communication?). He said he knew American movies, and that Sam looked just like Jim Carrey, and I looked exactly like Meg Ryan (which I thought was hilarious...I love hearing who people think we look like!). Our train finally came, and it was obvious that he was waiting for us to get on so that he could follow and continue the conversation. With quick thinking, we started walking towards one entrance, allowed him to get on first, and then turned and got on another car. Once aboard, we quickly ran through two more crowded cars, until we had a good 3 cars between us and him. It was good for everyone - we had a nice peaceful ride, and he found someone else to talk to (when we got off at Osan we saw him through a window, chatting away with someone else). All in all - a great Saturday!
