Thursday, September 07, 2006

Being in Seoul is like being on one long, endless subway ride. I spent last weekend there to meet up with friends and take a break from my stressful teaching life. Whenever I think about going up there, I always have an ambitious itinerary in mind, but sometimes I forget how difficult it can be to find the locations of neighborhoods when you're in a huge metropolis of 10.3 million people where very little English is spoken and the subway has 8 lines. I wanted to go to Insadong, a trendy district full of tea and coffee shops, pottery shops, all kinds of clothing stores, street vendors selling shoes, artwork, Korean crafts and a lot more. I visited this area on my first trip to the capital and loved the cultured, artistic unartificial feel to it. However, this did not happen because I took the wrong subway line. I did not realize it until I had been riding for about a half an hour. Since I left my luggage in a locker at the Yongsan subway station which was on the orange line, I thought it best to go back in that direction since it was approaching 8pm, when I had to meet my friends. I am thinking about getting a teaching job in a city near Seoul for next year, perhaps Incheon or Suwon or Bundang. It might be fun to get the best of both worlds--the calmer atmosphere of a smaller city when I want to relax and the buzz and energy of the big city when I want to have some fun. Living right in Seoul would be too much--I would not be able to stand the crowded subways and streets. When I returned to Daegu and took the subway from the Dongdaegu station back to my apartment in Daegok, I looked with gratitude at the subway map, a very simple, green and red, 2-line system.

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