Category Archives: trains and train stations

Extreme eating

A long weekend is a rare blessing in Korea, particularly as a Hagwon employee. This long weekend – courtesy of Buddha’s birthday on Friday – was a chance to take a trip to the less touristed, less famous South West of the country. Except that there are no trains that run across the country (east to west). In order to go from Daegu to Mokpo, it is necessary to travel half way to Seoul (heading North), change stations and catch another train back towards the south. Frustratingly complicated, especially because the whole country was on the move. Having bought my tickets 2 weeks in advance, it took me leaving Daegu at 7:40 in the morning (having worked until 10:20 the night before) to reach Mokpo at 12:20.

I arrived in Mokpo, hopped on the city bus (thankfully described in the guidebook because there is NO English) and promptly found myself going in the wrong direction. One more try and I made it to the Mokpo Ferry terminal. The terminal isn’t particularly well sign-posted until you’re right on top of it. At least, it isn’t in English. It may be perfectly signposted in Korean.

I took a wander along the road, loving the hot sun (I even put on sunscreen) while I waited for my partner-in-travel to arrive. Her bus was slightly delayed by the traffic jam of people leaving Seoul for the weekend, but eventually she arrived in Mokpo and proceeded to follow in my footsteps and get on a bus going in the wrong direction. While I waited for her to change buses and find her way to the coast, I sat on the steps outside the Ferry terminal and watched the world of Mokpo pass slowly by.

Mokpo is a relatively small and underdeveloped city. The whole province of Jeollanam, in fact, is underdeveloped, in terms of infrastructure for tourist but also economically. This is, according to guidebooks and the other usual information sources, apparently partly because the opposition was, for a long time, based here. This was also the hot-bed of revolutionary resistance to dictatorial rule during the early 1980s, resulting, among other things, in various security-force crackdowns, sieges, massacres and other strategies of oppression generally employed by authoritarian regimes clinging to power in the face of change. Unsurprisingly, this adds to the appeal for me. As a result of being the trouble-makers, this region was, apparently, systematically underfunded and has only in the last few years begun to be given the kind of investment it needs. This is one of the reasons the transport systems are nowhere near as prolific and efficient as in, for example, the South-East (where I live) which has produced a large number of recent leadership figures.

After her bus adventure, Anna arrived. We were, by this stage, both a little hungry, hot and tired, so lunch first. There are seafood places all along the street across from the ferry and marina. You know they are seafood places because they have pictures of seafood creatures on their signs. There is also the dead give-away of the tanks of sea creatures outside. When I first saw shops with tank upon tank of octopus, squid, crabs, fish of all makes and sizes, not to mention eels and weird mollusc-ey things, I thought they were pet shops. How wrong I was.

We picked a restaurant at random, wandered in and gratefully settled onto our floor-cushions and ordered beer. The women working there wanted to know (all in Korean of course) if we’d be eating too or just drinking. Anna went off to point at something in the tank (no menu, let alone in English). She pointed, the women looked concerned. She pointed again. They told us the price. We were a little shocked by the prices but really didn’t feel like going elsewhere so we decided to pay anyway and pointed meaningfully at the tank of baby octopus. The price really did seem rather high for Korea, or for that matter anywhere. In retrospect, that should have been a warning.

Korean food sometimes arrives too quickly. I like being able to relax and chat for a while until the food is ready. Here they tend to bring it quickly and relax after. Even for Korea, this food arrived remarkably rapidly. They brought us a couple of sides first, one of which was baby potatoes – making me particularly happy – and then the main dish was brought out.

What was placed in front of us was a dinner-plate sized platter of cut up baby octopus. Under normal circumstances, this would not really have bothered me. I quite like octopus. I’m a big fan of calamari. But calamari, at least in my previous experience, does not usually move. I know, it’s probably my own fault – I should have learned a little more of the language before venturing into the less touristed places and we should have asked more questions before ordered. We certainly didn’t intend to order a plate of raw, grey, slimy, squirming octopus tentacles. They were moving and wriggling like a mass of worms. One, I am not kidding you, almost managed to escape off the plate. They twisted themselves around the chopsticks. They stuck, with their little suckers holding on for dear life, to the plate. We waited a while for them to die – after all, the tentacles had been severed from the bodies, waited for them to stop moving, but the minute you touched one with your chopsticks, they all wriggled madly. The woman who worked there showed us the red sauce to dip the tentacles in. Dipping them in the sauce had no effect other than to turn the grey wriggling tentacles into red-brown, dripping-with-sauce, wriggling tentacles.

Had I not heard of this ‘delicacy‘ before, I think I would honestly have assumed they were trying to play some horrific joke on the foreigners. But I had heard of it. In fact, I have friends who tried it and were warned that you have to be very careful to chew each tentacle thoroughly (and hard) to make sure that they’re dead, otherwise they can sucker onto your throat, killing more people each year than blowfish. It had never even vaguely occurred to me that anyone would assume that’s what two accidental walk-in tourists, who obviously had no idea what they were doing, wanted to order for lunch. We were horrified. Anna at least is a fairly experimental eater. I’m not. And I’m certainly not going to happily chow down on a bowl of wriggling tentacles which arrive with no warning or time to psych myself up.

Which is not to say we didn’t try it. We each tried at least two tentacles. Picked up with chopsticks (around which they instantly, squirmily wrapped themselves), dipped in the appropriate sauces and (deep breathe and eyes half-closed) stuffed into the mouth chewed as fast as possible to stop them wriggling about. We sat for a while looking at the plate, hoping all the time they’d stop moving so that we could eat the rest. They never did. We couldn’t do it. It seemed a terrible waste to leave all that expensive food but there was no way. I am very solidly a carnivore but even I cannot quite bring myself to eat something that is still fighting back after it is sliced up and sitting on the plate.

We paid our bill and left as politely as we could given that all we wanted to do was run out of there before anyone suggested any more extreme eating experiences. I have it on video (a video of lunch!) and watching it again, I can’t believe that a) I actually ate some and b) people think this is a good thing to eat. It certainly wasn’t delicious enough to make it worth the trauma, to risk death by wriggling things. That said, it didn’t taste bad, actually. Not amazing enough to make it worth it but it wouldn’t have been too offensive if only it hadn’t moved. No-one died, so I suppose we escaped relatively unscathed but we got out of Mokpo post-haste and couldn’t quite bring ourselves to eat at a seafood restaurant for the rest of the weekend.

3:52 am, Seoul Station

Not too long ago, I took a day-trip up to Seoul. Seoul is nearly 300km from Daegu, so it’s a fairly long way to go just for the day. In Korea, in fact, it’s almost clear across the country. It was worth it to see a old friend I haven’t seen for ages and who was in the country for just a few days from Japan.

I took the bus up (3 and a half hours), managed to find my way through the rat-maze-chaos of Seoul Express Bus Terminal and navigated the Seoul subway system (which is huge and confusing) to reach Itaewon perfectly on time (amazingly). In order to manage it, I’d woken up at 7am, which will become important later in the story.

I had a great time with my friend. It is so nice to see someone with whom you have common history, to just talk and talk for hours and explore a new place together. It was particularly nice to be able to talk about where we are now and compare experiences. I read something recently (and cannot remember where I read it unfortunately) about how meeting up with old friends sometimes turns into a largely uninteresting litany of ‘remember when’ stories. This wasn’t that. We share a lot of common history but most of the afternoon was new memories and new experiences. It was lovely.

After dinner with two of his colleagues from Japan, I said my goodbyes and headed off to catch a late subway to Seoul station and take a train home. I had settled on taking the train back to Daegu because I wasn’t sure of the bus schedules and the train system is the mode of Korean transport with which I am most familiar and most comfortable. I managed the subway just fine and found my way to Seoul Station.

The first inkling that I may have miscalculated was when I walked into the airport-hanger-style station building and saw a departures board that seemed to indicate that the next train to Daegu wasn’t until 5:30am. I got a bit of a fright but was sure this must be a mistake. I had checked the schedule a few days earlier and was certain there were several late trains. The automated ticketing machine unhelpfully said there were no tickets, so I went to the counter and asked the rather harassed-looking ticket salesperson. He confirmed that the last train to Daegu had left 10 minutes earlier. Perhaps I looked at the train schedule for Daegu to Seoul, not Seoul to Daegu. Either way, I was clearly wrong.

I turned away from the ticket-counter and looked across the room. I will admit to a moment of panic before my new-found sense of adventure and humour in the face of crisis kicked in. I laughed it off: I’d simply wait for the next morning. It would be a little bit of an adventure. Plus, I had a brand new book to start reading and a pen and paper – more than enough to keep me busy for a few hours.

The thing they don’t tell you, and which I imagine very few people ever have occasion to learn, is that Seoul’s extremely busy train station does not, in fact, stay open all night. This was a surprise. The train station really is a major transport hub and I think it just didn’t occur to me that it would close. Also, they have a 24-hour McDonalds and a 24-hour Lotteria.

At around 12:45, the police and station security began rousing and clearing out the homeless people sleeping on the station floor. I frantically did mental calculations to try and figure out a way to afford a taxi and somewhere to stay and still get home. It was after midnight, so my bank card was of no help. There was no way I was going to be able to do it. Just then a kindly security guard came over and confirmed that they were indeed closing and throwing everyone out, but, perhaps taking pity on the bewildered foreigner, said earnestly that they’d be opening again at 2am.

Relieved that I’d only be stranded for an hour, I swung my pack onto my back and headed out into the night. Outside, it was dark and raining. Distinctly thankful for my less-than-trusting relationship with Korean weather, I pulled out my never-leave-home-without-it umbrella and pulled the built-in rain cover over my backpack. As the last people straggled out of the building, I watched the lights of Seoul Station go down.

The slightly less damp areas around the building had been firmly claimed by groups of homeless with cardboard for beds and their belongings firmly tucked up as pillows beneath their heads. I looked around. I’m a South African. Every muscle in my body was coiled in tense anticipation. I was alone on a dark, damp night on the side of the road in a city of 20 million people.

I saw a restaurant but I didn’t want to have to spend money on food I didn’t want. And anyway, it looked rather dodgy and like it might close any minute. The area in front of the station wasn’t pitch dark, thanks to streetlights and neon signs and a row of taxis waiting, forlornly, for passengers to appear out of the night. I spent some time idly trying to decipher the bus route information board. A Korean guy, sitting at the bus stop playing on his i-phone, asked in perfect English if I needed help. We chatted briefly before I moved on. I contemplated taking a walk but the streets seemed to disappear into darkness and all the assurances of low crime rates in Korea couldn’t persuade me that moving away from the lights was a good idea. I walked back and forth, back and forth in front of the station. I stood around. I watched the rain. I watched the night-people. I waited. Waiting, watching, staying near to the pleasant-enough taxi-drivers who tried, repeatedly, to convince me to take a taxi back to Daegu (at 5 times the price of a train and for which I most certainly didn’t have the money right then).

At 2am, as promised, the lights of the station came back on and the homeless station-sleepers and I, the one lone, lost foreigner, trickled back into the building. I found a bench free of people trying to sleep and returned to my book, willing the hours to pass quickly now.

At around 2:30 in the morning, the exhaustion was starting to kick in. I decided it was time for coffee. Because I didn’t have much money on me and I was now in the kind of head-space where I wouldn’t take any chances, I didn’t want to spend too much, but strong black coffee sounded heavenly, especially after an hour of walking in the rain. Plus, of course, I’d been awake since 7am. I went into the “24-hour” Lotteria (ha!), which had finally reopened.

The waiter disappeared as soon as he had served me. I sat down at a table with my coffee, glad to be comfortably sitting in a restaurant, away from the fights for bench-space and disputes with station security. I was a little chilly, so I got out my  jacket. The only other customer stared at me, open mouthed. “Is that a springbok jacket?” he asked. Of all the Lotterias in all the Train Stations in all the cities in all the world, what were the chances that the only other person in this one, at 2:30 in the morning, would be a Capetonian named Derek? We had the kind of conversation that happens when you randomly meet another South African in a strange country in the early hours of the morning: where in SA are you from? Where did you study? Do you know so-and-so? He went off, chuckling at the randomness. I think I might have believed I’d hallucinated it had I not caught a glimpse of him getting off the same train as me as we arrived back in Daegu. The last remnants of weirdness about spending the night at Seoul Station trickled away as I relaxed into the inexplicableness of life. If Derek ever reads this, he should he did a great job of brightening my morning.

I bought my ticket home, now that the machines were working again, and whiled away the next few hours reading and writing and occassionally wandering. At about 4:30am, the station began to fill up and slowly returned to its usual, busy, bustling self. At 5, I had another coffee to tide me over until departure time. I managed a couple of hours of broken sleep as the train swept across Korea before finally heading home.

I am absolutely no worse for the experience. It was totally worth it to see an old friend. I even relish a little being able to add to my repertoire of stories ‘The time I spent the night at Seoul Station’. I feel a little bad that I was unable to let my friend know I was okay – my cellphone couldn’t get internet and his wasn’t working in Korea, but other than that, no harm done. It was a little bit of an adventure: a day trip that ended with me sitting on a bench in Seoul Station, writing, at 3:52 in the morning.

40th Busan International Kite Festival

I have a soft spot for kites. In fact, it’s somewhat of a family thing. They’re pretty and fun and watching them is a great way to while away an hour or two. So, I was pleased to discover there would be a kite festival happening in Busan this month. I was even more pleased when I discovered that they’d moved the dates so that it no longer clashed with my trip to Seoul.

I got moving a little later than expected but decided to go anyway, figuring that getting out of town and seeing a new part of Busan would be fun either way. The KTX from Daegu to Busan takes just over an hour and winds through beautiful rivers, hills and farmlands. A cursory search of the internet had suggested that there were two ways to get to Dadaepo Beach for the festival – bus or subway and bus. I chose the latter because I was a little worried about time. I was struck again by the contrast between the Daegu subway, new and shiny and modern, and Busan’s more down-to-earth, slightly run-down version. I bought a day-pass (3500 won) and went down the stairs to the dimly lit and 70s-looking platform. The station was the last on the line (Sinpyeong). The carriage slowly emptied stop by stop until it was just me and a mother and son. I felt the familiar tingle of nervousness at being in a completely unfamiliar place as the train emerged from the subway and we disembarked.

I was still not at my destination but 20 minutes on bus number 2 got me to the Dadaepo Beach stop. I stood on the pavement at an unfamiliar bus stop in an unfamiliar city with no beach and no kites in sight. Nine months in a foreign country is a great way to learn not to panic. The trick, I have discovered, is to pick a direction and start walking. Along the road and around the corner, I spotted a brightly coloured kite fluttering in the distance. I crossed a road and found a policeman directing people and traffic, which seemed a lot of security for a kite festival but what do I know? It made more sense when I noticed a temporary stage set up on a paved square with a sound-check going on. Beyond that, down a hill and along a slightly muddy road, I found the beach.

The number of kites flying above the beach wasn’t huge. This may have been because I arrived rather late – there wasn’t all that much activity around the tents on the beach, either. There were some huge octopus-like kites soaring in the breeze, however. They were beautiful. Blue and pink and multi-coloured giants fluttering above us. In between, smaller kites bobbed in the breeze. Some were birds, some just shapes. My favourite was a full, rigged, pirate-type ship. Some were anchored in the sand, like the big kites. Others were flown by adults or children. I loved looked at them and seeing all the colours and shapes. As I was walking along the beach, looked at them all, someone started flying a 2-stringed, 3-story triangle-shaped kite with two long, long tails. I couldn’t see who was flying it through the scattered people but he or she was good at it. The kite twisted and circled and danced in the sky.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of this type of competitive stunt-flying going on, but there were groups of men standing around who I gathered from the whistles and the tension were involved in competition. It took me ages to figure out what they were doing. The kites they were flying were fairly ordinary looking pale squares, each no bigger than about 50cm square and with a round hole in the centre. It wasn’t until I saw one of these kites flutter down without its string that I realised they were kite-fighting. Anyone who has read The Kite Runner will have some idea of what I’m talking about. The two kite-flyers battle it out as each tries to cut the other person’s string with his line, without getting trapped and his own string cut. It was fascinating (for a while at least) to watch the desperate silent battle high in the air.

On the other side of me, a far younger and more modern crowd were harnessing the wind in a very different way. In the shallow sea-water where the river meets the sea were the kite-surfers. I haven’t seen anyone kite-surfing in ages. There is something about the power of the wind and someone flying across the water under that power that is particularly beautiful. Behind a dark grey layer of cloud the sun was tilting towards the horizon and the light shining on the water silhouetted the surfers and their kites against a silver sea.

I walked along the beach towards the rocky hill at the other end, enjoying the light and the water and the ordinary, precious moments: the man standing on the sea-shore with his little daughter, a Saturday afternoon beach-soccer game, a couple walking along the sand. Against the rocky hill at the end of the beach there is a wooden boardwalk. I climbed the stairs and walked along the boardwalk, enjoying the views. The beach is in a little bay, so there are no real expanses of the open water, but the views are still beautiful.

As 5pm approached, people were starting to pack up and leave, although the kite-fighting matches were still going on. As I walked back towards the road, there was increased activity in the direction of the stage. In the open area down the hill from the stage, I noticed that the single police bus that I’d seen on my way down had been joined by three others. Food stalls had been set up and a crowd was starting to gather. In the open square area, where the stage and chairs were set up, I sat down to change my camera batteries. Once I was sitting down, I saw that there were many more people in the square. To the side, I saw an ambulance parked. People were milling around in front of the stage and being moved back by volunteers in orange vests. I saw men in suits and women in high heels and people wearing blue sashes over their shoulders. There was something about the energy that was so familiar – I could almost feel the adrenaline of eventing coming back to me.

And then I saw a photographer. In Korea, people wandering around with large, expensive-looking cameras are a dime a dozen. Everywhere I go, there seem to be people taking pictures of each other, sometimes in groups and sometimes in amateur photo shoots. This wasn’t one of those. Over one shoulder, he carried a fancy tripod, over the other a particularly large and impressive looking camera. Instead of taking pictures of pretty Korean girls or family snaps of the groups of people, he was walking the area, trying to see the stage from different angles. He obviously knew what he was doing. After looking at every possible angle, he wandered off to the side and had a cigarette. Thinking about it now, I do hope he didn’t notice me watching him but his presence and the way he was acting were a clear sign to me that something important was going on. I decided to stick around and see what happened.

I didn’t try and get a chair, most of which were already full of Korean families, with children running around and mothers pushing prams and grandparents getting settled. I sat off to the side and just watched. A group of people in sleeping bags arrived and walked the open area in front of the stage. Ok, not actual sleeping bags but the kind of puffy long winter coats that make the person look like he or she is wearing a sleeping bag.

Before long, the sound of drums and gongs started in the distance. A group – I assume the same people who had been wearing the sleeping bags – were marching onto the square in a procession, all in traditional outfits. The front person carried a flag and all the others had drums or gongs or cymbals. They wore white with black waistcoats and yellow and blue and red sashes and the strangest white hats that looked as if they were wearing bundles of candy floss on their heads. They processed past the chairs and into the open area in front of the stage and dancing and playing their instruments. In all my time in Korea, one of the things I haven’t managed to see is traditional music and dancing. It was great to find it by accident today. The music was so different. It is strange to think that traditional music using the same instrument (drums) that I’ve known for so long, can be so different to what I’ve known. The dancing was different, too. I’m so glad I saw it.

After the dancing, a swing band played lovely music. Just as they started, the sound system distorted badly and two people, obviously the ones running the show, tore across the square to fix it. I had a moment of nostalgia for my days of running events. I listened to the band for a while but the evening was getting colder and I had a long trip home and increasing activity of the police and volunteers and people in suits suggested that the evening may shift quite rapidly to speeches and other things in Korean, so I headed back to the bus stop. The bus took ages to get back to the station, but I had a lovely time looked at all the things in the city. I may not have been paying that much attention because I definitely thought I saw a chicken shop called ‘Syndrome’, a bakery named ‘Alientots’ and a bus stop for the ‘Korea Cast-Iron Pig Refinery’. Also a sign for one of the suburbs (Gu) of Busan which has taken the tradition of each place acquiring a trite and often inappropriate adjective (‘Dynamic Busan’, ‘Colourful Daegu’) to another level, calling itself ‘Nice Jung-gu’.

A trip back on a particularly smart-looking KTX and I reached Daegu feeling tired and hungry after the sea air but still managed to stop and pick up a lemon meringue cupcake before taking the bus home. Kites, beach, silver-sea and traditional dancers – a good afternoon. Oh, and the cupcake was delicious.