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.