Friday, March 12, 2010

Yes, Some Who Wander are Lost

Saturday. I'm hungry; my fridge is empty. I decide to go to E-Mart.  I've been there once, I know one of the buses that stops there...noooo problem.

Wrong.

The ride to the E-Mart was ten minutes. The ride home was three hours. (For those who are unaware of the significance of this, I could have ridden to Busan, on the southern tip of the country, in four). As I boarded the #1 bus, which I had arrived on, and settled into my seat, I was rather pleased with myself for not having gotten lost. It was two stops later that I realized that we were heading AWAY from home, and that the determined little Asian man at the wheel was not planning on turning around any time soon.

Not even for a silly little American girl whose eyes have just grown wide at the realization that she is headed into uncharted territory with no cell phone and no ability to communicate her address to the bus driver, assuming she knew her address. Which she didn't.

I saw three options:
1. Hop off at the next stop, find a bus going the other direction, and hope it went by my apartment. If I ended up in the middle of nowhere, I had food and a pocketknife.
2. Give myself a tour of the city and see where bus #1 ended up. Eventually it would reach the end of the route and turn around.
3. Wander back three rows to the boys who had been talking about me for the last fifteen minutes (quietly practicing their English of "Hi, how are you? Where are you from? You are cute.") and see if I could borrow a cell phone.

The boys amused me, and I didn't want to ruin it, so I decided on option number two.

So that's what I did. I gave myself a tour of Incheon. And Gimpo. And Hyundai.

And I ate cookies made in France and sold in Korea as I looked out at Asian shops with American posters in the windows and thought how fascinating the world is.

All the while, I filed away information on the Blue Bus #1 route:
3 middle schools
2 elementary schools
1 high school
1 Incheon Civic Center
8 Outdoors and Sports stores
17 clothing shops
1 tall clown on stilts handing lollipops to teenagers
1 Buddhist temple
2 parks with Asian trees and waterfalls
10 bars for Koreans
2 bars for foreigners
3 very skinny roads where a bus like ours should not have been allowed
1 stunning view of the Han River

Eventually, the bus did come to the end of the route. The bus driver tried to motion me off the bus, but I shook my head and tried to indicate that I wanted to stay on and keep him company on his way back (I was, by then, the only passenger). We played back and forth between American and Korean sign language for awhile, until I gave him the name of my town and he shook his head and muttered and indicated that it would be a long time till we got there. I nodded and smiled and sat back down.

By the time I got back home, I was tired, but my head was spinning with pictures from the city and countryside, and I went to bed happy.

I could end the post here and save myself the embarrassment of continuing, but I'm off work for the weekend and my apartment is warm and I have nothing better to do.

So, the next day was Sunday. And I wanted to go to church. In English. So, I took my trusty map of the subway system, and a piece of paper with my director's phone number in case of an emergency, and wandered out to my bus stop to find Bus #81, which, I was told, would take me to the subway station in Geomam.

It did. And the subway took me to the station at Gimpo, where I transfered subway lines. And that subway took me into Seoul, where I got off and started wandering the streets, trying to follow the vague directions I had been given to the church.

I found it. There are stories worth telling about the next seven hours, but not in this lovely post about being lost. We shall skip to after the single's activities and dinner, when my new friend, Jon, and I boarded the subway to head home. Jon was the only other person in the ward who lived out in my area of town, so he decided to travel back with me and see where I lived so that we could get together sometimes on the weekends if we were bored. We did just fine until we hopped the 81 bus to head back to my apartment. It should have been a 15-min. ride.

As it turned out, the bus never went by my apartment. I don't know why. Except that I am doomed to be lost all the days of my life. After we rode the 81's short circle route a couple times, we hopped off and caught another 81, hoping this one would make the right stop. It didn't. We got back on another 81, which was actually the same as the first one. The bus driver recognized us.

We got off. Walked to another bus stop. Got on. The bus driver was now quite perplexed.
We got off. And decided perhaps we should try a different bus. We got on a #78.

At one point, I made Jon get off the bus with me because I saw a Paris Baguette breadshop and thought my apartment must be nearby. Jon didn't bother to tell me until we had gotten back on another bus that Paris Baguette has shops on just about every corner in Korea.

Through the whole thing, he was grinning and teasing me and having a great time. He thought it was sooo hilarious that I didn't know where I lived and couldn't find it. He said he had been meaning to just hop a bunch of buses one Saturday and orient himself to the city.

And really? It was a lot of fun. Riding buses around with a martial artist who is in love with literature, people, sleeping under the stars, watching sunsets on mountain tops, and trying to take a chunk out of world hunger by teaching economics, really made for a good evening.

The 78 didn't go by my apartment...

But, hey, the 76 did.

1 comment:

  1. You simply must write a book about all of this when you get home!

    ReplyDelete