Out and About in Korea

We’ve arrived in Korea and are safely ensconced in our son’s apartment on the campus of the school where he teaches in Seoul. What a joy to just hang out with the grandkids! Most of the time I understand the language they speak, although my grandchildren are learning to speak Korean. When we pester them to perform Korean for us, they lapse into one-word expletives that feel like little crumbs dropping from the table of their multi-lingual lives. We swell with pride at our obviously advanced progeny and ignore the fact that we would never know if the language is being spoken accurately. It really doesn’t matter anyway. The point is to swell with pride at our obviously advanced progeny. It’s taken me the better part of sixty-eight years to figure out that self-delusion is the spice of life.

The family apartment is a pleasant little bubble of America floating in the vast ocean of Seoul’s profoundly Korean culture. Inside that bubble, things like the NBA playoffs, Thanksgiving turkey, and midwestern accents cling to a tenuous existence. Korea threatens to pour in at any moment. For instance, if you open the refrigerator you will get a blast of Hangul (Korean Writing) that can nearly take your socks off. Raiding the fridge in Korea is not for the faint-hearted since most of the labels are unintelligible. “It sure looks like mustard, but it tastes like hot pepper lemon paste!”

A serious observer would ask, “Why would one travel for over thirty hours wedged into undersized airline seats to a foreign country just to hide out in a three-bedroom American oasis?” It’s a fair question—annoying, but fair. The honest answer is that getting out and about in Korea can be a little scary. It’s scary because the cultural practices and perspectives of Koreans are different.

Let’s take for instance a casual greeting between strangers. When you drive down a country road in North Idaho you wave to everyone. You may never have seen them before, but you wave anyway. If they fail to wave back at you, then you know they are from foreign parts, like Seattle. If you tried to walk down the street in Seoul, waving to everyone you met, they’d be putting your arm in a cast in short order. You just can’t wave to that many people all at once, it’s an anatomical impossibility. Out of a sense of self-preservation, people ignore each other as they crowd their way along the streets of Seoul.

However, if you see someone you know, it’s polite to bow to them. The etiquette of bowing also eludes me. For a casual acquaintance, there seems to be a quick bowing of the neck that is roughly equivalent to the one-finger wave over the steering wheel. But for true friends and neighbors, there is a full-fledged bow that I failed to master during our dance unit in PE.

I personally think I look foolish and stilted trying to mimic the oriental greeting bow. I’m better off with a little flick of the wrist and a friendly, “howdy!” After all, why shouldn’t Koreans get the benefit of an American greeting? But I do find that I offer and receive back my credit card with two hands and a slight nod. The Korean ritual of transferring credit cards between cashier and customer is simply charming, like exchanging a little treasure.

The real challenge in being out and about in Korea is the vast contrast between the American and Korean sense of space. For example, take a normal American parking space you’d find at your local grocery store. You’d park a single car in it, right? Then it would be full, completely occupied, no room for anything else. Not so in Korea. After you’ve parked a car in a normal American parking space there is still room for Koreans to park another car, four motorcycles, a delivery truck, and build most of a condominium. And if you took too long in the grocery store they’d be adding a parking lot on top of the condominium.

This means that when you are walking down a street no wider than a midwestern cowpath, you’ll be sharing it with shoulder to shoulder pedestrians, car traffic going both ways, and delivery scooters slaloming their way through. As an American, the first time I saw Korean traffic, I reached for my phone to call 911. Actually, I think it’s 119 here in Korea. But you get my point. I thought there was going to be carnage for sure. But Koreans just took it in stride and everybody seemed to get where they were going. It’s a kind of cultural magic trick.

Now I think you may be getting the idea of why getting out and about in Korea is a bit of a challenge. In most places we frequent across America, going out means hopping in our faithful Equinox and motoring down well-marked roadways. It’s not that roadways in Korea are unmarked—they are marked in Hangul. Misreading them can have slightly more significance than ingesting odd sauces. I have no intention of venturing onto a Korean roadway behind the wheel. Waving to those I meet would be the least of my worries.

This leaves public transit, which is extraordinarily well thought out and amply available, again in Hangul. Buses labeled in strange stick and circle characters whiz here and there taking passengers lots of places. I’m sure I’d like to go to some of those places, but I’d only know after I got there, and how in the world would I ever get back.

Subways are more negotiable. Stops on the railway lines are labeled in English. It is actually an exciting adventure to plot a trip out to destinations like the airport or a shopping mall via the subway system. And if you time it right you don’t even need to worry about finding a seat. Wedged and pressed into a mass of humanity traveling the subterranean world you couldn’t fall down if you wanted to, although there is always the concern that a sufficient mass of passengers will disembark where you want to get off.

There are taxis, of course, and in Korea they are amazing. They’re everywhere, they’re clean, and they’re cheap. The only caveat is that you have to be able to explain to your driver where you want to go. I’ve tried various methods for crossing the communication barrier with taxi drivers. Pointing to a map app on the phone sometimes helps. Traveling to major points of interest that you can say clearly is the best way to go. And if you’re not fortunate enough to find a driver with a smattering of English, many seem quite capable in charades.

Now we come to our most common way of getting out and about. That is we simply walk down into the local neighborhoods. It is a bit slow, exhausting, and good for our health. It is an intimate visit with Korean culture to journey down the mountain from our apartment into the wonderful morass of humanity jammed cheek by jowl in the surrounding communities. We saunter by doorway after doorway amazed at the confluence of commerce, residence, and neighborhood life that compacts itself into every square yard of Seoul. And it’s so nice on the tired end of our adventure to pull out our son’s business card with the school’s address printed in Hangul and flag down a taxi. That’s when out and about becomes an oh so pleasant, “We’re back!”