The Seoul Subway Saunter

It has been just over two months since the day I stepped foot on Korean soil. It is strange to say now that I have easily spent more of my time on the subway than any other place except in my bed, and even that is cutting it close some days. I have offered far more of my time to below ground commuting than I have even spent working, which still sounds like some sort of joke, even as I write it.

I am currently working as a private English tutor through a third-party company. I will get a phone call that someone would like to learn English from a real, live American. They choose a time and I make my merry way to their home for an hour to make all their dreams of properly pronouncing the letter ‘r’ come true. But Seoul is a formidable city and the subway is a metropolis of its own, complete with its own electronic currency, T-Money.

Spaghetti Bowl Seoul

After living with DC’s frightfully simplistic and terribly designed metro; confusion tinges my eyeballs just trying to comprehend this mess of lines that never end and names like Sindaebangsamgaeori that are only just beginning to awkwardly roll from my very Western tongue. There is a joke in Seoul that it takes at least 45 minutes to get anywhere here, and I am quickly learning how much closer to truth than humor that really is. The craziest part of all this is that it is one of the easiest, most efficient and most punctual subway systems in the world, leaving you to wonder how long these journeys might take if I were trapped in any other city.

According to the above map I live next to a little purple dot called Yangpyeong on the west side, south of the Han River that folds lazy across the city like a blanket tossed carelessly onto the bed. On an average day I will wake up at 8 a.m. and leave my apartment at 8:50. I will walk ten minutes to Yeongdeungpo-Gu Office station to catch the 2 which I take 3 stops to the 7. In the seven minute underground walk to transfer from Line 2 to Line 7 there are two shoe stores, two clothing stores, a bag store, a wallet store, three types of muffin and coffee places, a cell phone cover and random socks store (a surprisingly common combo here), a Dunkin’ Donuts, two different skin care stores immediately adjacent to one another, and myriad stalls offering some combination of drinks, candy, patterned socks, strange snacks, and men’s shirts. If the shoe store (I use the term store quite loosely here) is already set up when I pass, I know I am running late. I will also walk down two short flights of stairs, one unfathomably tall escalator, and two of a much more acceptable height.

I'm on time!

Before I am home on this day I will make eleven more transfers, traverse twice across most of this sprawling city, cross the river four times, and walk at least four miles including probably a mile of which is up an uncountable numbers of stairs. It’s no wonder you could easily live beneath the streets when you spend so much of your life down there. When I walk in the door at just before 9 p.m. I will have worked for five hours and commuted for seven.

In the morning hours the trains are an impenetrable mass of Koreans where your very movement is only a function of those moving around you like getting caught in a crashing wave, unsure of which way your limbs will be taken yet incapable to do anything about it. In the quieter afternoon hours there is usually a seat to be found and only the curiously judgmental glances of those wondering what you are doing here so far from the foreigners district, or a book, to pass the time. In America anyone can look American at first glance, but here in this homogeneous nation, my tan skin, wide eyes, and low-cut shirt are a sight to be leered at. Aside from the older generations who have cultivated such piercing and telling glares over many a year, the remainder of people on the ever busy rails are much more adept at acting like you never even existed, in the way that all people on subways in big cities around the world seem to have perfected.

I consistently break this most unspoken of rules and find myself scanning each and every face, studying their clothes and postures, trying to understand a language of which I know fewer than ten words. And when I zoom out and look down through the seemingly infinite line of frighteningly clean cars snaking almost silently and efficiently along the rails I see nothing but headphones in ears and faces glued to television shows playing on phones that rival the size of my laptop. Even walking between transfers it is not required to put down the TV or watch where you are going.

Green Line Afternoon

Green Line #2

So far I have ravenously devoured over 6,000 pages of literature in my first two months of subway life. But already I find myself growing weary of the endless monotony of stairs and escalators and hoards of herds ahead of me, each day taunting me with all the hours of mine they intend to steal. But without any other option I will continue to commute more than I work, and to read more than I sleep in the hopes that it stops draining me dry by the end of each day. With my eyes glued to my wide-screened Kindle that might be mistaken for a small television as muscle memory takes me effortlessly from one stop to the next, I can almost feel like I’m assimilating into Korean culture, at least of the subway variety. And there is one small victory for me in the face of this seemingly endless journey: walking up all these stairs is giving me some pretty great legs.