More Narrative

With the narrative we left off with DG getting on the bus to Incheon. After that I went back to KIAS and wrote a post on this blog, but I did want to try to do another tourist thing before the day ended so I then spent a little time trying to decide what would look good at night. I came up with two things. One of them was cribbed from a CD of Korea photos, songs, etc that had been made for me by SH (one of the grad students). He'd included a picture of Namdaemun gate at night, soo I decided to go look at that. The other one was that I thought the river (like most reasonably old cities, Seoul has a river running through it. The name of Seoul's river is the Hangang. J thinks it more beautiful than the Seine and the Thames) might be pretty at night. I think I had seen a tourism website claiming that it "lights up at night." So I hopped the subway to Namdaemun gate. (Theres's no Namdaemun gate stop, but I forget the name of the nearest stop) and looked at the gate and the nearby Xmas decorations and took a few photos, then decided it was time to eat, since people seem to eat early in Korea and I wouldn't want to miss the opportunity. So I stopped in a decent looking Chinese restaurant and got something relatively mild. Mushrooms and rice with some seafood. The water it came with was barley water. This place was near to Seoul station. On the TV was a rather strange show on which about six people were singing in a sort of chorus, and periodically one of them would be selected for a solo and perhaps squirted with water. I think the water squirt would occur if the person flubbed the lyrics, or messed up in some way. The squirting implement was embedded in the microphone, so it was sure to get them, and generally just at the moment they seemed to be thinking "oh boy! they didn't catch that! i'm going to make it through this!"

As hinted at above by the description of my meal selection, my stomach was a little dicey this evening. The day on which I felt really bad and posted about it was two days later.

Anyway, the next stop was the river. I went and got on the train and decided which of the subway stations looked like it was closest to the river. I got to a certain station where I was going to need to change and take the train two stations roughly parallel to the river to a point where it was slightly closer. I decided I might as well just get off where I was and walk a little bit, so I did. The train station itself was pretty neat. It looked like the starship enterprise. The river was less impressive than the tourism website had made it sound but was still reasonably pretty. I confess I'm still partial to the Seine, though. The area between the train station and the river was a little seedy, and I felt a little silly for not having entertained that possibility, since it seems to me the phrase "down by the river" evokes an air of seediness. Whatever.

I didn't have any trouble finding the river but did realize that the project was a little ill-thought out. And not just in the sense of the rube-ishness already discussed. In fact, the Hangang is bordered for most of its length by an expressway. So, I made it pretty close to the river and then it was completely unclear what to do. Those that know New York may imagine that I'd decided to go check out the East River without thinking ahead of time about how I was going to get across the FDR. (Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and Marine Drive in Bombay are not really good comparisons...) But it turned out that what I could do without too much trouble, (i.e., only have to dart across a couple of off-ramps) was walk a little ways out onto a bridge over the river, so I did that and took some pictures. Then I think it was home and early to bed.