Morning of the 10th, cab excitement
I guess there's nothing else to mention from the conference.
I'll just put clearly some information that's come up already but not in an organized way. Specifically, I was staying at KIAS for he entirety of my stay in Seoul, and KIAS is located in the city but not downtown, pretty far out actually, near a subway station called Hoegi.
So, now I'll try to give a bit better coverage to the morning after the conference ended, when I went to N Seoul Tower with DG. I forget exactly what Prof C was calling this tower. Maybe Namhansan Tower? I think in Korean it is not called "Seoul Tower" but "[Name of the *part* of Seoul it is in] Tower." It looks a bit like the Space Needle (Seattle) or the CN tower (Toronto). Now, the plan that had been arrived at the night before was:
* meet at DG's hotel at 10.
* the hotel had a shuttle to Dongdaemun Market
* subway to Myeongdong
* taxi from there.
Where the taxi would need to take us was to the base station of a cable car which would take us to the top of a small mountain where the tower was. Prof C. had written as much in Korean in my notebook for me to show to the driver. She also had written something to show a cabbie to get us back to DGs hotel and something for lunch. The lunch one never got used: DG insisted on Bulgoki. I think Prof C was right that he ought to have had Kalbi but what can you do? And the Bulgoki was excellent.
Anyway, so what had not been clear to either of us was that "meet at 10 and catch the shuttle" was a terrible plan because the shuttle departs on the hour. So when I arrived at 10:02 we'd probably already missed it and if we hadn't, then we did while I was going to the bathroom. So instead we took a taxi to Dongdaemun. Which made very little sense: the original plan involved going to Dongdaemun because it's one of the places the hotel has a shuttle to, not because it makes that much sense in general. If one is going to hop a taxi someplace and then get on the subway, it makes more sense to just take a taxi to the nearest subway station. Alternatively, we could have just taken a taxi from the hotel to the cable car station. But when we got on the subway we found that the planned subway ride was a whopping 3 stops so taking a taxi over half the way, riding the subway 3 stops, and then taking a taxi the rest of the way made almost no sense at all.
Still, it was ok, because Dongdaemun was a shopping area and DG was thinking vaguely about getting a teapot for his wife, while I was thinking vaguely about getting some clothes for my sisters, so we poked our heads around Dongdaemun a little bit before hopping on the subway. In other words, it didn't make much sense but it actually worked well.
Anyway we took the subway 3 stops and then got a cab. I showed the cabbie what Prof C had written. He typed it into his little GPS directions navigator thingie (which I will henceforth refer to as an "OnStar"). I started to get kind of a bad feeling: what kind of a cabbie needs OnStar to tell him how to get to the most touristy thing in Seoul? The only thing I could think of was that there was some regulation that requires cabbies to go by the OnStar so they can't take you for a ride.
My bad feeling got worse when we passed Seoul Station. If the route to the tower goes past Seoul station, why did the plan have us getting off the subway somewhere else? On the other hand, it was already pretty clear that the original plan was rather oddly formed. Then the OnStar was telling the cabbie to make a U-turn. This made DG extremely suspicious. But actually there's nothing suspicious about that per se. It's rather common in Korea that you have to drive past where you're going to the next U-turn lane, make a U-turn, come back, and make a right instead of being allowed to make a left. So at this point I was juggling the sense of an imperative to reassure DG that there was nothing suspicious about the U-turn thing with my own misgivings. And also the debate: are we being taken for a ride or have we merely failed to communicate effectively? Is this guy dishonest, incompetent, or is it just that Prof C's handwriting is illegible?
About then, our cabbie pulled over next to another cab and called over for help. So, that confirmed that even with the OnStar he didn't know what he was doing. He turned back to us and said we needed to "transfer bus." He said he would take us to the bus station. This struck me as pretty unacceptable. I was by now pretty sure he was just really new at this, rather than deliberately cheating us, but at any rate I knew we wanted a cable car not a bus. I thought we ought to get down and attempted to convey as much to him without success. On the other hand I knew that D would have been able to tell what I was trying to do and did not join in. Also D had been expressing his own misgivings for some time. So it seemed to me that D was content to be taken to the bus station. So I figured what the hey and sat back. About 15 seconds later D piped up and made the driver let us out.
Somehow the information that our desired destination was a cable car station, as opposed to the tower itself, did not reach D prior to the postmortem on what just went wrong which was conducted as soon as we were out of the taxi, and did reach him then. He was a little cross at me for not telling him sooner, and thought that it made a big difference. Maybe he was right. It had not occured to me that this "bus" might actually be the cable car we wanted and it was just a matter of the guy not knowing the English word for "kei bul leu kah."
I'll just put clearly some information that's come up already but not in an organized way. Specifically, I was staying at KIAS for he entirety of my stay in Seoul, and KIAS is located in the city but not downtown, pretty far out actually, near a subway station called Hoegi.
So, now I'll try to give a bit better coverage to the morning after the conference ended, when I went to N Seoul Tower with DG. I forget exactly what Prof C was calling this tower. Maybe Namhansan Tower? I think in Korean it is not called "Seoul Tower" but "[Name of the *part* of Seoul it is in] Tower." It looks a bit like the Space Needle (Seattle) or the CN tower (Toronto). Now, the plan that had been arrived at the night before was:
* meet at DG's hotel at 10.
* the hotel had a shuttle to Dongdaemun Market
* subway to Myeongdong
* taxi from there.
Where the taxi would need to take us was to the base station of a cable car which would take us to the top of a small mountain where the tower was. Prof C. had written as much in Korean in my notebook for me to show to the driver. She also had written something to show a cabbie to get us back to DGs hotel and something for lunch. The lunch one never got used: DG insisted on Bulgoki. I think Prof C was right that he ought to have had Kalbi but what can you do? And the Bulgoki was excellent.
Anyway, so what had not been clear to either of us was that "meet at 10 and catch the shuttle" was a terrible plan because the shuttle departs on the hour. So when I arrived at 10:02 we'd probably already missed it and if we hadn't, then we did while I was going to the bathroom. So instead we took a taxi to Dongdaemun. Which made very little sense: the original plan involved going to Dongdaemun because it's one of the places the hotel has a shuttle to, not because it makes that much sense in general. If one is going to hop a taxi someplace and then get on the subway, it makes more sense to just take a taxi to the nearest subway station. Alternatively, we could have just taken a taxi from the hotel to the cable car station. But when we got on the subway we found that the planned subway ride was a whopping 3 stops so taking a taxi over half the way, riding the subway 3 stops, and then taking a taxi the rest of the way made almost no sense at all.
Still, it was ok, because Dongdaemun was a shopping area and DG was thinking vaguely about getting a teapot for his wife, while I was thinking vaguely about getting some clothes for my sisters, so we poked our heads around Dongdaemun a little bit before hopping on the subway. In other words, it didn't make much sense but it actually worked well.
Anyway we took the subway 3 stops and then got a cab. I showed the cabbie what Prof C had written. He typed it into his little GPS directions navigator thingie (which I will henceforth refer to as an "OnStar"). I started to get kind of a bad feeling: what kind of a cabbie needs OnStar to tell him how to get to the most touristy thing in Seoul? The only thing I could think of was that there was some regulation that requires cabbies to go by the OnStar so they can't take you for a ride.
My bad feeling got worse when we passed Seoul Station. If the route to the tower goes past Seoul station, why did the plan have us getting off the subway somewhere else? On the other hand, it was already pretty clear that the original plan was rather oddly formed. Then the OnStar was telling the cabbie to make a U-turn. This made DG extremely suspicious. But actually there's nothing suspicious about that per se. It's rather common in Korea that you have to drive past where you're going to the next U-turn lane, make a U-turn, come back, and make a right instead of being allowed to make a left. So at this point I was juggling the sense of an imperative to reassure DG that there was nothing suspicious about the U-turn thing with my own misgivings. And also the debate: are we being taken for a ride or have we merely failed to communicate effectively? Is this guy dishonest, incompetent, or is it just that Prof C's handwriting is illegible?
About then, our cabbie pulled over next to another cab and called over for help. So, that confirmed that even with the OnStar he didn't know what he was doing. He turned back to us and said we needed to "transfer bus." He said he would take us to the bus station. This struck me as pretty unacceptable. I was by now pretty sure he was just really new at this, rather than deliberately cheating us, but at any rate I knew we wanted a cable car not a bus. I thought we ought to get down and attempted to convey as much to him without success. On the other hand I knew that D would have been able to tell what I was trying to do and did not join in. Also D had been expressing his own misgivings for some time. So it seemed to me that D was content to be taken to the bus station. So I figured what the hey and sat back. About 15 seconds later D piped up and made the driver let us out.
Somehow the information that our desired destination was a cable car station, as opposed to the tower itself, did not reach D prior to the postmortem on what just went wrong which was conducted as soon as we were out of the taxi, and did reach him then. He was a little cross at me for not telling him sooner, and thought that it made a big difference. Maybe he was right. It had not occured to me that this "bus" might actually be the cable car we wanted and it was just a matter of the guy not knowing the English word for "kei bul leu kah."
posted by GB at 6:28 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home