The Seoul Subway

After our Sunday morning meeting with Jake, our customer service rep from the printing plant, Dan and I decided to see some sights. We had done the thirteen hour flight with little or no sleep and hoped to extend that throughout the rest of the day so we could better adjust to Korean time, waiting for night before sleeping again.


We survived the first day without getting arrested, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. We discovered the Seoul subway system and decided to find the city’s key tourist sight, the Gyeongbokgung Palace. The subway system here is very extensive and for a tourist, a cheap way to get around and see how the average person lives and commutes.

There are over twenty-one million people in and around Seoul, making it the second largest metropolitan area in the world. Imagine a city seven times larger than the entire Phoenix metropolitan area. Dan said that when he gets home, he will never complain about traffic again (or for that matter, two and a half hour flights back and forth to the Midwest). Getting around Seoul isn’t that bad, as long as you don’t have a problem with crowds. And since I was born and raised in a town of 747 people, it is hard for me to be around this many people without being extremely aware of it. The subway was standing room only on a Sunday afternoon. We couldn’t imagine what it would be like during the work week.

I am pretty fluent in speaking Chinese, well, as long as the conversation doesn’t go beyond, “Hello”, “Goodbye”, or “I am an American and I don’t speak Chinese.” And Dan can give an incredibly convincing “Hello” in Japanese, but, unfortunately for us, people in Seoul speak Korean. So we were forced to navigate our way around by pointing at a map, handing over 10,000 won, and then hoping that was enough for the subway tickets and that the guy was pointing us in the right direction.

Generally, it is not that difficult to find someone who speaks English. (In fact, I recently read that South Korea plans to teach all children’s educational courses in English by 2010.) It is just that you can never seem to find an English-speaking Korean when you want to ask if what you are about to do is illegal or not.


We purchased our subway tickets, found the right subway going the right direction, made a transfer to another subway without too much difficulty, then arrived to the Gyeongbokgung Palace. I slipped my ticket into the out-going door, the gate opened and I exited. Dan put his ticket in the slot, his door buzzed and the gate remained locked. We looked around, not quite sure what to do. Dan tried again. It failed again. I told him to jump over the gate like they do in the movies. Dan pointed out that there were security cameras and that me bailing him out of jail would not be the best way to start this trip. (It would have made for a great blog entry though.) Finally, Dan was saved when an attractive young lady pointed out an emergency exit several gates down.

Having been to the Forbidden City in Beijing, China a couple of times, I looked forward to seeing the Gyeongbokgung Palace. They are incredibly similar in design and layout, except that, unlike the Forbidden City, this one doesn’t have a Starbucks in the center of it. We enjoyed an hour long tour and a quick stop into the National Palace Museum next door.

We took a different way back on the subway, getting off once to wonder through some neighborhoods just to get a feel for the city. Then, after arriving to the stop by our hotel, we ran into the same problem trying to exit, only this time it was both of us and there was no emergency exit to bail us out. Finally, with some coaxing from an older gentleman signaling for us to crawl under the gate, we made our escape, scrambling up the subway stairs. Then, like fugitives not looking back, we quickly blended into the mill of the crowd on the sidewalks above.

I guess if we want to stay out of jail, we will have to figure out what we are doing wrong with those subway tickets.

-dane