Transport Troubles

I’m not sure that this is really ‘blog worthy’ but it was probably my most problematic day yet, so I thought I’d enlighten you all.

Yesterday I got up early and my friend Dorrial and I had plans to go to Costco to pick up some North American goodies. The Costco is fairly close to our apartments (about a 4 minute cab ride) and it is fairly well known. We hailed a cab and told the driver where we wanted to go. He began taking us in a direction neither of us had been before. Eventually we got out Dorrial’s Costco card and showed him the logo and it turns out he had no idea where he was taking us. Frustrated because the meter was going and we didn’t know where we were, I told him to stop and we got out. The nice thing in this situation was that he didn’t charge us for the cab ride and we ended up finding our way on foot.

After Costco I had a nice brunch on the beach with some girls from work and then returned back to my apartment to pack my things and head to work.

I had recently learned of a subway card that is a monthly package and it turns out to be much cheaper than what I’m doing now so I decided to go to the subway station 30 minutes early (leaving myself plenty of time) and purchase it. I went up to the machine and put the setting on English and then pressed the button to get my card. Everything was going well until my card got stuck in the machine. I had to call for help but that is difficult to do when you can’t speak Korean.

Eventually someone came to fix the machine and after quite a bit of waiting he was able to get the door open and start tinkering around. By the time I got my card it was 2pm (I was supposed to be at work now) and I still needed to put funds on it. After everything was resolved I ran to the entrance of the subway and quickly got on hoping that I wouldn’t be too late for work. Well this surely backfired when I realized that I had gotten on the subway going in the WRONG direction.

Extremely frustrated I got off the subway and decided that my best option was to ditch the subway and take a taxi (it would be faster and more direct). I got up to the street and hailed a cab and told the driver where I needed to go. (Until this point I was still fairly confident in my ability to tell people where I need to go in Korean). Well I think I was overconfident because he too took me to the wrong place. Getting evermore agitated, I called my Korean friend Jasmin and asked her to tell the cabbie where I needed to go. FINALLY I arrived at my destination… very late and very frazzled!

Lesson Learned: Doing simple things in a foreign country is always more complicated than you think it’s going to be.