Our first subway ride. We're waiting for the thing to come and are looking over a vending machine trying to figure out what kind of snacks Koreans eat underground when a young Korean kid walks up to the machine. I step back to let him use the vendor, and so does he. I soon realize he's not here for snackies. Dralle and I buy some crackers and Mak-seu-well Hau-seu coffee and offer a cracker to this Korean kid. He tells us he's a high school student who was downtown hangin out at the library. We talk a bit on the subway ride, mostly confirming how to pronounce the name of our coffees, and when we get to the right stop, our little buddy gets off with us. We get outside and ask him which way he's going and he snickers and says, "I'm going with you". We had a tour guide. Dralle and I had come here to the outskirts of town to hike some trails up in the mountains. Our guide took us past his high school before leading us up into the woods. The Development here is really bizarre, where it's flat, there are buildings. Where it's not, it's nature. This means at the end of town where the mountains start, there isn't a gradual decay from city to wilderness, there's a very visible line.
We wandered around on the paths, learning some Korean words and asking him questions and fielding questions for a couple of hours till it was chow time and then we parted ways. In the end, we got a tour through the mountains by a high schooler still carrying his library books, and he got a little English lesson and a good story to tell about meeting some bona-fide foreigners.
No comments:
Post a Comment