Arrived in Korea

After a sleepless night, 24 hours of travel (including eight or nine hours of layovers) we landed in Incheon, Laura at 4 p.m. Korean time, me at 6.  It took about an hour to debark, go from the gate to immigration, collect our bags, and go through customs.

Apart from the queue, immigration is easy.  You present your passport and arrival form (pretty much your name, sex, DOB, passport number, where you're staying, and reason for visiting) to the officer, he flips through the passport, digitally takes a photo and fingerprints, and then waves you on.  Unlike U.S. immigration agents, and like every other country's immigration officials, he seemed unsuspicious and frankly a little bored.  Customs was even quicker: I handed the customs officer my declaration (which said I had nothing to declare), and he waved me on after the most cursory glance.

From there we caught the metro to Seoul Station.  It works pretty much like the Paris Metro.  Automated ticket kiosks with an English option, go through the turnstile, and then wait for the metro car.  The cars look like the ones in Paris, only cleaner and more modern.  Various stops allow you to get off and hop on another line.  The electronic signs and announcements are in Korean, then English, then Chinese and Japanese.  The female voice always sounds delighted or otherwise pleased with herself.

At Seoul Station we went up about seven escalators and got a ticket for the KTX train.  I was pretty well exhausted and heatstroked, so I wasn't interested, but Laura and her coworker Miki got noodles while we waited.  The train was a lot like the metro, maybe not quite as clean and modern, but the seats were more comfortable.  Both the metro and the train have TV sets that show Yonhap News, a semi-private but quasi-governmental agency.  The presenters all look like teenaged girls in suit jackets.  There were occasional long TV commercials from the foreign ministry denouncing Japanese territorial claims over the island of Dokdo/Takeshima and past aggressions.  I've read we should expect to still see a lot of official indignation over Japanese colonization.

We got off at Cheonan (the train runs all the way to Busan), then caught a taxi to our hotel in Asan.  The taxi drivers do in fact drive a bit like maniacs, but seem very practiced at it.  It's strange to read the road signs, as not only are they bilingual, but they follow the general color scheme of U.S. highway signs, green for directions, blue for services, etc.  Even highway number signs look like our interstate symbols, with the red and blue shield.

So to bed.  The next day:

The parts of Seoul we saw were ultra-sleek and ultra-modern, but Asan has a slightly more lived-in feel to it, comparatively.  Like any city in upstate New York, only a little denser, and where the residents don't appear to have given up on life.  The people you see around seem to be younger on the whole; the women are all pretty and the men a little awkward, and everyone is universally thin.  Younger people are taller, while the older people are much shorter, probably due to changes in diet since WWII and the Korean War.  Short at home, I'm above average here.  I'm not used to seeing the tops of so many heads!

The hotel lobby and restaurant are nice, but we got stuck in one of the older rooms.  It's still nice, but between old cigarette smoke (there are no non-smoking rooms here, the bellhop told—I suspect that's true of most Korean hotels) and humidity, every surface feels sticky and gross, but visual inspection suggests everything is quite clean.  The humidity is a result of the A/C being a mere halfhearted nod to Westerners, the Koreans don't seem to mind heat, either in the air or in their food.  Though the thermostat is set to 20°C, the room temperature is actually 27°C.  Sluggish, indifferent air blows down from the register with little discernible effect.

The bed is hard as a board, and all the bed linens appear designed to be slept on top of, not under.  Pillows are likewise quite stern, and there is but two of them for two people.  We mean to try to switch our room to one of the newer ones tonight, though whether this means softer beds, or better A/C, is unknown.

About language: seems like about 40 percent of the signage is bilingual, and some of the English is a little odd (KTX suggests passengers "refresh your life with a train", for instance), but no more illiterate than some of the signage you see in the U.S., written by native English-speakers, which is a testament to the earnestness of Koreans in learning English.  Nevertheless, life would be easier if we knew Hangul, the Korean script [edit from 2021: no, it really wouldn't], since a lot of things aren't written in English, but one suspects Korean is peppered with a lot of Western loanwords, only written in Hangul.  The celebrated invention of the Joseon king Sejong the Great (15th c.), Hangul is both alphabetic and syllabic, in that individual sounds have their own letters, and these get combined into a glyph for each syllable.  

Most younger Koreans understand English quite well, or at least don't let on if they don't understand you.  They are less good at replying in English, however.  When I talked to the clerk at the desk, she made it known that A/C is not provided 24/7, suggested I could control the temperature with the "electrical box" (thermostat), and, when I persisted, said they would look into it, so sorry.  Though merely mildly confusing to me, I get the impression the exchange was embarrassing to her.  Somewhere, I imagine, a plush anime puppy is being ruthlessly stabbed, and it's her fault and she knows it, all because she couldn't help the sweaty bearded man and his A/C.  But she knows way more English than I know Korean, so, if anyone is stabbing the plush anime puppy, it's me.

Now I'm going to go explore the neighborhood on foot and take some pictures.  If I find a cheap noodle shop and a convenience store today, I'll consider it a success.