South Korea: Beoseu Hell

For Sunday, October 16, 2011

Seoul

This day I had a flight to Jeju, a subtropical island off the southern coast of South Korea. I woke up at 9:30 AM, packed up my things, and was out the door by 10:30 AM, although I almost forgot my drying clothes and my toiletries. I just need a few more times to practice packing before it comes naturally. Keren (from Australia) was heading to Jeju as well, so we traveled to the airport together (we ended up on the same flight as well). Sadly, my very small pliers didn’t make the security cut, and I had to leave them behind. At least I haven’t needed them yet, so maybe I won’t ever need them. We departed Gimpo airport and an hour later landed on Jeju.

Seogwipo

Keren and I parted ways, and I took a limousine bus to the hostel Backpacker’s Home in Seogwipo on the southern coast of the island, about an hour’s drive. It’s common on Jeju buses for there to be an announcement a minute or so before the next stop about the names of the next stop and the stop after that. However, the next stop is called “this stop,” and the one after is called “the next stop.” If you’re not listening carefully to the sometimes fuzzy, barely audible loudspeaker voice, you’ll hear, “the next stop is place you’re going,” and you’ll get off at the next stop, totally oblivious, and then your only ride leaves you behind. That’s what happened to me one bus stop—and several kilometers—before my destination. The buses on Jeju have no English support whatsoever. All information about bus routes and stops are labeled in Korean. You have to know in advance the direction you need to go and the name of the stop you need. The drivers speak almost no English and could barely understand my pronunciation (which, admittedly, is terrible). Sometimes it almost seemed like willful ignorance, because I showed the address of my hostel written in Korean by the hostel owner, a native Korean, to several drivers, and they barely understood where I wanted to go. Maybe the address didn’t indicate a clear bus stop or something. I would have paid dearly for an English translation of the bus routes and time tables, but there seemed to be none to be had. So I had to gesture and repeat and try different pronunciations to somehow get my meaning across, and it usually worked out, but with an occasional mistake or worry that I missed my stop. I didn’t mind that there wasn’t any English on the signs or the drivers didn’t speak English, but I wished that the tourist information centers provided translations of bus information so I could have my own reference. If I had known all this in advance, I would have made my own reference. Anyway, fortunately, at that moment a Christian Korean was passing by and gave me some napkins wrapped in plastic adorned with Christian imagery. He helped me figure out how to get back on track, and I arrived only about twenty minutes late. I spent an hour or so reading the maps and other tourist papers I got at the airport and put together a plan for what to see when. By the time I was done, it was dark, so I asked a hostel employee to recommend a restaurant that had an English menu, and I had a delicious kimchi stew for dinner across the street from the hostel. Done with the meal, I crossed back to the cafe in front of the hostel and had a Tsingtao beer and read until bed time. Beoseu is the romanization for the Korean word for bus, pronounced something like bo-soo in English.