So arriving in Korea required a chance meeting that led to marrying my wife. We met in Australia, but that part of the arrival still brought with it a lot of the cultural shocks, learnings and joys of Korean culture. Until I set foot in Korea though, I didn’t realise just how much of it I had already become familiar with. That said, Korea still seemed to have a generous supply of surprises waiting for me.
After a smooth 15-hour flight from Melbourne to Incheon, we arrived around five o’clock in the morning. Customs was smooth, and in no time at all I was meeting my mother and father in-law for the second time, and my brother in law Seokmin for the first. We changed Australian dollars into Korean won, and then we hit the road in time to beat rush hour and get to Namyangju, on the other side of Seoul.
Then we hit our first snag. My wife and I had jumped in Seokmin’s car, and he had forgotten to fill up. Not filling up wasn’t a big deal, but his car ran on LPG. Unlike my home town Melbourne, where every station sells LPG, finding LPG proved a little less easy. We watched the fuel meter dip perilously close to empty, and finally saw an LPG station. We saw it, but not in time to let Seokmin know, and so we drove on looking for a chance to turn around.
We were filling up, but now we had lost both sets of parents in the other car. Phone calls were made, and by the time they came back and found us, dawn was well and truly broken and rush hour was beginning.
Melbourne is a pretty car-dependent city. It’s also sprawling and radial, so a peak-hour drive from the outskirts, forty to fifty kilometres into the central business district can take a long time. But it’s nothing like Seoul.
교통이 복잡하다 - The traffic was 'complicated'
And the peak lasted until almost eleven, which is I guess is to be expected in a mega-city of twenty million. Still, the slowness of the traffic gave me plenty of time to take in the sites. Later, I would also wonder why anyone would choose to take those hours of driving over the clean and efficient mass transit system, but for now it was a good chance to just look.
Incheon (I think), on the way to Namyangju
Celebrity!
As we drove alongside the Han river, I could see the traffic on the other side, equally stationary. Sleep deprived, with my brother-in-law who spoke minimal English, and my wife asleep in the back seat, I was flagging a little, but still trying to take in as much as I could. I noticed how few cars were made outside Korea (- I counted just five in over three and a half hours – Two Hondas, an Audi, a Mercedes and a VW Golf). I noticed how few cars were had a colour. Almost every vehicle was black, white or grey. I noticed the universal western ailment of giant SUVs sitting in peak-hour traffic with a single occupant. Row upon row of similar, unappealing apartments went by.
Finally, we crossed the river, went through a toll gate, and we picked up speed. As we moved further from the Han and the flatter river valley, we moved toward mountains. Suddenly, in the middle of twenty million people, there was not a building to be seen – just wooded peaks and the expressway snaking between them.
Ain't nobody here but the trees...(Creative commons license - See photo link)
I would appreciate this in other ways later, but for now, it made the journey more interesting and impressed me that there could be so much green still in the middle of such a metropolis.
Finally, we made it across the city to Hopyeongdong. We took our luggage up to my sister in law’s apartment, just like the matchbox rows I had seen earlier, and I was pleasantly surprised. It was bright, pleasant and reminded me in a lot of ways of the kind of apartments that we no longer build in Australia, now that developer needs trump those of the people who will actually live in the building. On the south side of the apartment was a long, thin room with full exposure to the sun. I sat for a while looking out at the children playing in the apartment grounds below, then stretched out on a bench underneath the window and sucked up as much of the sun as I could get through the hazy sky.
I decided the best thing for my body clock was to stay awake even though I hadn’t slept at all on the overnight flight. I acquainted myself with my one-year old nephew, the family dog and Korean TV. Then I waited for everyone to wake up and for the fun to begin.
