"Hey
what do you mean we're too drunk to ride the
Subway
Sidetracks
by Donald Burns The only place I’ve ever seen a hot-dog vending machine is the Seoul subway. I’ve been surprised by trilingual religious crusaders, legless-singing-blind men and the occasional battalion of gray-padded riot police guarding entranceways. But nothing amazes me more than the sight of uniformed schoolgirls riding safely on late-night trains. I like the subways in Seoul. If you fall asleep and leave a briefcase on the overhead rack, nobody steals it. No apparent vandalism or graffiti, either. The big billboard ads that line the walkways are tempting targets--flimsy two-by-four meter pieces of plastic stretched over light boxes--but nobody bothers with them. The Seoul subway is the world’s seventh-largest, about 100 km of track and just under four million daily passengers. (New York’s system, by comparison, has 440 km of track and moves two million people daily.) I’d rather be driving my car, of course, but lately the traffic is so bad that I’ve even given up on taxis. On the other hand, had I been sitting idly on the Kyong-bu Expressway instead of changing trains in the City Hall subway station, I might have missed three separate exhibits set up along 90 meters of concourse walls. This simultaneous-triple-expo included: An architectural contest, a map-and-photo history of Seoul’s past 600 years and some kind of trade-show promoting plumbing fixtures--thought I’d wandered into the Seoul "toilet exchange," with gleaming sinks, faucets, bathtubs AND a big tank of goldfish. OK, so maybe this last exhibit was not exactly Sea World. (Eventually I figured out that its theme was water conservation, but people seeing it will be taking twice as many showers.) On the subway, people sometimes go out of their way to help a stranger, or students will try to get a little rap going to practice their English. As a rule I really hate being approached by strangers--unless, of course, they happen to be attractive women. Oink. Foreigners always attract attention on the subway, which is especially annoying late at night because a high percentage of the adult-male passengers appear to be drunk. Late at night that subway air reminds me of the old bar car on the Long Island Rail Road, and there are plenty of accidents waiting to happen: At Ewha Station--which has one of the longest escalators I’ve ever seen--I watched a wobbly, teetering man safely stagger down about 30 meters, a virtual free-fall had he slipped. No problem, that time, but maybe the police should set up a few sobriety checkpoints at the subway turnstiles. At Shindorim Station, 7 PM, the car doors open onto a crowded platform. To get off the train, people start pushing, shoving and squeezing their way past the inrushing mob--let the games begin! Once outside, we inch our way toward the stairs at the end of the platform. Up ahead, an old man is squatting dead-center in the exit stream, smoking, oblivious to the crowd tripping over and around him. His job consists of clearing his throat and making loud sounds like a sink backing up: "K-A-R-U-G-H-K-K." I can’t figure out what he needs--an ashtray, Roto-Rooter or the Heimlich maneuver. The platform is cold and very windy, and I don’t feel any warmer shuffling past a little bonfire that is blazing in one of the trash barrels. People slink past this hazard, pretending not to notice, slowly advancing towards the end of the platform to a very wide stairway--maybe 25 meters long--that is jammed with people coming from the other direction. I know it’s just the evening rush hour as they stare ahead, climbing towards us, but the scene is straight from Night of the Living Dead. At 9 PM, return trip, the Shindorim platform is even more crowded--now it’s bulging with people, and there is a serious possibility that somebody could get knocked onto the tracks. Horn-blaring express trains go racing past, but the subway is delayed--very unusual--and we haven’t seen a train for Inchon or Suwon in 20 minutes. When the train finally shows up, it’s the usual pandemonium: People scramble desperately to get inside, barging in immediately so that the passengers inside must fight their way out. This results in temporary gridlock, and everything comes to a standstill. A three-year-old maybe one meter high disappears under the crowd. Then a gate-crasher tries to cram himself inside, but he's too fat and the doors rebel (finally he gives up--to everybody’s relief). If this same scene were to occur in New York, somebody would get killed. For me, getting on and off these trains is no challenge because I outweigh most everybody in Asia. The train finally leaves Shindorim, and we are packed in so tightly that whenever somebody moves, a human wave ripples through the train, knocking everybody off balance. Somebody sneezes--dammit, forgot my little face mask at the dry cleaners. Those surgical masks that you see people wearing are one of the best ideas I’ve seen over here, but if I wore one back in New York I’d be laughed off the subway or shot by a transit cop. When my near-empty train finally pulls into Suwon Station, Generation X comes bursting in, all students--hustling for seats, animated, squealing and hyper. My only fear about riding the trains here is that I’ll go soft; I’ll need my subway-survival skills back home. Meanwhile, the Seoul underground inspires all kinds of upbeat possibilities for big-city dwellers like myself--riding relaxed on late-night trains, for example. When I see young schoolgirls riding the subways here unafraid, I’m reminded of a scene from the mid 1960s, my mother’s lecture just before my first solo excursion on the Queens E-Train. At the time I was barely 11 years old, but seven words adequately conveyed all I needed to know about riding the subway: "If you go alone, don’t get lost." (Originally published in the Korea Times) |
