The next day saw me waking up late and taking a half hour bus ride to the station to meet Tara, who had been in the country a month longer than me. Though my neighborhood is considered part of Suwon, it's actually relatively separated from it (cities just seem to endlessly sprawl and mix together here, at least anywhere near Seoul). This was my first time seeing downtown in the day. In Chicago, I felt that I always had a clear sense of when I was in the city and when I was outside it, or on the edges. That hasn't been my experience here. My own apartment complex feels like it could be on the edge of a random highway just about anywhere, but only a short walk, and I feel like I'm downtown again. I suppose it's a symptom of modern city planning, when all of the development has taken place with cars in mind. But it feels like some sort of hybrid of the urban and suburban environments back home.
We ate at a quaint Indian restaurant. The owner's children played on the computer that doubled as the cash register. Jars of spices and bags of rice crowded the shelves near our table.
Other things happened that I've forgotten. I believe I shopped for clothes (since I had none but the ones I wore until my luggage was found) and food. Then we headed to Hwaseong fortress, an old stone wall enclosing a portion of the city, which used to be all of Suwon back in the day. We walked around the outside of the wall just after nightfall. A concert was ongoing somewhere close by, though the music was hard to distinguish. The wall is on a hilltop, so we were able to see for a fair distance in some places. Neon crucifixes shone atop buildings in any direction I looked. At intervals along the wall sat little clusters of exercise equipment. After a while, we found a random set of steps headed downwards, and walked through a sleeping Buddhist monastery. The white swastikas over doorways still threw me off despite knowing what they meant, or rather didn't mean. Just knowing it was a monastery made the night's silence seem even more peaceful. Bags of trash in the alleyway were covered with stray cats.
The directions for taking the bus home were pretty simple. I got on the right bus, and after half an hour, the bus turned right. This was my cue to exit, at the same stop where I had boarded the bus earlier that day. I stepped off, and did not recognize anything in my sight. A small playground of plastic dinosaurs, an odd glass wall, a street curving downward, none of it looked at all familiar. Somehow, I thought, I had gotten the directions wrong, or gotten off at the wrong stop. I walked down the hill. A major intersection, lots of construction, a strip of shoe stores on one side, glowing signs, a hospital. Still nothing familiar. I remembered an address my coworker had given me the night before. I hailed a cab, and gave him the address. He talked at me in Korean for a while, pointing at the paper, shaking his head, until I finally left the cab.
I wandered around for a while longer, feeling that each step took me further and further away. I didn't realize until later how true that was. I hailed another cab and tried the address of my school. It was a short ride, which told me that I might be in the right area. But at this point, I had little conception of how close my apartment was to the school. Eventually, I found my way back to the bus stop. With no idea what to do next, I got on the bus hoping that I was just a stop away, or that I could get back to the station somehow and start over. Not sure where it took me, except that it wasn't where I needed to go.
After several buses, each one more empty than the one before, and several attempts to communicate with my bus driver, I found myself next to a convenience store by a highway, in a place that appeared to be miles from any city. I finally remembered having written down a coworker's cell phone number, so I stepped inside the convenience store. I asked the clerk for a phone, gave him the universal hand signal for phone, even used the Korean word for phone, but his face betrayed no hint of recognition. He stood at the counter staring at me until I left.
Outside, the few other buildings were all dark. The occasional car passed by, but it was late. I was tired, and I was still carrying my plastic bag full of groceries from earlier that day. I had to pee. I began to wonder where I was going to sleep that night. Then I began to wonder if there were homeless people out there who had a home, but just couldn't find it anymore. I've been lost in a city more than once, but I could always ask for directions, or even just pull up a map on my phone. But my cell phone had no service on the opposite side of the planet, and no one spoke my language.
Having worn the same clothes for three days didn't help me feel less like a future drifter. After navigating several miles down one highway after another, headed towards impossibly distant skyscrapers, and cursing my choices countless times, I was able to flag down a cab. I seized on the only thing I was certain about, which was the address of my school that I had written down. The length of the cab ride made it obvious how far away I had gotten. I had no money at all, so I was lucky that the cabs here take credit cards.
I finally got back to the school and to a street that I recognized, where things were still open, lights were still on, and there were other people, which was momentarily comforting even if they couldn't understand me. I was able to coax a phone from someone standing nearby, and call my coworker. He wasn't able to describe the route home, so he walked over to meet me, and guide me back to the apartment, which I had been tragically close to when I first got off the bus. It turned out that if I had walked up the street instead of down, I would have seen the bus stop where I boarded the bus, which was right next to my apartment.
I stepped into my room, which still had no heat, and still didn't feel a bit like home, but was comforting in a relative sense. The bed sheets they had provided me with were bright pink. I laid down to sleep contemplating my first work day, and resolving not to take any more buses.
No comments:
Post a Comment