Here are a few more photos of the area around Seoul Station.
Are you tired of these endless photos of anonymous buildings? Me, too.
As I went to the station to buy the train ticket, I passed a promotion for the “2006 Fifth day of Fifth lunar Month (Dano) Celebration Housewive’s Ssireum (Korean folkstyle wrestling) Tournament.” I watched it for a moment or two; there was a large crowd around, so I didn’t get any good pictures.
Once inside the ticket area, I tried to get a ticket from the machine, but it wouldn’t accept my credit or debit card, so I got the ticket from a human at a ticket window.
I went to Lotteria, a fast food restaurant at the station for lunch. Here’s what was advertised:
and here’s what the chicken part of the meal looked like. Essentially, it was chicken breast compressed into hockey puck format:
That evening I went out to the Dongdaemun market area to get a backpack for my day trip to Daegu on 31 May. I got a really cheap one for ₩5,000. It doesn’t have to last more than a week, so I wasn’t concerned with quality.
I also decided to stop at one of the large fashion stores; Doota (see their totally impossible-to-navigate web site). Noisy, crowded, with scads of people selling shmattes. After only fifteen minutes in there, I fled, shrieking.
Korea is a nation of smokers.
At the subway stop, I noticed that the map for the number 4 line looks like a big letter “S” As I took the picture, a couple of Korean guys looked at me as if “What the hell is so interesting about that?” When I explained it to them, they looked at me as if I was entirely crazy. It had never occurred to them, of course, that it was shaped like an English letter.
