Caveat: Killing time in the Tokyo Airport

The wait for the next flight is longer than expected.  So here I sit.  I should take this time to work on one of my videos, maybe. 

I already feel exhausted, and I've only done the shortest, easiest leg of this 2 stopover airplane journey.   I guess I had some busy days the last few days, with a VERY late night having dinner and beer with my friend Curt and two former LinguaForum coworkers, Ryan and Keith, and my friend Peter who was so generous as to let me crash on his extra bed in his apartment in Ilsan the last few days.  Yes, I actually drank a few glasses of beer, which is almost unheard of for me.  I think I did it as a Korean-style "show of good faith" to my friend Curt — he's one of the few Koreans to whom I've admitted that the fact that I don't drink alcohol isn't really because I have a problem with alcohol per se, but rather because I have a problem with Korean-style drinking culture (i.e. get puking drunk with your coworkers as a way of bonding with irrational management).  Anyway, we were talking and and eating 안주 until after 3 am.  This is so typical of Korea — and that's on what was a worknight, for all of them.

Yesterday, I made a weird sort of disconsolate "pilgrimage" to the Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art.  What do I mean by that?  Well… in around April of 1991, I made a trip to this museum, and it was my absolute very first time "on my own" in Korea.   I arrived in Korea with the US Army in December of 1990, but because the Gulf War was going on, we were almost constantly on "lockdown" status, and getting leave to go off base was difficult.  As a consequence, the first time for me to be able to take a day and go exploring the country as a civilian didn't come until 4 months in.  I got a "day pass" from my commander, and rather than use it to go to another post (like Camp Casey or Yongsan), I decided to go exploring on my own.

I'd been studying Hangeul, so I was confident I could decipher any location signs on e.g. trains or buses (Korea in 1991 still didn't have a universal policy of putting Roman-alphabet transliterations on all public signage, the way that they do now — at least not out and about the provinces — so being able to competently navigate public transportation required at least a basic mastery of the sounding out the writing system).  

It was a Saturday or Sunday, I don't remember.  Around 9 am, I took a taxi from the Camp Edwards gate to Munsan train station, and took a train into Seoul Station.  Nowadays, there's a subway line that goes right in front of where Camp Edwards used to be, but back then it was a slightly decrepit suburban commuter line.  At Seoul station, I got into the Subway (I think it only had 5 or 6 lines then — now it has 15 or something like that).  I had decided based on some guidebook I'd found at the base library, that I was going to try to go to the museum.  I was feeling starved for culture.

I enjoyed navigating the subway, and I got out to Seoul Grand Park (대공원역) on the blue line by around noon.  I walked up the pathways, past the smallish theme park called Seoulland (well, small back then — it seems much larger now when I saw it yesterday), and found the museum.  When I went back yesterday, I was running too late to be able to go in, as it was closing.  Back then, I went in and spent a few hours there.  I remember I bought a tshirt that didn't fit me very well, but that I was proud of because it had Korean writing on it, which was unheard of for a GI like me to be wearing. 

Back to Top