On Sunday, it was raining again. I thought it would be a good day to ride the subway to a random location, so I got onto the orange line here at Jeongbalsan, and rode it all the way through downtown and past the river to the southeast, and got off at Dogok. I have this idea that I will try to visit every single subway station in the Seoul Metro – not for any particular reason, except that I tend to do such a thing wherever I'm living: explore the public transportation system far beyond mere curiosity. The only subway system I've really done that with is the one in Mexico City – and since I lived there 5 or 6 new lines have been added, meaning that I can no longer even say I've been in every subway station there.
I'm wondering… perhaps if I set it as an explicit goal, and made a task of taking a picture or two at each subway station and documented my visits here.
So I wandered my way to the Daechi station, next down the line, and then proceeded to go to the Youngpoong bookstore, where I splurged and bought myself a detailed atlas (on near-street-level scale) of South Korea. I also found a quirky trilingual edition of Le Petit Prince (Korean, English, French) for only six bucks, and bought that too. I have now successfully deciphered the Korean version's first paragraph, with much help from a dictionary.
Today, we had a Halloween party at the school, for the younger kids. A few went all out and brought costumes, but, unlike e.g. Mexico, the Koreans haven't really bought into the commercialized, American-style holiday, so it's a bit of a novelty, though you do see the inevitable displays in large stores and suchlike.
One reader of this blog has observed that, based on my descriptions, Korea sounds like a gray, overcast and cloudy place. That's not really true – at least not since the start of October, when the summer rainy season ended. But, since I dislike sunny weather, I tend not to write about it much. So what you see here is my commentary on the weather I enjoy. Regardless, to remedy: today was sunny – but it was also a cool 10 degrees (C).