Thanksgiving Seoul Trip Part 4: Transportation

It was surprisingly easy to get around during our trip to Seoul. We took a cab from the school to the KTX station in Daegu. The KTX is a commuter train that travels all around Korea and is one of the best ways to travel. It moves pretty fast, roughly 300km/hr, and we managed to make it up to Seoul in about 2 hours and back from Seoul in roughly the same amount of time. Once we arrived in Seoul, we exited the KTX station and looked for a cab. Once we managed to get one, Amber told him where we were going and he seemed quite confused. Instead of looking at the information in Korean, he kept looking at the English words and not understanding (Amber had purposely put it in both languages so that our cab driver would understand, but that seemed confusing to him). He finally realized where we were going and said "oh... Holiday Hotel", instead of Holiday Inn. Luckily, we made it to our destination, checked in, and got ready for dinner. There are roughly 9 different subway lines that litter Seoul, and we were located between two of them, the 4 and the 6 lines. Our first night, we decided to use the 4 line, only to realize that it would have been much simpler to use the 6 line to get to where we were going. By the end of the trip, we were more than capable of traversing the subway lines without any real problems... the key is to just know where you are going and how to get there once you leave the subway, because using the subway map makes it a lot easier to get from line to line.

The KTX train is very nice and I thought it was cool. It was fun to sit and look out the window as you passed by some really large hills and mountains and could see these little "villages", more like tiny towns, that would pop up and then disappear as fast as they arrived. Some of these places seemed so small, yet they had enormous buildings, which was pretty cool. That it one thing in Korea that is pretty neat, their architectural designs. You will see all sorts of interesting shapes and colors, and plenty of buildings with huge glass windows. They have some of the coolest building designs that I have ever seen. You got to see all those things while riding the train, and it was rather comfortable. The only mishap was the fact that we had temporarily gotten off at the wrong station, but luckily made it back onto the train before it left. I would definitely take the train again because of its convenience, speed, and comfort.

The one funny thing about the train is that it functions much more like a subway in the sense that it stops only for a few minutes at the stations. You actually have to get up out of your seats and head to the doors just to stand there before you exit or else there's a good chance that you wont make it off the train at your stop. Other than that, its a perfect mode of transportation.