Seoul, Korea
Wednesday. 13 November 2019
Our generous professor gave me about three hundred dollars worth of scholarly (his) books at our meeting, so my reading time is predetermined. In the meantime, I had to locate a dry cleaners. The Korean Tourist Bureau is extremely helpful, and indeed, they located a dry cleaners nearby. It was barely raining when I set out, and I did not bother with an umbrella, so determined was I to have a dry-cleaned sweater.
I was given written directions and the exact address of the dry cleaners, but the welter of business-announcement signs—capitalism runs rampant here—rendered my written directions of little assistance. By this time, rain was coming down more intensely. Somehow, I stumbled into the correct commercial building, and a smiling Korean at the front desk read my note and listened to my request: Dry cleaning? In Korean, “dry cleaning” is “dry cleaning.” “Shopping” in English is “shopping” in Korean. Very convenient. Koreans use many unadulterated English words. But that doesn’t make it easier to locate that which the word signifies.
Either the smiling Korean door person hated foreigners or felt I needed exercise. He waived me out the front door to the entrance just outside of a flight of stairs and pointed. The dry cleaners—he had understood “dry cleaners”—- were in the basement. And so down I went, and down, and down narrow basement stairs that descended six stories below ground level. The dry cleaners was on the first basement level, at the bottom of six levels. I unknowingly stepped out of the stairs at the second basement level. Decades passed while I searched throughout the wrong level before I understood my error. Hours wandering past restaurant after restaurant, a Burger King, some very nice restaurants, a Thai massage parlor, a graphic design shop, more and more restaurants, all obviously thriving, all side by side, warrens and warrens of small restaurants and apparently the same many restaurants on all of the other six levels. Certainly the same on the first level, where the dry cleaners was finally located. How can they all thrive? Doesn’t anyone cook at home?
Hours devoted to mundane maintenance leave little time for scholarly research.
I took an elevator up from the lowest basement to street level. I walked home in serious rain. The waterproofing in my boots gave out midway. Swirling in the wind and rain, yellow leaves were falling like snowflakes artistically patterning the gray sidewalk.
PS Lots of photos in my album but no way to upload them.App incompatibility? Updated program hates me? Who knows. Very disappointing.
