Daily Commute

For the last 4 days I have commuted roughly 1 hour in each direction between where I am staying in Itaewon to COEX in part of the downtown area alongside the Hangang river. COX is the exhibition / convention centre and Itaewon is a raunchy night-club district, and Hangang = Han River.  I used the convenient and extensive subway system serving the 10.1 million people who live in Seoul, almost half of Australia's population in a densely packed few square km.

This daily commute brought me into contact with the average man or woman in the street, which was good, although there were a good few stares following me around the train carriages. Still, the locals were genuinely friendly. The journey started in Itaewon on line 6 travelling NE towards Cheonggu where a change of lines was needed to line 2 going south across the Hangang to Jamsil and COEX at Samseong (Samsung?). After a few iterations of this journey, I rapidly came to the conclusion that Seoul has one of the best rapid transit systems anywhere. The 8-carriage single deck trains were long and spacious and , by my calculation, able to handle maybe 2000 people per journey. The interior shot provided here shows an almost empty carriage today. Each carriage typically has LCD screens carrting information about route, location, exit side, and that kind of thing.

Another great feature of the system is the provision of a barrier to the track aty each platform with a line of doors that correspond exactly to the train's doors - see the second photo. So, people cannot fall accidentally on to the track or be pushed three in some sort of scrum. I suppose, too that the barriers insulate waiting passengers against winter cold.

The line travels above ground in areas close to the Hangang. The next groupd of photos shows something of Korea's dense urban development needed to house 10+ million people in a small area. Housing, workshops and high capacity freeways make up the next few pictures.

The high rise housing blocks are humungously large and densely packed; the roads are jammed much of the time; and buildings are often many different shapes and sizes.

The final pciture taken from the train shows the river almost in flood after exceptionally heavy rain ... well, it is the monsoon seaason. Lines of housing blocks fill the background.

AS