Public Transit in Korea

It's hard to believe we've completed our first term of teaching. We have now been in Korea for 15 weeks. 3 more terms to go and we're home! I'd like to take this opportunity to detail some of our recent adventures with public transportation in Korea.

Blake and I have been getting pretty confident with our navigating skills and are becoming quite adventurous around Daegu. Last Sunday our good friends from church offered to give us a toaster oven that they didn't ever use. We were thrilled because we don't have an oven in our apartment (ovens aren't common in Korea) and it presents a whole new assortment of meal options. The only trick with this toaster oven is that we had to get it from our friend's apartment to our apartment which is quite a distance away. Our friend told us to catch the 403 bus in order to get home so we stood at the bus stop and waited for a really long time. At this point I should mention the fact that a fellow teacher had told us that any bus that had a '4' in it went right by our house. When the 403 still didn't come, we thought we'd try our luck with the 649 bus (keeping in mind we have a huge toaster over with us).
As we continued to ride this bus, we keep assuring ourselves that it was making a big circle and would eventually come back to our home. When all the Koreans got off the bus and we were sitting there alone with our toaster oven, the bus driver looked at us with a funny expression on his face. We said, 'Bummuldong?' (our home) He laughed and laughed at us and gave us the thumb for us to get off his bus. So Blake and I and the toaster oven got off the 649 and found ourselves on a little travelled highway at 11:30pm with no sidewalk and no lights. Feeling quite stupid at this point! Koreans stare at us white people as it is, let alone being on some abandoned road stumbling around in the dark lugging a huge toaster oven. We had no money on us and and we were a little concerned when we couldn't find any taxis. We had absolutely no idea where we were and couldn't even ask anyone for help!
Well I guess we could ask for help, but it wouldn't do us any good.

A taxi finally did show and when we said 'Bummuldong' to the driver he turned and said, 'Daegu?' We were totally outside of Daegu!

We were never so happy to arrive in Bummuldong! Home sweet home! We were thankful the taxi driver let us go to a bank to get money for the very expensive taxi ride back home.

So we learned a few lessons the hard way... All buses with a '4' do NOT go to Bummuldong, always carry some extra money for those emergency taxi rides and NEVER EVER get on the 649 again!

All in all, we got a tour of the city and a deal on a fantasitc toaster oven...we just try to forget the fact that we paid for it with the taxi ride home! ;)