::A Geek in Korea::

As the group got back to the hotel after the opera, we had a discussion with some of the other people on the tour. We decided that since we had been taken to so many crappy places in the day, we needed to go out to see something for ourselves. We grabbed a few of the revolutionary conspirators and headed out of the hotel to see the nearby Beijing train station.

I brought my GPS along, just in case, but the Beijing train station was one of those "can’t miss" sorts of buildings. It’s easily four or five times larger than any train station I’ve ever been in, and Seoul Station and some of the European train stations I’ve visited weren’t exactly small either. This thing dwarfed everything short of airport hangers in terms of scale. It was absolutely enormous.

We didn’t exactly know the protocol. They scanned luggage as you walked in the building, but we passed through security by simply waving our hands in a "I don’t know" gesture. They didn’t demand to see our tickets, since we had none, and we walked around. We went to "Store number 8" which had exactly the same things for sale as all the other stores in the building, but was located at the end of the hallway we eventually walked down. Seeing as our options didn’t change the more we explored, we went inside.

The people we were with looked into buying Chinese jelly candy, while I walked around. I did however find some things picture worthy:

 

Who in their right mind would buy that candy? Anyway, we eventually got the transaction completed despite a lot of communication problems on both sides. The Korean people my wife and I had went with didn’t know if they were buying candy or soap, which turned into a hilarious set of pantomimes that baffled the cashier. The cashiers were under the impression that  by speaking louder, Chinese was easier to understand.  My wife would also try to clarify things in English, which they also didn’t understand. They would just speak louder in response to anything we did. It was hilarious and frustrating at the same time.

The people waiting at the train station had brought blankets and were sleeping on the floor. A policeman with a golf cart would roll around, almost drive over them, then stop and pull out a bullhorn. He’d yell at them, then get out, make threatening gestures, and reach for something on his belt clip that looked like a night stick. The people would get up long enough for him to drive off, then set their stuff down, go back to sleep, and he would move on the next set of people, threaten to beat them…etc. People did eventually move out of the area as we walked through it. They were sizing up the people I was with like fresh meat, so we decided we had enough adventure for the night and headed back to the hotel.