Today was the opening of the Daejeon city subway. It officially opened at 3pm today. I know the exact opening time because my wife tried to ride the subway to work today. She went to the subway station located directly behind our apartment (awesome!) and found out it wasn’t opening until the afternoon. Her bus line had been replaced by the subway as of today, so it was no longer running. She had to take another bus that dropped her off a few blocks away downtown instead and walk a little farther. Tomorrow her subway commutes will begin.
Sadly for me, the current subway system is incomplete. It is two full stops away from completion of the closest station that is nearest my school. I’ll have to wait for the rest of the line to open before I’ll be able to make good use of the subway at all. Still, being as it was the first day to actually get a chance to ride, my wife and I took a walk and got on the subway two stops away from our apartment building.
The entire area is so new. People didn’t know where to line up for tickets when we showed up. I don’t recall seeing an actual person selling tickets at all, only coin operated machines. The machines don’t print tickets like in the rest of Korea, they serve out coins that look like poker chips. These must have some sort of electronic identification on them, as you wave the tokens on the entry gates to go inside. These tokens are your tickets, and when you leave the station, the exit gate takes them back. This is more environmentally friendly than printing one time use magnetic strip tickets. The same system that the buses use to handle electronic transfers from debt cards also works on the subway, so you can ride without even bothering with a token at all if you wanted.
We entered the subway and took a seat. The train had obviously been waiting to get a full load before departing. There were electronic station doors that opened and closed in sync with the subway itself. In typical Korean style, just as the announcement for the train to depart was made, a man tried to sprint into the closing set of double doors and got rebuffed. He was lucky as the outside doors closed first. He didn’t loose a limb or get dragged down the station due to his stupidity.
However, one family freaked out when the doors closed. From what I heard from the noisy gossiping woman that was openly chastising the family said to her friends on the other side of the subway car, they had let their young daughter walk in and out of the doorway repeatedly to take pictures of her. When the doors closed, she was on the outside, while the rest of her family was inside. The girl had this stunned expression on her face as the train left without her. It was funny in a Home Alone sort of way. Her parents will obviously be sending her to therapy years later because of this event. Her parents looked for levers, door opening switches, and eventually found the emergency communication phone to talk to the driver. I’m not sure what was going on, since it’s not like the driver could turn the train around, but they got off at the next stop. They probably were going to head back to the station by taxi I would guess.
We got out and found the exit that leads directly to the area behind our apartment. While I don’t have any daily business that requires the subway use, the entire city seems much smaller now. I can cheaply go downtown, or even farther if I need to, without worrying about bus congestion or the traffic involved. The city of Daejeon got a whole lot more liveable. I can’t wait for the subway line to be finished.
