Post-100: Ilsan Bus Stop in the Rain, “An Amateur Sociological Analysis”

I snapped the above picture while waiting for bus #1001 in Ilsan on Sunday afternoon. I was returning to Bucheon after visiting at the hospital (see post-99).

It’s a seemingly-humdrum scene, but there’s actually several interesting things going on here.

(1) Teenagers Riding Public Buses. The two umbrella-clutching figures you see are high-school girls, wearing backpacks which are obviously weighted-down by books inside. This was 3 PM on a Sunday. These being Ilsan kids (Ilsan is on the wealthy side), they are no doubt going to one of their many hagwon (supplemental education institutes, such as the one I work at, as of this writing). In the USA, teenagers generally don’t ride public buses, of course. Certainly not well-off teenagers! “It’s dangerous”. I’ve seen elementary-school-age Korean children riding the public buses alone — inconceivable in the USA I know. In Korea, nobody is scared of being attacked on the bus; nobody would think twice about “letting a kid ride the bus alone”. I like the utter safety of general Korean public life, and lament that the USA I knew growing up was not…quite…like…that. That’s the way a society should be.

(2) Monsoon. Look at the sky. All of Sunday looked about like that. And all of Monday, and some of Tuesday….. Korea’s monsoon rains are not usually very vicious, but they are certainly persistently-depressing. There was no break in the total cloud-cover all day, with occasional rain. In my place of birth in Virginia, summer rains tend to be short and intense, then sunny. I am not used to a blotted-out sun for days on end. / Actually, on Sunday I had no umbrella, myself. A young man whose father was in the hospital kindly gave me an extra as I was leaving.

(3) GPS-Based Bus Arrival Notification. At the top of the picture you can see a device that says “1001 — 11분 일산서구청”. “1001” is the bus running from Ilsan to Bucheon’s Sang-Dong neighborhood (near where I live and work), taking about thirty minutes on a good day. The cost is about $2.00. The sign informs the bus rider that the bus is set to arrive in eleven minutes (11분), and it gives the bus’ current location (“일산서구청“, West-Ilsan City Hall). The buses in the Seoul metro area are now all, AFAIK, being tracked with GPS. This is highly useful.

(4) Dieting Advertisement. Points #1, #2, and #3 above are all aspects of Korean culture that are different from what we’re (I’m) used to in the USA. Some things, though, just cross all cultural boundaries: The advertisement on the bus shelter claims that you can lose 10 kilograms (22 pounds) in four weeks!, using their special dieting method.

There are a couple of other things I could comment on in just this humdrum little photo. The wide sidewalks, the very-short shorts of the high-school girl (which — no joke — may have gotten her mother, at that age in the ’70s, into trouble with the police), the greenery (an extension of the amazing urban park anchored on Jeongbal Hill in the middle of Ilsan).

The cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words is proven again.