Ari OfsevitYou know KTX is a TGV derivative since it’s a new(ish) system without level boarding.
That said the kiddo is sitting in the vestibule asleep in a stroller and Shinkansen would never allow *that*
(Kiddo in 11 months has now been on TGV, Shinkansen and now KTX.)
(I never finished my Japan #travelthread, maybe I’ll start this one here and get back to the other.)
Okay so KTX is about as expected. Slow in the city on legacy trackage shared with commuter EMUs. Paris with new buildings and more mountains.
And local safety videos.
Seoul, Paris, with tall buildings. And nicer banlieues.
Commuter trains get level boarding and screen doors. The steps for the KTX are just dumb but then again … TGV. (This is a Rotem.)
So, how did we get here? Well the wife has a conference in Busan, kiddo follows her, I follow him. How to get to Busan? Originally, BOS-SFO-ICN, leaving 1818 Wed arriving 0430 Fri. TPACs, man. Then a train.
But there's rwy construction on 9-27 at BOS. IFR = long inbound delays.
We had a 2h layover at SFO. Our inbound was 4h late. This gave us several unappetizing options:
1) Take the original flight, get into SFO at 0200 PDT (so 0500 EDT), get a hotel for 6 hours, then get on a daytime TPAC and get in 11 hours later. Losing our MUA to J. Ugh.
2) Take an 0600 flight out of BOS to the 11-hour-later flight. Meaning waking up at 0330. Also ugh.
3) LH via FRA. In Y. On LH. Ugh.
4) Drive to BDL. Didn't *quite* have time for this (parents were willing to give the ride).
Quick aside for #3 … I was talking to someone about just casually changing how I would travel to the other side of the world, whether I would go one way or the other, something completely inconceivable 100 years ago. Kinda cool. Anyway.
5) Get a seat out of BOS to SFO via … somewhere. Except many flights had canceled out of BOS, and seats were hard to come by. The last IAH seats evaporated as I was on the phone (it went out with one empty, we needed two). ORD was sold out too.
But there was a delayed DEN flight, delayed enough that some confirmed pax dropped off so as not to misconnect in DEN. We snagged seats on that. The agent at the UC held our upgrades on the flight out of SFO even though it was an illegal connection (scheduled at 35 mins).
We gave it a go. At worst, it would mean getting a hotel in SFO or DEN before midnight rather than 0200. At best, we'd make or original flight.
To DEN loaded slowly and left 1854, favorable winds meant we landed at 2054, next plane departed at 2124, which we made easily.
Then we waited 10 minutes for a crew member, putting our onward connex in jeopardy. Turns out our BOS-DEN pilot was assigned DEN-SFO at the last minute. He recognized us waiting for our stroller, said "well, the connection in DEN was easy, since I was making that too and you don't fly without me."
Arrived SFO 2300 with 45 minutes, once we had our stroller in hand and made the walk we had about 10 minutes to spare. We were the last passengers to get on both flights.
BOS-DEN-SFO in under 7 hours is not bad!
Anyway big shoutout to Michele at the BOS UC for spending half an hour figuring out our itinerary, rebooking us, and figuring out where our infant went in their system. "Ari Ofsevit please meet the gate agent" when we landed at ICN, and some questions at immigration, but we were let in.
Okay so we got to Seoul.
I did not do this.
It was foggy.
If you’re going to build a new airport rail link with an underground terminus maybe build enough elevators! This shouldn’t be hard.
#travelthread
Some comments on ICN and the airport connection:
I forgot that ICN is only 25 years old. It feels like "airport" but it was 0430 after a TPAC so I didn't exactly see much. Will have more opinions on the way back.
The AREX rail link is … reasonably useful, but kind of funny.
So ICN opened in 2001 and AREX wasn't even under construction at that point. It opened to GMP (the airport and a major metro transfer station) in 2008, and eventually into Seoul itself in 2011. The terminal at Seoul Station is deep underground, and the elevators, as show upthread, are undersized.
ICN also had a "maglev" on-airport shuttle which was shut down because "maglev" is a marketing term for "expensive to maintain" and is being converted to a regular airport shuttle train.
But even funnier is the express portion of the Airport Railway Express.
The Airport Railway runs every 6 to 10 minutes and is a, as we found out, quite full commuter service between the airport and Seoul for about $3 and takes 53 minutes.
Or you can pay double that fare for the express train which runs every 40 minutes and saves you 10 minutes of travel time.
Meaning for nearly everyone, just take the all-stops train.
Do they have an entire extra set of platforms at both airport stations and the Seoul terminal (deep underground) for the "express" train? Indeed! Does it appear many people use the "express" train? No it does not.
Let's also get into Korean fare payment systems.
Pro: There is one system (T-Money) for the entire country (as far as I can tell). This is admittedly a big pro!
Con: The T-Money system only takes cash. No, really. You can't add money to your T-Money card except with cash.
So here is how you buy a transit card landing at ICN:
1) Find an ATM.
2) Figure out how the ATM works, by finding the correct series of buttons to press to use a foreign ATM card (it took two of us about 8 tries)
3) Get your won (50,000 won! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiny...)
youtube.com/watch?v=UinyOm...
youtube.com/watch?v=UinyOm...
In Korea I'm a millionaire. Anyway.
4) Go to the first cash-only machine near the train station to buy a T-Money card. Not to load the card, that's a separate machine. You can pay extra for a personalized card. We got whatever they had. They came in cute little cardboard boxes.
5) Go to the other cash-only machine on the other side of the hall to load your won onto the T-Money card.
6) Tap onto the train.
(At some point between 3 and 4 was "wake up the wife who didn't sleep enough on the plane. Anyway.)
In Japan, of course, there's SUICA or ICOCA (not Lee Iacoca) which you just load up on your phone, albeit making sure you have a Mastercard. In the US, many systems let you tap a card to pay. And cash-only fare cards? It's just … bizarre.
So now I have a bunch of won to use for transit and whatever else. Anyway, herein ends my rant about paying for Korean transit. Actually using it has been fine!
Now since we made our flight we had time to kill in Seoul.
#travelthread
Okay, mini-rant about the luggage storage sitch in the Seoul station: they have a few dozen lockers and the big ones are all full early, apparently even the little ones fill up, too.
We found space for enough of our bags that we could stroll the kiddo around Seoul, but … come on.
The US does this worst by not having lockers at train stations at all. Europe is generally great with plentiful lockers (Japan, too, although I haven't used them as extensively). But if the advice is "get there early or they'll be full" then … add more.
#travelthread
KTX runs something like 65 trains per day, there's a bottleneck which precludes much more service, and Friday afternoon getaways are busy! Luckily I booked ahead and found us non-contiguous seats, and we had several hours to wander around Seoul.
Goal: do not fall asleep!
Squinty family portrait (we locked away our hats and sunglasses) in front of the old city wall.
The architecture and urbanism biennale. Across a monstrous stroad with long wait times. And a pagoda. Stroads seem to be a theme of South Korea urbanism.
