狂ったブログ

It’s not every day that you wake up not knowing what country you’ll be going to bed in that night. In fact, before yesterday that had never happened to me. In any case, it happened when we woke up yesterday faced with the fact that our application for a certificate of eligibility to apply to change the status of our residence (i.e., work visa) had not finished processing, and our 90-day temporary permission to stay (i.e., tourist visa) was about to expire. We made our way to 成田 airport, which is almost 2 hours from 東京 proper, and after some final calls to the immigration office to see if the paperwork had somehow miraculously finished processing, we found ourselves looking for the cheapest tickets out of the country. The best prices we found with a not-quite-exhaustive search of the ticketing booths was about 6万2千円 each for round-trip tickets to 서울 for a flight departing an hour later.

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I’ve never been to a country where I couldn’t speak at least several dozen phrases in a local language (although this is only true if you include English as one of the local languages of Delhi), so it was a bit daunting to arrive in 서울 with nothing but a food-related vocabulary. We went to the bookstore and picked out Lonely Planet as the best of a small number of options to assist us in our 48-hour stay. In it we found a motel that was foreigner-friendly, offered Internet access, and seemed affordable, so I decided to call them. A lady answered and said “yes please sure” to everything I said, including “how do you get there?” and “can I go by train?” Nevertheless I took it that they had vacancy and we opted to take a bus to 안국역.

When we got to 안국, we stood around looking stupid for a while thinking about our next step. We had a listing for the motel, and some possibly useful maps in the back of the Lonely Planet guide, but were a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of connecting those two with our surroundings. While we stood there, a lady approached an asked us in English whether we needed help. I explained that we were looking for this motel. She asked whether we had made reservations there already, and I told her that we had not. She recommended her guesthouse and we said that we were interested, so she led us to a small shop and exchanged some words with the proprietor, who was the landlady of the guesthouse.

The lady that was so nice to help us, as it turned out, lives in Paris with her husband, though they are currently staying in Manila. She was fluent in French, so we ended up communicating in a mix of French and English (her English was better than my or Lucía’s French, but having a backup was helpful when one language failed, and it made it easier for her to sometimes be able to speak fluidly in French after a time of struggling in English).

So here we are now, in an empty guesthouse. The guesthouse is two floors of a five-story building, and the lady was the only other guest. After helping me pay the landlady for both last night and tonight, she left to visit with her family this afternoon. The guesthouse is quite spacious and is located in 인사동 , which for the moment is giving us our only view into what 서울 is like (or for that matter, 대한민국).