KTX bathrooms

Generally, public bathrooms in large heavily trafficked areas of Korea are really really nice. I'm talking about places like highway rest stops, Seoul Metro stations, and the like. I've posted previously about nice bathrooms in the Seoul Metro, and more recently about female bathroom cleaners in men's public restrooms.

In that last post I mentioned that I'd never before seen a sign saying that men should not use the bathroom while it was being cleaned by a female employee. The sign was in the KTX (bullet train) station Dongdaegu.

Recently in our local KTX station, Singyeongju (i.e. "New" Gyeongju), I saw a more typical sign, warning about the presence of a female cleaner but not suggesting that anything should be done about it.

The men's bathroom at the Singyeongju station is really really nice. Take a look at this:

Those are urinals on the right; the stalls are on the left. Separating them is a natural wood partition with each section designed to look like old-fashioned Korean-style courtyard doorways. On the back wall is a photo of a traditional Korean village. Just visible on the left, decorating the walls and doors of the stalls, are pictures of iconic Gyeongju archeological treasures.

And check out this specialized stall. Remember, this is the men's room.

Agi-rang hamkke 아기랑함께 means "together with a baby"

If you really need to sit on a toilet and you've got an infant with you, you're pretty much out of luck in most public bathrooms. But not here.

Fold down the little seat, strap the kid in, and do your business while entertaining (or consoling) the little tyke. The inside walls are decorated with cartoony, kid-friendly images: balloons, flowers, etc.

This post is about men's bathrooms

This is not the first post on this blog about men's bathrooms, and I suspect it won't be the last.

On my way to Changwon 창원 last weekend, I changed bullet trains at Dongdaegu 동대구 station. The train I got on was actually two trains stuck together. It was announced that after pulling out of the station, the train would separate and go to two different destinations.

Two trains joined

But I digress. This sign was hanging on the wall just inside the entrance to one of the sizable men's rooms at Dongdaegu Station.

Korean, English, Chinese (in a notably ugly font), Japanese

There is an Asian zone within which female employees clean men's public restrooms while they are in use. It includes China, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand, but I haven't traveled widely enough to provide exact boundaries. I have had on more than one occasion the experience of peeing at a urinal while a middle-aged woman is standing behind me mopping around my feet.

It's hard to say to whom this is more degrading, or whether it is degrading at all. It's a cultural phenomenon that I just can't wrap my head around. In cultures that are traditionally quite conservative when it comes to keeping the sexes separated, it's never made sense to me that you would have women watching men relieve themselves. On the other hand, the women are usually quite old; perhaps they are considered desexed by age.

Whether or not this is related to the fact that in these same countries (and Japan) it is typical for men's bathrooms to be situated in such a way that passers-by can get a glimpse of men peeing as they walk past the open door I can't say. (For pictures, see the last half of this post.)

Anyway, the unusual thing about the sign reproduced above is that it claims that the bathroom is closed during cleaning. I've never seen a sign like this before, and I wonder if it's an attempt to "Westernize" the public face of Korea (much like the "walk on the right" campaign)—a theory supported by the use of multiple languages. But nobody was falling for it. The bathroom was briskly in use, men walking in and out completely oblivious to the female workers doing their job inside. None of those workers were young or smiling like the lady in this picture.

Sanso

We are spending our last week in Korea with Erma's parents in southeast Korea, not too far from Gyeongju. In a few days we will return to Seoul to pack up for our flight home.

As noted in a comment to an earlier post on street addresses in Korea, the government is switching over to a street-address system more like that used in the US. We saw direct evidence of this in a new sign attached to the side of the building where Erma's parents live:

"So this is Jigok Street," Erma helpfully remarked, supplying an appropriate quote for this blog entry, "Who knew?" This isn't a small street by any means. It looks like this:


In the lobby of the building there is a sign up informing residents of "your new address".

Korea is a fairly small country and that makes it easier to do certain things than in the US. The widescale changeover of the address system can probably be done more quickly and efficiently than I would imagine in the States. Another nice thing about small-sized Korea is that you can ship items by taekbae 택배, home delivery service, quickly and cheaply from any place to any other place in the country.

I'm not that familiar with the satellite navigation systems currently available in the US, since Erma and I don't have one in our car. But I suspect that certain features of the Korean system are missing in the US systems, again because of the relative sizes of the countries.

Here's Erma's dad driving with the navigation system on.


The software knows the location of every single speed-enforcement camera in the entire country, as well as the speed limits on every stretch of road. So as you approach an enforcement camera, the system measures your speed and issues a warning if you are going too fast. You can see here that we are approaching a camera (marked by the yellow triangle) in a 100-km/h zone. Erma's dad is driving at a law-abiding 97 km/h. The symbol on the lower right of the screen indicates that a tunnel is coming up in 2.2 kilometers.


The reason we were all in the car was to visit the ancestral gravesite of Erma's family, located about four hours away in southwest Korea, out in the countryside.

The graves are cared for by a distant cousin with the same surname (a seventh cousin, to be precise) who lives here:


There are a mix of buildings, some in the older Korean style, others of concrete or brick. The cousin is a farmer, so there are also some greenhouses around the property:


Here's Erma with her sister, aunt, and father, heading up past the greenhouses toward the burial area.

Korean graves are traditionally marked by mounds of earth. Of course, for ordinary people the mounds are much smaller than the massive mounds marking the graves of Shilla royalty in Gyeongju.


Most of the mounds are unmarked by gravestones. But it is not uncommon for descendants to collect money and erect gravestones, so some mounds are marked with stones that were carved within the last decade or two. Erma's father and his siblings had paid to have several gravestones erected. The "youngest" relative we visited was Erma's great-grandfather. The graves go back many generations before that.

We made the round trip in one day, which meant eight hours in the car. Some of it was on the Gyeongbu Expressway, which Erma's father informed us is part of AH1--Asian Highway 1, which runs in a nearly unbroken line from Tokyo in the east to Turkey's border with Bulgaria. It's the first I'd heard of the extensive Asian Highway network. (The Wikipedia article has a good map detailing the network.)

The rest stops along Korea's highways are far nicer than anything I've seen on American interstates, and the bathrooms in particular are impressive: clean, comfortable, and attractive. Many are decorated with polished marble. Some play classical music and other have elaborate water sculptures. There are even little baby-sized toilets for small children. We stopped at Geumgang 금강 for dinner. According to Erma's father, Geumgang has the best rest stop in the whole country. The public bathrooms have giant picture windows along the extensive back wall looking out over a scenic river. (Since we were there after dark we unfortunately didn't get to enjoy the view. It may have looked something like this.)

But there is one very odd and unsettling thing about public bathrooms in Korea. They seem to all be deliberately designed in such a way that men peeing are visible to passersby of both sexes. (I noticed something similar in Japan. But not in China.) For example, I took this photo at the Geumgang rest stop, from the doorway where both men and women enter. (Men proceed to the left, the direction I'm facing, women to the right. It was pretty nerve-wracking taking this picture, since there was a lot of traffic going in and out, and as you might imagine I didn't want to get caught photographing people using the bathroom.)

Even in small bathrooms in restaurants and bars, where the men's room might have just one urinal and one toilet, the urinal is invariably placed along the one wall where it will be visible from the hallway when the door swings open.

The bathroom in the restaurant we ate dinner at is a good example. Men and women share a doorway leading into an outer area with a sink. Straight ahead is a stall for women; next to it on the right a stall for men. If you look to the right after going into the outer area, you can clearly see the urinal.

True, there is a panel which blocks the view of the urinal from the threshold of the door. But it leaves the urinal clearly visible to anyone exiting the women's stall. Here's Erma coming out after doing her business.

No! Don't look to your left!

Oh, the humiliation.


It seems hard to square this whole urinal situation with the traditional conservatism of Korean culture. But perhaps it has roots in the relative openness of bathroom culture in the countryside. (I remember in the early '80s in China, rolling past open farmland in trains, and seeing peasants squatting out in full view to do their business. But I can't say whether Korea and China have any commonalities in this regard.) There's also a certain underlying assumption of sexlessness that perhaps ameliorates any embarrassment that might otherwise be expected from these bathroom setups. Unlike in America, public bathrooms here aren't closed for cleaning. It's quite common to walk into a public men's room and find a middle-aged woman mopping the floor. (I don't know if middle-aged men clean women's bathrooms.) In fact, once at Severance Hospital, one of these ladies vigorously but matter-of-factly mopped around my feet while I was peeing at a urinal.

Jihacheol

It turned rather suddenly from summer to autumn this week. When we arrived it was still hot, muggy and in the 80s. Then one day the weather just flipped, and since then it's been drizzly and cool, with highs in the upper 60s and low 70s. Erma and I keep expecting the heat to come back -- in Seattle, the transition between seasons is hesitant and full of reversals -- but it looks like fall is here to stay.

Enough about the weather ....

Seoul has a fantastic subway system. When Erma last lived here, it was a simple relatively thing of four lines. Now it's a sprawling octopus with eight main lines, a ninth under construction, and a number of inter-connected commuter train lines. It probably should be considered in the same league as some of the great metropolitan subway systems like those of Tokyo, London, and New York. While some of the cars on the older lines are showing their age, the cars and stations on the new lines are beautiful. And most of the older stations seem to have been renovated recently.

Here's a map of the system, to give you an idea of its scope:


We get on the subway at Shinchon, about a 10-minute walk from our apartment. From there it's easy to get just about anywhere. The trains run at frequent intervals, even on weekends and holidays, and you barely lose any time when transferring from one line to another.

One of our first trips on the subway was to Homever, one of the large Korean discount department store chains (think Target), to buy some necessities for the apartment. Interestingly, the Homever is located inside the World Cup soccer stadium. (The World Cup was jointly hosted by Korea and Japan in 2002.) This gives it a rather odd shape, elongated and curved, as it follows the donut-ring circumference of the building.

The subway station at the World Cup soccer stadium seemed brand new. It was completed in late 2000, and I suspect that one reason that the line and its stations were built so nicely was in anticipation of the crowds of foreign soccer fans that would soon be pouring through it.

(It seems, sometimes, that countries like China and Korea make infrastructure improvements not for the sake of their own people, but out of fear of shaming themselves before Westerners. That's the attitude that was behind the celebrated ban of dog-meat sales before the 1988 Olympics here, and that is now behind the campaign against public spitting underway in Beijing in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics. Whatever the motivation, though, you can't quibble with the results.)

Before we headed up to Homever, I needed to pee. I knew the bathrooms in the department store would be fine, but I thought it would be a good idea to try out the subway bathrooms. Knowing how user-friendly they are could prove useful in a future emergency situation.

Well, the bathroom at the World Cup Stadium metro station was so nice that after I used it, I waited until everyone else had left, pulled out my camera, and took a few pictures. You'd never find a public bathroom this nice in the US.

Here is the entrance to the bathroom:


And here's the gleaming urinal area of the men's room:

I think the lone urinal on the far wall is for handicapped and/or children. About half the stalls had toilets, and half were squat toilets. (If you don't know what squat toilets are like, you can see a description and pictures here.)

We did finally make it out of the bathrooms and up to Homever. We were pretty surprised to find a very large contingent of riot police, complete with riot buses and riot shields and riot helmets and riot sticks, lolling around outside the entrance to Homever. They didn't appear to be there to buy inexpensive household goods, but on the other hand they didn't appear to be there to stop a riot, either. Mostly the young men were sitting around on benches trying not to fall asleep.

I wanted to, but didn't dare, take a picture of them. In this picture you can see one of their buses in the background, and if you look carefully at the larger picture you should be able to see the protective metal mesh on the windows.


There are a number of other great things about the subway besides the bathrooms and the fast and efficient transportation. For one thing, the signage is fantastic. Not only are there clear route maps at all the stations and on all the trains, but in every station there is a schematic three-dimensional diagram of the station (some of them are quite big and complicated, with over a dozen exits) and a little neighborhood map that shows places of interest in the immediate vicinity of the station. This is the one in the World Cup Stadium station:

If you take a close look, you'll notice that each place of interest appears to be labeled in three languages: Korean, English, and Chinese. In fact, this is a false impression. The three languages are actually Korean, English, and Korean again. I'll explain more about this in a future post.

Another great thing is that in many of the newer stations, there are glass walls separating the platform from the track, so that it is impossible for waiting commuters to fall in front of a train. The glass walls have doors in them, and the train stops at a precise location so that its doors line up with those in the wall. We saw these glass walls on the Singapore subway when we were there in 2000, and they were being retro-actively installed in many of the Hong Kong stations soon after that.

Some of the older stations in Seoul are also getting the retrofit treatment. This is the Shicheong (City Hall) station. You can still see some of the protective tape at the bottom of the newly installed doors.


But probably the best thing about the subway system is the great T-Money card, very similar to the Hong Kong Octopus Card that Erma and I came to know and love six years ago. Like the Octopus, the T-Money card is a rechargeable transit card that can communicate with other devices over short distances. This means that you don't have to slide or touch it to card readers -- you can just wave it nearby. If it's in your wallet or purse, you needn't bother taking it out, you can just hold the whole wallet or purse over the reader. And, like the Octopus, the card is turning into a general form of electronic money, usable at a number of retail outlets. Here's Erma using her card to get to the subway platform at the Shinchon station:


The reader, which controls the gate, lets her know that 900 won (about $1) is being charged from the card (that's discounted off the regular fare of 1000 won), and that a balance of 3300 won remains. (Depending on how far you travel, you may be charged a few hundred additional won when you exit.)

Many of the larger subway stations have small shops in them. When we went to the baseball game, the station by the ballpark had a baseball paraphernalia shop in it. Here's a picture of the window display:


Perhaps this is where all the Koreans are buying their MLB baseball caps!

But wait ... something's wrong. Take a look at that male mannequin. He's wearing a Red Sox jersey and Yankee pinstripe pants?!?? Shows what Koreans know about American baseball.

Erma and I have been keeping an informal and unscientific tally of baseball caps seen around Seoul. Red Sox and Yankees caps are definitely most popular, with Yankees caps seeming to hold a slight edge. Next most popular are the Chicago White Sox.

I still don't know if people are choosing these hats randomly, according to fashion or aesthetics, or based on knowledge of the teams.

I could go on with even more detailed descriptions of the subway, but if that's the kind of thing that really interests you, you'll just have to come over and ride it yourself.