Angels in Seoul

 Angels in Seoul

By Bobby Neal Winters

As I write this, I am in my hotel room on a Saturday morning in Seoul, South Korea.  I’ve been here as part of a small group which is cultivating partnerships with several South Korean universities.  We look at programs that we have in common.  We examine their similarities and their differences.  If they are too different, we cannot form a partnership; if they are too similar, there is really little point in forming a partnership.  The trick is finding that magical window where the differences add up to value-added for both sides of the partnership.

This is exhausting.

When I’ve not been meeting with university officials or going to and from meeting them on the Seoul Metropolitan subway system, I’ve been exploring downtown Seoul.

By exploring, I mean wandering out of sight of my hotel and getting lost.  Getting lost is one of my favorite things to do in a strange city.  In Seoul it doesn’t require much effort.  There are two factors that make getting lost in Seoul easy.  The first of these is there is a large number of very tall buildings.  Cross a street, walk half a block, and you are out of sight of your hotel.

The second factor is what I like to think of as the Underground City.  As I mentioned before, we used the subway.  There is a tunnel system attached to the subway system that connects it all up.  Attached to that tunnel system is an underground shopping mall.

There are tons and tons of little shops.  Hardly any of those are shops that are part of any franchise that is recognizable to an American, or at least to a Kansan.  Korean has a different alphabet than we do, but some of the signs are in Korean and English and Chinese and Japanese.  And none of that makes it any easier to pick out a landmark. 

So getting lost is easy.  The irony is that I was not lost when I first encountered the Red Angels.

When I first encountered the Red Angels, I was about 100 feet from the Plaza Boulangerie, the bakery near where our hotel connects with the tunnel system.  They were not difficult to see.  They were dressed in red--and when I say red I mean Nebraska Cornhusker red as opposed to Oklahoma Sooner red--quasi military-style attire. As the design-types say, their uniforms popped.

Given the connotation for red I grew up with, my first thought was, “Those have got to be the worst North Korean spies ever.”

But as I approached, we made eye contact and the man (there was one male and one female) asked, “May I help you?”

I declined his offer because I was not lost.

I walked a distance further and found a map of the subway system and a map of the underground shopping market, and paused to study them. I’d been there a minute or two when the earnest young man offered again.  This time he gave me a map and pointed to where I was on it.

I accepted the map, and walked off in another direction, out of their sight.  I was grateful to the Red Angels for the gift of the map.  I opened it and began to try to find where I was on it.  Because, as you know, a map is useless unless you know where you are on it.  As I was looking the map over, I was approached by someone else in a uniform.  

I don’t know if it was a policeman or a mall rent-a-cop, but he saw I had a map open and assumed that I was lost.  In uncertain English he asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m exploring,” I said. But this was beyond his English.

“Where are you going?” he asked again.

I did a quick mental calculation with regard to how likely it would be to get him to understand that I was not lost, but just exploring.  

I told him the name of my hotel.

He led me up a long flight of stairs and pointed to my hotel which was exactly where I knew it would be.

I put away my map the minute he was out of sight.  I was then able to get lost and, after a satisfying length of time, to find my way back.  It was a time well spent. 

“I once was lost, but now I am found/ Was blind but now I see.”

I will see you all on the other side.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )