...aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand the O-Train is sold out

When you live in a city of nearly ten million people, it's easy to forget that you live in a city of nearly ten million people. You only see a few hundred of them on any given day: neighbors, convenience store owners, barflies, restaurant-goers, coffee-shoppers, bike riders, bus drivers, the old ladies in the elevator, the geezers playing baduk in the park, university students, up-and-coming executives, and the singers, comedians and newscasters on TV. A million is a statistic, as Josef Stalin might've once possibly thought about saying. It boggles the imagination. It's hard for human beings to picture a million of anything in their minds. Unless it's a giant pile of uncooked rice grains or something.

The practical upshot of this mental stumbling block is that I sometimes forget that I'm competing with ten million other warm bodies for a train ticket or a seat at the cinema. Often, I neglect to make reservations for things which I really should be making reservations for. In this case, it was the O-Train.

I finally got off my duff (or rather, sat down on it) and checked out Korail's English website yesterday. I had attempted to reserve tickets on the O-Train once before on this site, and failed, because I couldn't find the specific line I sought. After the abortive attempt to buy a ticket and board at Seoul Station last weekend, I finally realized why: the O-Train is not labeled as such on Korail's booking webpage. It's just another Saemaeul-class passenger train. The key bits of information to search for online are the departure time (7:45 a.m.) and the destination (Jecheon, Gangwon-do).

So I did a search for those on the Korail pages, and the results I got were disappointing. In a way, I should have seen it coming. I had read earlier that the O- and V-Trains were so popular that they had already started up a southern version, or S-Train, in September. (And apparently there are plans for a "G-Train on the west coast and a "B-Train" on the east coast, plus a DMZ-touring train which shall be labeled goodness-knows-what.)

The S-Train. Photo by Julie Jackson/The Korea Herald.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise when I logged on to Korail's webpage and discovered that the O-Train was sold out for the foreseeable future. The site wasn't specific on when the train would stop running for the winter, but for the month of November there were no seats available.

Bummer.

Oh well. I don't want this to sound like sour grapes, but it's supposed to rain again on Saturday anyway. Time to stay in and work on NaNoWriMo s'more, I guess.