The Mass Exodus

Seoul is a city of 11 million people. Its particularly apparent during the office hours and the weekends. Thanks to a highly developed public transportation system and an almost uncountable number of restaurant and bars, the crowd is never a serious problem when you are commuting or eating out. But empty places can be a very rare experience in this fascinating city. I've been living in Seoul for close to 5 months now (actually exactly 5 months ... I arrived here on the 25th of August) and I've almost never seen an empty restaurant or bar in the heart of the city. However on the eve of the Lunar New Year, the virtually empty roads and the lifeless pubs left me surprised. There is a pub close to the place where I live, called 'All that Beer' - it serves a variety of beer from different parts of the world and has an interesting menu of anju (side dishes served with a drink). When I went there today, I was almost shocked to find out that we were the only customers (though a few other people came in when we were about to leave after an hour).
The Lunar New Year (along with Thanksgiving) happens to be the time when Koreans get away from the city to visit their families and relatives in the country. I managed to catch a glimpse of this mass exodus yesterday when we were returning from the ski resort. The Korea Times carried a report which said that some 20 million people were on the move throughout the country braving the inclement weather and the heavy snowfall. We were coming in from the east and even my Korean friends have never seen such a spectacle! On the road out of Seoul, for many miles there was a bottleneck. I was surprised to see the sheer number of buses. The first lane of the highway is reserved for heavier vehicles and for close to 6 or 7 km, there was an almost continuous chain of buses packed to capacity taking people out of the city. If each bus occupies a length of 15 to 20m, it means that stretch had close to 400 buses carrying something around 16,000 people. The other 3 lanes of the outgoing road were also packed with smaller vehicles. And this was just one of the several roads going out Seoul. My friends who used the highway early that morning said that the scene was almost the same right from the crack of dawn. I was really interesting to see such a large number of people moving out. I've only seen such a spectacle in movies (Gotham in the Dark Knight or in the War of the World) but coming face to face with it was rather surprising.