Korail Loves the tourist...Really?

Shameful passage of time since my last post.  I suppose I should apologise but then in the very next sentence I would start giving excuses that would attempt to prove that it is not a flawed character but circumstances out of my control that interrupted the flow of blog from me. So I won't go down that path, just devils lurking for me there.
Instead I'm going to launch into Korail - the Korean Railway company - it is time to make some penetrating and nasty observations about them. Are they perfect? Well, maybe not. Are they better than any rail company in the UK? Hell yes.  But I'm going to gripe anyway.

What do they do right?  They run a national train network, including a High Speed train (the KTX) as well as one of the subway lines in Seoul.  Maybe they do more but I can't be bothered do that much research. These trains pretty much run on time, they are clean, they don't break, if it snows or if there are a few leaves on the tracks they don't collapse into a pathetic mess. The service is courteous and efficient - the hostess (the conductor to the rest of the world) stands at the front of the train carriage full of passengers and gives a deep bow before walking down the aisle in a desperate search for fare dodgers. Pretty sure the bow is just a ruse, distracts the fare-dodgers into thinking they are safe.  So what more could you ask for from a train company?

Well, they could stop pretending they like tourists and foreigners. If they dropped that I'd at least feel I could start to prepare myself better. Instead, every time I set off on a trip, I let myself in for a nasty shock.

It begins here...

Somewhere within the bowels of the Korail corporate entity there is some junior marketing git who managed to learn a few phrases of English in high school and after weeks of hard sweat and toil, not to mention hours of committee decision making meetings, they've come up with the slogan 'Fast, but Slow Life'.  Capitalised and with a comma no less. I can only guess they are getting at the KTX travels at 300km/h and that if you are a hung-over salary man on the 7.10 to Busan, it is possible to enter a near-vegetative state. But otherwise... Say What?

As an example of the 'Slow Life' being encouraged or advertised here, please look in the detail of one of my fellow passengers on the Number 1 line, express train to DongIncheon. Not for him the maxim, Be Here, Now.

Because my picture taking capabilities aren't really the best, I may need to explain: over the mouth and nose is a surgical mask (worn by most of the city's 10,000,000 hypochondriacs in the belief that its magical powers will protect them from all manner of ills) and above that an Eye Mask, like what you wear on an airplane. Sort of an improvised Spiderman outfit.  I know what you're thinking... 'Did he miss his stop due to being all zoned-out?'   I don't know, had to get off before he did.

But back to the point....

Does Korail love or hate tourists and foreigners? Possibly love, but it enjoys even more watching them stand on the platform gazing in total perplexity at schedules and arrival boards written in Hangul. Seriously - would it be such an effort to write a place name and a time in Roman characters?  There are roughly 60 million people that can read Hangul. There are 6 billion people that can read Roman characters (including the 60 million Hangul readers).  I've been in this situation so many times now, in a town way outside Seoul, and the next train notices come up on the board and I have no idea where it is going. Bizarrely, most of the time, if you ask someone who appears to have spent many years reading Hangul something like '... Train, Seoul?? ' they have no idea also.  Anyone...Try catching a train from Guro to DongIncheon and see how well it goes.

My even bigger gripe is that there is no website where it is possible to figure out how to get someplace and get a schedule on the regular trains (KTX is ok). I actually wrote to Korail about this but they ignored me.  I was polite. But still they ignored me.

But I should be happy, they run on time, if only I knew where they were going.