About two weeks ago there was an open mic night with some local foreigners playing and my friends and I decided to go. It was in the neighboring city, Masan, which is just a city bus ride away. That Saturday night we hopped onto the bus for what should have been a pretty typical ride.... but it was just the beginning.
When we first got on the bus it was quite full of people headed to Masan, but it was Saturday night and most likely people have places to go and things to do, as we did. We sat by each other and chatted as the bus continued on it's path. Once we got into Masan, we started to pay a little more attention, but still thought we continue our conversation. However, once the last Korean got off the bus we realized we might have missed our stop because we were talking. Never the less, we waited on the bus to see if our stop came around.
Finally, the bus pulls off onto this little poorly lit road and into a parking lot. The driver proceeds to park the bus and open the door for us to exit. I instantly thought... ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Here we are outside the edge of town, without a clue of how to get where we are going and he is about to end his shift driving the bus. AHHHHHHH!!!! I talk frantically with my friends as to what we should do now. In about 10 seconds we decide we need to try to talk to this bus driver with what little Korean we know. I approach the bus driver and say the name of the place we are wanting to be at and then asking him where it is. All he says is "yes." He then turns the bus back on and starts to drive..... somewhere.
At this point we realize he is going to drive us to where we need be to, like a taxi driver EXCEPT we had a whole city bus to ourselves. My friends and I felt so thankful and relived that we had such a nice driver who would just take us there without questions. But then we got worried again because he got onto the highway, when we believed we should just be heading back into town. Our next thought was 'We are 4 beautiful women in our early 20s at the will of this Korean man driving a city bus on the highway on a Saturday night.' What is going on?
Luckily, Korea is an extremely safe place. I do not exaggerate when I say that you can walk home at any hour of the night/morning and it is safe. Walking alone, with people, or riding a bus to Masan... HA! I pulled up the GPS on my phone to see where we were headed, and then we realized he is driving us after his shift is over. He HAD to take the highway because he was not a his regular route and could not pick up other passengers. At this point we have probably been on the bus for about an hour, but finally we approach the city and our stop near the University in Masan. We all let out a sigh of relief at this point, because if we were Koreans.... there is no way he would have done this. In this case, being a foreigner was a positive because he acted as our personal bus driver and got us to our destination safely.
As we got off the bus, we just said thank you (in Korean) as many times as we could. We tried to think of other things to say, but that was the best thing we knew how to say in Korean. In the end we couldn't believe that actually happened and we got to our destination in one piece. I cannot begin to tell you how thankful we all were for that bus driver's kindness and understanding. Someone was definitely looking out for us that night.
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