Good Times!

So we got getting lost out of the way pretty much right off the bat. We arrived late on the 13th and went with Soren's boss the next day, Saturday, to get cell phones. One of the other employees came along as well, to translate. As she showed us around our neighbor hood, she pointed out the subway station to us. She told us that when we rode the subway we needed to know "Wolchon" and exit number 3. When we got to the shcool that afternoon, she pointed out the station nearest it and told us to remember exit number 12. I'm not sure what Soren was thinking about this whole subway thing; I thought that it was pretty easy. "I'll just get on the subway at exit three and get off at exit 12. How hard could it be!" As it turns out, it was harder that I thought.

His boss told us to come back to the school on Monday so that we could take care of a few more things. That meant riding the subway. So we go down to the subway to buy tickets. Luckily that was in English. Upon purchasing our tickets we looked up at the map above the counter and realize that the stops are not numbered. They have names! That's fine and all except we didn't have a name for the stop we needed we just knew exit 12 (which is apparently the exit to the surface after you exit the train.). That was problem number one. Problem number two was that we then decided to GUESS which stop we should get off at. Problem number three was that all we knew was that we needed to go downtown and that the map didn't have "get off here to go to downtown" written anywhere on it. I know, I checked twice!

I'm sure that this will surprise you; we got off at the wrong stop. Twice. We ended up having to use payphones that let you talk for 15 seconds before shutting off to call the school. After two attempts, we had no change left. We ended up with only one word form the entire conversation, "Banwoldang." We guessed that that was the name of the station and figured that if it was the wrong one we wouldn't really be any worse off. Luckily, it was the right one. We did eventually find exit twelve and made it to his school without further incident. We have ridden the subway many times since then and have had no other problems. Hopefully that same thing won't happen when we ride the bus for the first time!