Repatriate Me!

The last couple of times I went out to visit my in-laws I took some video of the various highway rest stops here in Korea. In my almost 14 years in Korea I’ve always enjoyed the rest stops here and have thought them far superior to those in Canada. At least the ones I’ve seen in Western Canada during the 80s and 90s – who knows maybe things have changed.

What I remember of highway rest stops in Canada is that it’s usually a single restaurant with a gas station along side the highway and not much else. The toilets were usually disgustingly dirty and there were few cars and the food was usually better than I expected based on what I’d heard from friends. Each rest stop in Canada would have a few big rigs parked and anywhere from zero to five cars depending on the time of day and if it was a holiday. Also the rest stops are very distant – at least 2 hours between them.

Here in Korea, it’s much different. There are rest stops every 15 to 30 kilometres. This may seem excessive but it’s not when you consider the volume of traffic along the highway here. The traffic on a regular weekend will be very crowded with sections of several kilometres dropping speed down to 40-60kph for unknown reason. Due to the heavy traffic driving 210km to my inlaws takes anywhere from 3 hours to 4.5 hours on a regular weekend – no holidays.

Rest stops here can easily hold 20-30 limo buses and 200-400 cars depending on the size of the stop. The washrooms are generally clean and very very large, there’s usually a food court, a single stand alone restaurant, a gas station, a playground for children, a gift shop, and a car accessory store where you can buy anything imaginable you’d want to pimp your car out with. – I forgot to do a walk around this shop, but it’s large and extensive. Along the outside of the main building there will be several shops selling CD/DVD/Cassettes (yes they still sell cassettes), magazines, newspapers and books, and finger food including donuts, chicken shiskebabs, and various unique Korean food stuffs.

This past weekend was Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year and is one of the two biggest holidays in Korea where everyone is expected to visit their family. This leads to extreme traffic. This year it wasn’t so bad for us, it only took 6.5 hours to drive 210 kilometres. There was one year it took 14 hours and that same year it took us almost 2 hours just to exit the rest stop. We needed to use the toilet again even before we made it onto the highway.

Anyhow enjoy the video.

Korean Highway Rest Stops

A short video of a few rest stops along Korean highways. This is the first time I added an audio commentary over video at home. Please let me know if I should have lowered the volume on the main sound track some more.