Joy Rides for Seniors

I’ve figured out where I want to retire. And it’s not in Phoenix, Arizona, or Sarasota, Florida. I’d like to head for the subway trains in Seoul. In this capital city of South Korea, seniors ride trains for free—in clearly marked priority seats reserved just for them and on a subway system widely regarded as one of the best in the world. Throngs of seniors ride every day. Some crossing the city to visit a food market or one of the national museums. But many going nowhere in particular, just riding.

Board a train and you may see a widower who needed a reason to get dressed and leave the house. Or a retired librarian reading from a volume of Chinese poetry. Or a couple of former professors in quiet discussion. Or people watching people. Every seat, as you know, holds a story.

A few years ago Seoul Metro installed glass safety doors in every station. This effort to protect passengers from collisions with high-speed trains turned literary. Kim Jeong-hwan, a poet, novelist, and critic, proposed that poetry, not advertisements fill the glass spaces. Each year thousands of amateur poets submit poems to a panel of judges who choose which to post.

Seoul’s subways have other bookish ways. Little free libraries, where you take a book or share a book, are appearing in subway stations. And in a new kind of flash mob, young people board trains together, books in hand, to show the fun of reading in transit.

Trains are for me. As an introvert, I get time alone. Yet people are just a seat or two away. It’s on trains that I do my best reading and writing. The ambient sound and gentle rocking and forward movement dial me down. And, oddly, also activate my brain.

So the Seoul subway with its 700 miles seems too good to be true.

And it is.  

These free joy rides for seniors may go away. Or at least be curtailed. Seoul’s population is rapidly aging, subway operating costs are soaring, and steep fare hikes for the younger generations loom. With such concerns, this perk could vanish long before I get myself to Seoul.

I suppose I’d better stay home, retired in small-town America, where I’m nearer to my grandkids and where I can go to Chicago if I want to ride a train.