Spoiler Alert: No, I didn’t get arrested in South Korea. Sorry to disappoint you. But what happened while I was teaching English in South Korea is a crazy story with a harsh lesson learned. I apologize in advance that there are no wild photos of this event because this happened before smartphones…which 100% would have helped me and my travel girlfriends avoid this whole incident, but where’s the fun in that?

So instead, I’ll post mostly-not-related stock images for drama!

Okay, South Korea Story Time…

Living or traveling abroad offers its fair share of language barriers and misinterpretations. Sometimes these language mishaps wind up getting worked out pretty quickly or they spiral out of control into what can only be described as “hilariously tragic”. This story is of the tragic kind…

In 2013, I made one of the best decisions of my life and moved to South Korea with my best friend to teach English. Without speaking the language, without knowing the culture and without a smartphone to help us, Meagan and I immediately planned an adventure-filled weekend 3 hours away from our new hometown. To get there, we had to learn how to navigate the Busan bus system! We left the big city from the main bus terminal called ‘Sasang’ and successfully made it to our destination where we spent an entire weekend kayaking, fishing, paddle boarding, and making new friends. Success!

When it was time to leave our weekend fishing village and head back to the big city, we moseyed on over to the most modest little bus terminal you’ve ever seen. This place was the definition of small town…with no English signs anywhere!

I had been studying how to read and write in Hangul (Korea’s alphabet) and gave my best shot at reading the signs to find the Sasang bus terminal to return home. I found a sign that I THOUGHT read “Sasang” but I wasn’t sure. So, I approached a young college-aged Korean girl wearing cute frameless glasses and enlisted her help. I told her that we needed to go to the Sasang bus terminal. She repeated it back to me a couple times, and we both were cheerfully satisfied that we understood each other. She walked us to the counter and helped us buy 3 tickets to Sasang; one for me, one for my best friend, and one for a fellow American teacher who we quickly learned was afraid of her own shadow. Nothing to be afraid of here, however, as we were quickly in our seats and on our way home.

After about an hour, we started seeing signs for our home city of Busan. “Right on track,” we thought. Then, we started seeing signs for our city in the opposite direction. And then we noticed we were on a highway heading in the completely wrong direction. I quickly hopped up and headed to the front of the bus to try and confirm with the bus driver that our bus was headed to the Sasang bus terminal. This dude didn’t speak a lick of English, but he, too, was repeating to me ‘Sasang’. “Ok,” we thought, “don’t panic, yet”.

After another hour and a sinking feeling in our guts, we asked a fellow Korean if we could use his then state-of-the-art internet phone to identify our current location. Well well well, what a surprise…we were in the middle of nowhere in the complete opposite direction of home. We were headed in the literal opposite direction of home! We had no Uber, no internet, no nothing back then. And there was no one on that god damn bus that spoke English.

The only thing we could do now? Burst into laughter and accept our fate of going on one insane Korean adventure. Our coworker, on the other hand, went into complete panic mode. “It’s dark, it’s late, we have work tomorrow, how are we going to get home…”. This girl had a meltdown right before our eyes.

After 3 hours of driving into the middle of the country, the bus pulls into a tiny village with one restaurant at about 10pm. The bus driver apathetically shouts at us in a heavy Korean accent, “Finished! Get off!” and points out the door. We ask him where the bus station is and he shouts again, “bus finished”! With a mischievous grin and a nod towards the restaurant, he says, “Police. Police.” There, sitting outside the restaurant finishing his dinner, was one policeman. I calmly approach him and pray that he speaks English. Hallelujah, he does- at least, enough to understand our predicament.

Before he would talk to us, however, he insisted that we sit and wait for him to finish his soup. After waiting ten minutes, he tells us he is going to take us home. “But home is 3 hours away,” we discussed amongst ourselves, “there’s no way he’d drive us all that way.” And we were right. Heeeeee was not going to drive us ALL that way.

We get in the back of his police car and drive for about an hour in the dark. Wondering what the hell was happening…but also feeling extremely safe because #SouthKorea. Finally, up ahead in the distance, we see flashing police lights. “NO. No…is that for us?!” we thought. YEP. Sure was.

Over the next three hours, we were driven to three separate checkpoints where we were handed from police car to police car, each one waiting for us on the side of the freeway with their lights flashing in the dark.

The last police car didn’t take us home, however.

The last driver pulls up to a small bus station in the middle of nowhere (ah, familiar). He walks inside and helps us buy the correct bus tickets home to BUSAN. I could have just said BUSAN. But he doesn’t stop there. This police man and his partner escort us on to the bus and to our seats. While it was the kindest act of protection and care, this police escort made us look like we were dangerous foreign criminals being exiled from a tiny town. I swear, every person on that bus was in fear for their lives.

Around 1am, we finally arrive back home. We take a taxi to our apartment building and climb out of the car disheveled and exhausted. At the exact perfect timing, the director of our school was passing by (Korea never sleeps). We tell her what happened, show her our original bus tickets. Waving our bus tickets in the air, she points her finger at us and exclaims, “Your bus tickets are for ‘Saesong, not Sasang”! And then she explains that next time we just need to say “Busan”. Yea, I got that by now.

At the end of the day, everyone had a laugh at the silly foreigners who almost didn’t make it home. We learned an important lesson that day: when dealing with a the Korean language, the littlest mispronunciation can mean the world of a difference.

We were lucky that we made such a rookie mistake in a country full of trustworthy, honest, and kind human beings who had our best interest in mind. South Korea is as safe as can be. It’s often ranked one of the safest countries in the world, especially for solo female travelers.

This won’t happen to you.

Nowadays, with translation apps like Queble and smartphones, sticky situations like these are totally unavoidable. I wouldn’t take back anything that happened that day, but from now on, I hope there will be no more cop cars in my future.