Buses are a staple in South Korea

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — There was the bus with a donnybrook billiards match on the TV screen up front; and a bus with a scintillating volleyball match; and a bus with updates on Kim Jong Un; and a bus with an indecipherable game show; and a bus with four screens all showing an animal show; and that bus with the Korean soap opera in which the handsome young doctor tried to resuscitate the pretty young woman, and he kept thumping her chest and thumping and thumping, thumping for a good 10 kilometers of bus ride at least, thumping until you might wonder if by chance he had resuscitated her and then killed her again.

There are the buses on which the drivers do seem just a little too Formula One.

Mostly though, there are buses. Buses are always an Olympic staple, transporting all manner of people to all manner of venues and hubs, but at these Pyeongchang Games, the bus, that human invention with roots in France and Britain and Germany, does seem more of a star.

That’s because this Olympics is a sprawl, from mountains to coast to in between. It’s such a sprawl that one can feel, from one place to another, variations in climate. It’s such a sprawl that one might leave a hotel at 11:40 a.m., walk to a hub, take a 43-minute bus, walk to a wrong hub, take a five-minute bus back to the other hub, take a 41-minute bus to a third hub, take an 11-minute bus and, given all the waits, reach the speedskating venue at 3:30 p.m.

Is a seven-hour, eight-bus round trip with a closing 40-minute walk in the snow at midnight worth the trouble to watch the herculean Sven Kramer skate for the Netherlands? Some believe so.

But what if, here in South Korea’s delightfully friendly Olympics, which employ occasional people assigned simply to say hello to passersby, someone attempted to go to as many sports as possible in a given day? Might that person wind up leaving the hotel around 10, and returning 17 hours, nine minutes, eight buses, eight removals of layers for the hot bus interior, and eight reapplications of layers for the outdoor frigidity later, at 3:09 a.m.? Might that person learn the hard truth, that if you go about things just incompetently enough, there’s a chance of botching bus schedules with such waywardness that one might not witness any athletic pursuit at all?

Might that person wind up at 11:47 p.m., standing below a mountain for the women’s normal hill ski jump, wondering how in the world anyone would use an official word like “normal” for that “hill,” waiting to see if a Norwegian with blond pigtails might be able to sail through the 12-degree, minus-5wind-chill air, and land far enough away to get a gold medal?

Might that person wind up exhilarated at 3:09 a.m.?

Spend 17 such hours and, beyond an ophidiophobic worry about whether a snake might turn up in the animal show on that one bus, and one might see some things.

Let’s start with the young man at snowboard on the front edge of the mid-day crowd, amid all the aahs and gasps and cowbell ringing for a Swiss snowboarder. The young man is dressed in the kind of black fur coat, and he’s holding a flag in the red and white stripes of Austria and colors that reads, “ANNA GASSER.” He has flown from the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don, two hours to Moscow, then nine hours to Seoul, then the two-ish-hour ride out here, the flag in his luggage.

The metal flagpole, he bought in Korea.

This man, Ilya, explained that, since his trip to the Sochi Olympics in 2014, “It was clear for me that she’s an outstanding person. Yep, and she gave me a sign [autograph]. I was very lucky to get it. And after this, I watched her on the Internet and on TV every time I have a possibility. I am her fan because she’s open-minded, and every time in a good mood. She’s very positive and energetic, it surrounds her.”

Two buses and one change later, a person might wind up on a bus at 2 a.m. with loud French guys cackling in back, what with Americans always complaining about the French always being so notoriously loud, and then an hour more after that, that person might wait for one last bus, from 2:34 a.m. to 3, waiting more and waiting more, with a body downtrodden but a mind uplifted.