BUSAN, KOREA

My first trip outside Seoul, it's about darn time, I’ve been here three months!!! Busan is the second largest city in Korea, on the southeast coast. It has one of the world’s largest ports, there is a LOT of shipping to and from Busan.
We rode the bullet train, which goes as fast as 300 km/hr, but really doesn't feel like it's going that fast...you can track the speed in the corner of the television screens...(that are showing programs we couldn't understand)...It’s only 2.5 hours or so on this train from Seoul to Busan.
We spent two days wandering around busan...it's a much more industrial city than Seoul, and I think we saw some of the seedier areas...it certainly felt a lot more blue collar to us...but maybe we're just spoiled in the area we live in in Seoul...i'm not saying it's a bad thing, i'm just saying it felt different...grittier if that makes any sense at all...

We felt like much more of a tourist attraction ourselves, as quite a few Koreans said hello to us while we were walking around town. I know there are plenty of English academies in Busan, so they’ve seen foreigners before. We never did figure out why we got such the welcome wagon treatment. we investigated the fish market, which is huge (and smelly)...one of the ladies working there was totally fascinated by the piercing in brie's lip...We also hopped onto a “tour boat” for a 20 minute ride around the harbour. Pretty, though I think we would’ve liked it more when it was warmer. busan is one of the biggest ports in asia..Then time investigating Gukje market, which is much like namdaemun in Seoul, but much smaller...(busan is 7 million people smaller than Seoul)...You can find just about anything you want, you just have to know where to look. It’s fun to just wander through. You find yourself saying, “oh, I need one of those, oh, I’ve been looking for that.” I bought my postcards, and we looked for a hanbok (traditional Korean dress) for Toni. We thought we had found a place that was super cheap, but it turned out that the lady was getting her numbers mixed up...too bad...In the early afternoon we also took a bus out to one of the beaches...

Haeundae beach…the ride was a lot longer than we thought it would be, and our bus driver didn't stay in one lane for more than 10 seconds at a time...I’ve never seen anyone weave across the road so much...he was also a big fan of using his horn…every 6 seconds or so, he was honking at someone/something…it’s no surprise Koreans don’t seem to take whistles and horns very seriously, they hear them all the time so they never seem out of place. it was colder than we wanted, (or maybe the temperature was different on the beach, and it was windy as well) so we walked on the beach for a few minutes, took some pictures, and that was about it...it was sooooo cold..took a taxi to another beach, where we ate dinner in a restaurant looking out at a fabulous bridge that is lit up at night...after dinner, before going to sleep, we walked through the area near the train station, and figured out that it was basically a red light district!! several people spoke to us in russian, so we guessed that most of the foreign ladies in that area are russian prostitutes!! hmmm, no wonder foreigners don't want to be mistaken for russian...

our yeogwan (cheap, love motel) was close to the busan train station, we got a room with ondol heating...since I’ve been freezing all winter in the estate, it was nice to actually be hot while sleeping for once...when we walked into the room, everything was fine…but when we were getting settled for the night, we realized there were only two blankets, and three of us…so we ‘borrowed’ a blanket from the room next door, which was still unoccupied….in the middle of the night someone started pounding on the door, which we ignored…then the phone rang, for quite a while…then more pounding on the door…we opened the door to find the ajuma very angry that we had taken the extra blanket…she proceeded to lecture us in korean for about 5 minutes…since none of us understood a word, toni went to sleep, while brie and I tried to indicate that we had no clue what she was saying…anywho, she took the blanket, and presumably gave it to whomeva had checked in next door…at the time we were annoyed, but over the next couple days, it just became another part of the adventure…

the second day we went out to the temple on the edge of town...beomosa...a Buddhist temple, it's been there for a LONG time...(rebuilt a couple times I think, invaders love to destroy the national treasures of the country they invade)…there were a few different parts of the temple, each 'important' for various reasons, none of which meant much to us..afterward, we came back into town, and tried to go to another temple, but the directions the tourist people gave us weren't clear, and we gave up after realizing we were nowhere near where we wanted to be...
we ended up going home a few hours earlier than we had originally planned, but that was all right, it meant we got home at a much more reasonable hour, and we felt like we had seen nearly everything we wanted to...

maybe I’ll go back during the summer; it's supposed to be much better...well, maybe not better, but definitely warmer...spring would probably be the best, come to think of it, as summer is probably HOT and HUMID...anywho...