Busan!

Ummm, so... I love South Korea. :D I guess to be more accurate, I love travelling around with a built-in social network in South Korea during beach season. Amazing.

On Thursday morning, I met up with Miranda, Renee, Toby, Laura, Eddie, Alex, and Adam. We took taxis to the train station in Suwon where we hopped a train down to Busan, the second biggest city in South Korea (3.65mil people according to Wikipedia). This is coincidentally nearly the size of New Zealand. More on that later.

We got into Busan around 4h30 and were on the beach by 5. We spent time at Haeundae Beach, the Guinness Book of World Records holder for most parasols in one place: 12,000. 12,000! This photo doesn't do it justice, but it lets you get the idea.



We hung out for awhile and then checked into our hotel room for which we paid 90,000W a night (about... $75/night). It was a great place... mostly because it was a Korean love motel. While some can be rented by the hour, that wasn't the case for this hotel... They did, however, have a pretty spiffy color changing mood light right over the tub. Haha. We were comfy. We went out to this amazing Mexican restaurant, "Fuzzy Navel / FN Tacos" (it apparently had two names???). Delicious burritos with real fresh avocado. Mmmm. Apparently all of those things are hard to come by here. After, we headed over to the beach to hang out... with soooo many other people.

We retired around 4am after a beautiful night on the beach, slept in 'til 11h30 and were out on the beach again! It was a bit overcast, so we decided to go for a walk out to the light house on the far end of the beach. There were decks and docks all around to be able to get everywhere easily (as you can barely see in the photo)... but it was a great little walk over there... and then we saw the site of the APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation).

Path to the Light House and APEC Retreat Center

It sounds kinda lame, but it was really pretty cool... and just very unexpected. We even thought the light house wouldn’t be too great... so everything just exceeded out expectations. We also had a perfect view of a beautiful bridge... You can see a photo of it a little further down (don’t scroll down now... just wait!)

So after our lovely hike, we went out for galbi, a Korean barbecue-your-own-meat sort of pork meal. Delicious. And then back to the beach. :D And then we had dinner at TGI Fridays... and then we went to a crazy foreigner bar where we threw darts and had a great time. And then we went to the beach. Until around 3am when we all called it a night.

Saturday was perhaps one of the greatest days... really ever. We woke up around 11h30 again and hit Caribou Coffee (how Western...) and then went to the beach. We were in the water all afternoon, having handstand and sommersault contests, body surfing (or trying anyway...), playing Frisbee, "having a little paddle" (apparently British for "dipping your toes in the water"). It was a beautiful afternoon. I, however, didn't put on any sunscreen... and am really burnt. You know those people you see every once in a while and think, "Oh my God, that person must be in paaaain!"? Yeah, well, that's me right now. But moving on.

So after an amazing day of lounging at the most-parasol-ed beach in the world, we showered off, and Adam, Alex, Toby, and I went to check out Beomeosa temple, a popular temple in the mountains of Busan. We took a taxi ride up there and arrived around 7h15pm. At the gate, they told us we could only have 15 minutes there because it was supposed to be officially closed. While we were kinda bummed to begin with, it ended up being perfect... because there were maybe 4 other tourists there. We got in right as the sun was setting. We got to see these huge (2 stories at least) statues of Buddhist important figures(?). (I don’t really have any idea what they mean...) It was so peaceful. The temple itself was built in 678. So old.



AND we got to see a Buddhist monk leading a prayer in one of the temples.



After a beautifully serene 30 minutes at the temple, we waited and took the bus and the subway back into town. We wanted to hit somewhere off the main strip so we got off a metro stop which actually has the same name of the village we live and teach in. Haha. We were so hungry by this point... and we couldn’t find any restaurants. We finally walked around enough and found a delicious Vietnamese restaurant. We had great food and a perfect view of the craaazyawesome fireworks show that was being shot off at Haeundae Beach (for no real reason other than a beach concert that was going on that night). It was bigger than any 4th of July fireworks show I’ve ever seen. It was huuuuge! Beautiful.

We went and found the bridge I’d mentioned earlier... because I really wanted to see it at night... and it was breathtakingly beautiful.



After snapping far too many photos to try to get something that even remotely captured it, we went back to the beach to see that it was absolutely crawling with people. There were 1000s of people all over the beach, mostly sitting in circles playing Korean drinking games until all hours of the night. (It’s a very social drinking culture.) We were absolutely exhausted after such a loooong tiring day of swimming and exploring.... and went to bed around 5h30am.



Today (Sunday), we woke up around 10h30 to have another little “paddle” before getting another burrito and heading home. After another delicious lunch, we hopped a taxi to the KTX Express train station. We were going to try to make the 3pm train, but that didn’t really work... especially because those trains were completely booked. The soonest we could get on one was at 16h30... and because it’s prime holiday/vacation season, there was standing room only. Ugh. 3 hours standing in train cars. It was exhausting, but it was only 3 hours. And then we headed to Itaewon, the site of the American military base... causing a lot of seedy activities... that draws a lot of foreigners, for an amazing Moroccan meal. Mmmm. It was so delicious. Spoke some French to the owners. I’m going to become their best customer over the next 12 months. I can’t wait. We then had to catch a bus back home... so we waited for about 15 minutes before getting on to a full bus where we had to stand for 40 minutes to finally get home.

It’s funny that when I give the résumé of all the amazing things we did, it totally doesn’t capture just how great this trip was... mostly because I haven’t talked about the incredible people I got to know over these four days. We spent so much time together, just hanging out and chatting... and learning so much about each others’ cultures! Adam and I are from Wisconsin, Renee is from Newfoundland, Eddie is from Seattle (and he did Peace Corps in the Gambia!), Miranda is from Kentucky, Alex (previously dubbed “Sir Alex”...haha) is from London, and Toby and Laura are from New Zealand. Yes, we’re all white, we’re all foreign, we’re all native English speakers, we’re all Westerners... But for all of these similarities, we come from completely different places! And it was so much fun to learn about the other cultures! I learned more about New Zealand in these 4 days than I think I ever have or otherwise ever would. So many great discussions, so many funny stories, and so many good laughs.

Basically, we ate well (American, Mexican, Korean, Vietnamese, and Moroccan), we explored well (light house, APEC, temple, swimming, crazy travel day), and we had amazing company. I’ve never had a vacation like this before. It was incredible... and I can’t wait to spend more time with these amazing people! I’ll post more pictures when I steal them from others!

And tomorrow? My first real day of teaching. Hope I’m not too burnt or exhausted! Keep in touch!