Weekend in Busan

This weekend, I had the opportunity to bid farewell to the beautiful city of Seoul in order to visit Busan. Busan is home to beautiful beaches and boasts the title of second largest city in Korea (the largest being Seoul, of course.). My study abroad group all hopped onto the KTX, which is a high-speed train that connects multiple locations throughout Seoul. The KTX is fantastic and cuts travel time significantly! On my trip, our train reached 295 km/hr, which is over 180 mph. It's near impossible to tell it is going that fast unless you look at the speed information they displayed on the television screens, since the ride is so smooth. The KTX train has actually reduced the travel time to anywhere in South Korea to under 3 hours.

Once we arrived in Busan, our first stop was Haeundae Beach, the most famous beach in Korea. (Actually, the very first thing we did was grab lunch. We went to the restaurant that one of the characters in the movie Old Boy eats dumplings at! I'm sure it would have been much more exciting if I had actually seen Old Boy....) Luckily, we missed the peak tourism season for the beach, since there can be as many as 1 million visitors to the fairly small beach on the busiest days. It's also known for it's prolific presence of beach umbrellas. One day, just under 8,000 umbrellas were present, lining the entire beach in row after row. This seems to be an occurrence Koreans are strangely proud of. They even had a picture of it on an informational stand at the beach. But anyway, I digress... the beach was beautiful! The water was significantly warmer than what I'm used to on the West Coast. There were also seashells all over! Koreans must not love seashells as much as Americans do. But I think the best thing of all about the beach was... no sand crabs! That was a very welcome change. We did, however, find a spider on the beach. Which was actually worse.

After our trip to the beach, we brushed the sand off our feet and headed to Haedong Younggung Temple. This temple is unique because, unlike other temples, it isn't nestled in the mountains. Instead, it is on the coastline and has a beautiful view of the ocean! Although I'm sure the temple is gorgeous normally, it was definitely infested with flying ants when we went. So it was hard to focus on anything other than swatting away the beasts. And avoiding all the spiders who were no-doubt enjoying the prolific insects. So we got out of there pretty fast.

And this marks the end of day one! The study abroad program booked a pretty nice hotel for us, so we all slept pretty well. And in the morning, the study abroad program bought us a Starbucks breakfast! We were all thankful for the free food and the taste of home.

Breakfast was followed by a boat tour! But before I get to the actual boat part, let me tell you about the shuttle ride to the dock. We parked our party bus ("party bus" is the term we endearingly gave our private tour bus for the stay at Busan. It was a small-ish bus painted plain black with windows tinted so intensely that nobody could ever in a million years see in.) in the parking lot and all crammed into a small shuttle van. We sat 4 people to a row, even though I'm pretty sure the seats were designed to fit 3 per row. The shuttle driver proceeded to drive as recklessly as possible down a steep, curvy road to the dock. It was terrifying, but we all survived! And the boat trip was gorgeous. It gave us a good overview of the coast. The Korean coastline actually reminds me a lot of Oregon! It's very green: lots of trees and foliage. It's also pretty rocky. The coast is predominantly rock cliffs, with some sandy beaches in between. The seagulls also seemed to be a tourist attraction on the boat ride! That's completely foreign to me. You could even buy bags of "seagull snacks" before we left to feed to the seagulls as we took our tour. I'm used to the mindset that seagulls are a nuisance and the goal of their existence is to be rude and terrifying. But the Korean people seemed to love the seagulls. In their defense, the seagulls actually were cuter and less evil there.

Our last stop in Busan was the markets. First, we went to the famous Jagalchi Fish Market, which is the largest fish market in South Korea. And oh my word, that description does not do it justice! I've never seen so much seafood before in my life. Pike's Place seriously had nothing on Jagalchi! And you could get your fish in so many different ways... live, cooked, dried... It was both amazing and disgusting at the same time. And "fish market" isn't really accurate. There were fish, shellfish, squid, eel, octopi... pretty much any sort of living thing you can imagine within the ocean. It was quite gross, actually. But then we crossed the street and went to a normal sort of market. The kind that sells corn dogs and phone cases and things of that sort. That part was really fun! We got lots of delicious street food (like waffles and hodok and curry kare pan) and looked in some of the cute shops.

Although it was a horridly fun weekend, we were all ready to head back to Seoul. It was absolutely exhausting! I know we will all sleep well tonight.