I went to Busan.
Last weekend was a long weekend due to Memorial Day. Just kidding! I’m in Korea. It was actually Buddha’s birthday. So I celebrated by going with a friend to Busan. Busan is about a three and a half hour bus ride southeast of Gwangju, on the southern coast of Korea. It seemed like it was kind of a party town for foreigners. Gwangju has kind of a San Francisco feel to it, but Busan is more like L.A.
We stayed in this hostel in the middle of a fish market. It’s run by this Korean hippie guy who seems to really like India, and it was crowded with party girls there to go clubbing (and one Belgian engineer who was there for a conference on renewable energy). We chose this hostel because it was very near Haeundae Beach, and we wanted to take advantage of the warm weather.
The Sand Festival is the weekend after we visited, so they were getting ready by building these amazing sand sculptures.
We ran around on the beach for awhile, and then checked out the Busan Aquarium. That was pretty cool; I think I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
This aquarium had leafy sea dragons! Although these look like they might be weedy sea dragons. I was thrilled to see these; I have had a thing for them ever since I was thwarted in my desire to write a paper on them in 4th grade for lack of age-appropriate research material. Not the greatest picture, I know, but there they are.
I was also fascinated by the jellies. So sheer, so little substance, no organs as I think of them. How are these even alive? Truly a miracle only God could produce. (Kidding again.)
I LOL’d:
The next day we went to Busan museum, which has a place where you can dress up in traditional Korean costumes, much like those photo shacks at the fair. They let me dress as a man. My friend Jenny dressed as a princess. She rocked it, I looked hilarious.
The other exciting thing we did was go to a taco shop near the beach. It was amazing. TACOS!!! I think the restaurant was called Taco Señorita, and they showed nothing but Phineas & Ferb on their TV. We went there twice.
I won’t say that this food was exactly like Mexican or Tex-mex food. But it was just as delicious as that food. I was happy to eat it. I had a “quesadilla,” a folded tortilla filled with mozzarella cheese, rice, refried beans, and olives.
There were also “nachos,” which were yellow corn tortilla chips served with salsa and ranch dressing on the side. Still. Put it in my face.
In addition to this, we went to a tea ceremony that lasted 1.5 hours and taught us how to serve tea in the traditional style. It was all in Korean and kind of tedious. We also got awesome and slightly painful Thai massages (thankfully not a sex place, at least not for us!).
Busan was a nice place to visit, although I imagine it would be much different from Gwangju as a place to live. It’s a bigger city with more to do, but the tourists it attracts probably give foreigners a bad reputation in that city. In Gwangju the locals are usually nice to you because they can safely assume you live there, but in Busan it’s likely that a person has had a bad run-in with a drunk tourist. I know it’s the case that Koreans have a worse opinion of foreigners in places that have an American military base because the soldiers don’t always behave themselves off-base.
Anyway. Busan was fun. Thanks for reading.
Uncle Diana's Family Feedbag 