...and this is finally the post telling/showing you all about it.
This will be a fairly lengthy post with lots of pictures, partly to make up for the last of posting activity over the last little while, but mostly cause it was an awesome trip with lots of cool things to see.
So we traveled on the KTX, Korea's bullet train. It's only been around a few years and it seems that most Koreans consider it vastly and prohibitively expensive, but then again they only pay 6000won to travel on a luxuy bus for 2 hours to get to Seoul from Cheongju, so what do they know about expensive travel? We decided that it'd be fun to go first class for our trip down to Busan, and then we'd slum it in coach for the return journey. So, for people planning on a trip to Korea and are looking to budget, a 2 hour ride on a train that averages about 285km/h in first class with free beverages and little snacks came to a grand total of 33,000 won each. Thoroughly ridiculous. A no-frills crappy Greyhound ride from Peterborough to Ottawa costs more than that.
In addition to the overal spiffiness of our particular train, I've always loved travelling by train. It just seems so much more comfortable than by bus, and generally the scenery is better. If you haven't had the pleasure, I highly recommend it. We only really got a couple pictures from the train though, and here's one. It shows a popular method of farming here, which involved inexplicably covering crops in huge greenhouses, almost as if they wanted to protect their harvest from the elements or something. Weird, eh?
Anyway, getting off the train and out of the station, this is the first view you get of the city of Busan (whose municipal bird is none other than the SEAGULL):
Pretty nice place, all around. It's the second-largest city in Korea, and one of the largest ports in Asia. Like Seoul, it's got a fairly large foreigner population. Unlike Seoul, most of the foreigners are either Russian (there's a steady stream of ferries connecting Busan with Vladivostok) or Filipino. Anyway, enough of that.
South Korea is incredibly lumpy, so it seems that most of the larger cities are built with super steep streets to accomodate for all the bumps inconveniently placed right where they wanted to build a city.
The back alleys are nice though:
Granted, this was a *nice* back alley, but still.
We wandered around for a bit and then decided that we'd better find a hotel/motel soon so we didn't have to lug all our stuff around with us all day. On the way we saw the first of several noteworthy signs of the weekend. This one was noteworthy because it brought into sharp focus the reality of living in a place where this sign could either be for a pet shop or a restaurant:
I'm not going to tell you which it is, you're just going to have to use your imagination. So the quest for the place to stay continued. We came across this place:
but we figured that even if it wasn't booked solid for the night, it was probably a bit out of our price range. The lantern-esque chandalier in the lobby was probably a good indication of that:
It did have a nice little path that led up to a courtyard-type place with a decent view, so we decided it was a good enough spot for a photo-op.
The place we eventually found was actually quite nice. It was still off a sketchy little back alley, but had a nice little aquarium in the lobby and the rooms were a decent size and nice and clean. All in all, a much better room than the one we got in Seoul, and this one only cost us 25,000 won instead of 30,000. It also had a round bed, which neither of us had ever scene before in real life.
I'm not sure why a round bed is unique enough to actually buy, but there you have it. The sheets were round, but apparently the round comforter would have been pushing the budget, so they went standardized with that particular accessory.
After dropping some stuff off in the room (nothing of particular monetary value, mind you, but Korea's still a really safe place to be, so we weren't terribly worried, and we were planning on taking the camera with us anyway), we decided to head down to Haeundae Beach, which is the largest and most famous in Korea. Apparently in August it's wall-to-ocean people, but this time of year it was not surprisingly fairly sparsely populated. It helped that due to the 40 minute subway ride to get there we didn't actually see it until after dark. The adventure started just after getting off the subway, however.
The weekend that we picked to go was the weekend where Busan was gearing up for the APEC summit, which we had seen posters for, and we saw the occasional person with an APEC name tag walking around downtown, but thus far hadn't actually popped up as being terribly relevant to us.
That was before we walked up the stairs to leave the subway station and find the entrance being supervised by no fewer than 15 fully equipped riot police. Shields, assault rifles, helmets, and half of them had katanas. Yeah.
And there were more. Oh so many more:
Three pairs of cops on each side of the street on every block to be precise. They were positioned so they were all facing the same way (the way we happened to be walking, coincidentally enough), and the guy in front was holding the shield, and the guy in back was the one with the katana. I think you can kinda make out the handle in the above picture. A little while before we took this picture we walked past a fenced in lot that they were apparently using as a command centre of sorts, and there were about 30-40 of them in there, fully equipped like the rest of them, and a bunch of vans and stuff too. We found one that spoke a little English and he told us that they were just there to provide extra security for APEC. Spooky.
In between the blocks of riot police and the beach itself, we saw the second noteworthy sign of the weekend. This one exemplifies the importance on restaurants only serving pork that used to be dead sexy.
We didn't eat there.
The beach was nice. The entire area along the beach before the sand starts is lined with literally hundreds of little fresh seafood stand-type "restaurants". This phenomenon is fairly common here, and we'll have to get some pictures of it to show you, but people basically run temporary tent restaurants, complete with tables and chairs and everything, out of the back of trucks or carts. There were also guys on the beach fishing with enormous fishing poles that they stuck into tubes sticking out of the sand and just waited while the line got washed out far enough to catch stuff. It was a bit too dark to get any good pictures, but we'll be going back some time, so we'll show you what it looks like then.
At the beach, there's also the largest aquarium in Korea, so we decided to go check it out. A lot of the stuff was quite similar to the one we visited in Seoul, so we won't post too many pictures, but there were more big sea creatures at this one. A bunch more sharks and huge croupers and stuff like that. They also had a two-story tank with a living reef inside where we saw someone with a pretty cushy job.
She just kinda floated there, waving occasionally to the people walking past or sitting and listening to the presentations. Pretty sweet deal actually.
They also had an aquatic petting zoo,
and a vortex that shrinks your head
The end of the path through the aquarium leads, in traditional fashion, to the gift shop, and then out into a little food court area, where we encountered the third noteworthy sign of the weekend. This one's baffling. I apologize for the fuzziness, I'm not sure why the camera didn't focus properly, but you get the idea nonetheless.
MMMMM!!! Baskin Queen... uh.... Dairy Robbins..... uh...... help?
It's actually just a Dairy Queen. I have no idea why they put this sign up. None whatsoever. But then again, there's a store called Roots Canada in downtown Cheongju that sells cheap knockoff no-name shoes and crappy handbags, so I guess I shouldn't expect any different.
We ate dinner at an awesome kalbi (Korean BBQ pork rib meat type place) restaurant, where we got our own private room for some reason. Since we had our camera with us, and we've been meaning to for a while, we thought we'd get a shot to show you a typical Korean dinner layout. The only thing you actually pay for on this table (in addition to the beer) is the meat currently sizzling away on the litle grill. All the side dishes are completely free for as many more helpings as you can eat.
So tasty.
And that concludes Saturday.
On Sunday we headed over to large park in the northern part of the city, where you can take a cable car to the top of one of the mountains for a spectacular view of the city. I have the following panorama in larger format, but I wanted to show you this cause even at this size you get an idea what the view is like.
The city continues to wrap around to the right of the picture, but that was as far as the mountain would let me see.
This is where I was standing to take those shots:
It was neat. At the bottom of the cable car there a bunch of attractions to the park, including a couple little carnival-type rides, a marine history museum, and a little shop where a couple of old guys made these awesome Korean traditional crafts.
Nice guys. They didn't speak a word of English, but they were for some reason really excited that we were from Canada, which is always nice to hear.
Anyway, so that was our wonderful weekend in Busan. I'll conclude this post with a picture of the train station on Sunday night just as we were going to get on the last train, which was completely full except for two first-class seats, which we happily occupied. G'night.
