Busan in a Blur

Not going to lie, my friends - I write to you today a little tired and a little sick. But I'm keeping on keeping on, and part of that involves giving an honest account of the past couple of days, during which I was not on top of my game. So bear with me! Doing my best.

[PROLOGUE:  GWAENCHANAYO?]

"How are your feet today?"

Having just watched me limp down two flights of stairs to the communal breakfast table in the lobby like a poorly designed robot which someday in the very distant future might be able to mimic human movement, my Sungsan hostel host looks me up and down with a motherly mix of concern and pity.

"Gwaechanayo," I say. I'm fine! Honest.

"They must hurt!" she says, looking at my feet like there's some visible outward sign of the agony.

"Ne. They hurt a bit," I admit.

With a look that clearly says oh sure, just a bit, she disappears into the kitchen and returns with a breakfast tray loaded with fruit, a stuffed breakfast sandwich, and a big cup of coffee. I notice the other folks at the table had to pour their own from a pot down at the other end - my host has saved me having to stand up and limp over to it.

"Eat slow! Enjoy!" she urges me.

As I finish up, she whisks away my place setting (again, those with working legs seem to be responsible for theirs) and sits beside me, explaining to me in great detail and several times over which bus numbers to take from which stops and the timetables I might encounter. She writes it all on a piece of notepaper, circling certain numbers vigorously and drawing arrows between them to create a conspiracy-theorist-style web. The previous day's bus snafu as fresh in my mind as it seems to be in hers, I'm an eager and attentive student.

Later, when I leave the hostel with a bow and a gamsahamnida, she stands on the threshold of the sliding door, waving at me with a hopeful but slightly worried expression, like a movie mom watching her kid leave home and thinking they grow up so fast!

[INTERLUDE: BOGO SIPEULGEOYA]

Things I'm going to miss about Korea:

Amazing and cheap public transportation. From the sleek subway of Seoul to the extensive network of local, intercity, and express buses, not to mention the local taxis (which I haven't taken but might in a pinch), transportation in Korea's tourist areas is efficient and cheap to boot. A cross-city trip in Busan, for example, cost me ₩1300 - a little over a dollar, almost half or even a third of the cost of the underground where I'm from. My intercity bus from Busan to Gyeongju cost ₩4800 - less than $5. The total integration of the system - pretty much every subway and bus in Korea runs on the same declining balance travel pass, the T Money card - ties it all together with a nice bow.
(Except the bus system on Jeju, which we've discussed.)

Amazing and cheap convenience store food. While the US equivalent - gas station food - is notoriously gross and overpriced, Korean convenience store food is delicious and pretty affordable. A roll of gimbap will run you about ₩2000 won (about $1.75) - one makes a nice hearty snack, and two or three will more than make a meal. You can get lunch trays of seasoned meat and side dishes for about ₩3000 (maybe $2.50), samplers of cheese, meat, and nuts for about ₩3500 (about $3), and two- or four-packs of softboiled eggs for as cheap as ₩1500 ($1.25ish).

For the over-21s, Korean alcohol is also crazy inexpensive and readily available at these places; bottles of soju, a vodka-like liquor which drinks dangerously like juice (especially when flavored with grapefruit, my personal favorite), cost only ₩1500 apiece, and just one or two will make for a pretty solid evening. The giant bottle of makgeolli I bought to celebrate my Hallasan victory cost around ₩3500. Moving past liquor, my personal greatest convenience store weakness is cold mixed coffee drinks, which give you a nice energizing shot of caffeine and sugar for about ₩3000 - cheaper than a coffee shop, and they help you sober up from all the soju and makgeolli. (Just kidding! For that you should eat "hangover soup.")

To top it all off, the stores are set up for basic food prep, with microwaves, hot water dispensers, and even sometimes small ovens for you to use to prepare your food. This means you can buy a bag of frozen mandu and enjoy them on the spot, or collect a bunch of elaborate mix-ins from around the store and brew up a righteous bowl of ramen - again, without leaving the shop. My god, I'm going to miss these places.

Amazing and cheap street food. Pajeon, hotteok, mandu, doughnuts, skewers of meat and pickled radish, tteok rolled in red beans and chopped nuts, tteokbokki... the possibilities and flavors are endless, and they can be yours for an average of ₩1000-₩3000 apiece (between 90 cents and about $2.50). Especially with street food in the US becoming very gentrified and hipster (less street carts, more food trucks with Twitters and $10 truffle fries), it's refreshing to see street food available so ubiquitously and affordably. It also underscores something true of Korea which is not necessarily true of other travel destinations: the best food in any given city is probably not in a three-dollar-sign restaurant with a fancy interior, but in that tiny stall on the second floor of your local subway station or at a mom-and-pop shop on the corner with spring onions in a metal bowl on the table.

Banchan. Okay, I'm just starting to realize how many of my favorite things here are food-related, but pressing forward, banchan (small side dishes served alongside a main course) are delicious and creative, and the assortment you get with any given thing is always a lovely surprise. A recent pleasant one: a bowl of microscopic shrimp which packed a strong salty-savory punch with a silky texture. Often banchan allow you to sample local specialties beyond your main meal.

Never experiencing more than 30 seconds of confusion before someone comes over and asks if they can help. Seriously, between the big-city tourist police, red-shirted information point people to be found at pretty much every tourist attraction, and just random kind people on the subway or the street, I have had such great experiences with getting help in Korea - finding places, translating things, working machines that don't have English options, etc. My experience today at the post office (on which more later) could have been totally nightmarish and ended with me accidentally sending my things by shipping barge to Marrakesh, but the endlessly patient and kind guy behind the desk walked me through every step of filling out the customs forms and explained each shipping option to me in detail so I could make a good choice. Thank you, general Korean public. I would not be making it through this trip without you.

[PART ONE: HAEUNDAE]

From the moment I stepped foot in Busan, I felt on the back foot. Maybe it was the 12-mile hike I'd done the day before without adequate supplies, the bottle of celebratory makgeolli the night before, the two hour bus ride to Jeju Airport, the one hour flight to Gimhae, the thirty minute train ride to Seomyeon station, or the twenty minute trek through total sensory overload to reach my chosen hostel, tucked deep down a small alley off a street running beneath an underpass, but my first order of business upon arriving in my room was to stay there for the next seven hours, too tired to go out but too wound up to sleep. What grand schemes I had schemed for my first night in Busan - a relaxing, rehabilitating stint at the famous jimjilbang SpaLand and some strategic subway hopping to see the city's many gorgeous night sights - got pushed to other days, awkwardly shoehorned in between other stops, or dropped.

To back up a second, Busan is Korea's second-largest city, a long thin metropolitan area squeezed between a gorgeous and extensive seashore and an imposing mountain range which hugs the coast. You may know it as a world seafood capital, or a port whose relative proximity to Japan gives it a long and storied history; you probably know it as that place where the casino fight scene takes place in the recent Black Panther. Busan feels edgier than Seoul, a city with teeth people live and work in everyday in addition to a place for visitors to enjoy. The most important thing to know about Busan for the savvy potential traveler is this: it's bigger than it looks (and it looks big), and the ten things you probably most want to do in Busan are most likely in ten different neighborhoods stretched across the entire city.

Not having fully internalized this, I started my first full day in Busan with a trip to Haeundae Beach - perhaps the country's best known beach and the quintessential summer destination of the rich and famous - and wandered around there for so long daylight was growing short by the time I got around to trying anything else.

Some famous Busan fish cakes.

Haeundae in all its glory.

Dipping my feet in the East Sea.

I finally made it to SpaLand, a luxury jimjilbang in the luxury Centum City shopping center (the largest contiguous shopping center in the world). I have to say, the hardest part of the jimjilbang experience wasn't going au naturale in public - when everyone's doing it, it feels weirder not to. The actual hard thing was being cut off from so many ways of learning and clarifying what I was supposed to be doing. For example, unable to communicate with the Korean-speaking attendants, I accidentally gave away my "bathrobe" (a generic set of shorts and a large T shirt which everyone is required to wear in the unisex areas of the spa) and, unable to ask for it back or request a new one without the translator app on my phone (strictly forbidden in the spa to avoid inappropriate photos), I was instantly unable to do anything but use the bathing area for a while and then leave (versus take advantage of the other eighty percent of the facility, including restaurants, massage chairs, a PC room, a bunch of sauna rooms, etc.) I also became keenly aware of how much I have learned culturally just by watching other people. Not sure how to swipe into the subway? Wait ten seconds and watch someone else do it. Not sure if you need to bus your table or leave everything piled neatly on a tray and walk away? Wait for someone else to leave the restaurant and do as they do. By contrast, in a bathhouse, lingering gazes at other patrons are discouraged, and with most signs only in Korean, I pretty much just had to guess what to do in what order and what not to do under any circumstsnces. Ah well. It could have been worse.

[No pictures here for obvious reasons.]

After wandering around the Centum City Shinsegae department store (especially the food court, which looked delicious but was too rich for my blood), I'd worked up an appetite and subwayed about halfway back to the hostel to Deomyeon, where a famous dwaeji gukbap (traditional Busan pork and rice soup) joint served up an excellent dinner for about $6.

[...aaaand I didn't take a picture of this either. Whoops. Maybe I was just living in the moment...?]

Already flagging for the evening, I headed back to the hostel only to realize that if I wanted to see the lights at Gwangalli Beach (a classic Busan nighttime view), tonight was my only chance, as I'd be leaving the following afternoon before the sun set. So I subwayed all the way back across the city, to within just a few stops of Shinsegae, to take in the night view. Was it pretty? Very. At the time, did it seem worth limping up and down twelve more sets of subway stairs with hamstrings pulled so tight my legs wouldn't bend on the downhills? Debatable.

The bridge and city lights from Gwangalli Beach.

Note the magnificently highlighted bags under my eyes.

Feeling the shame of a sightseeing underachiever, I returned to the hostel to pass out.

[INTERLUDE: MINOR DIFFERENCES]

Some things about Korea that I'm more or less neutral about that just take a little getting used to:

Tomatoes as fruit. It being "wisdom" to not put tomatoes in a fruit salad is apparently just a western thing, because tomatoes are totally sold and served as fruit here.

The entire bathroom being a shower. This may very well just be a hostel/guesthouse thing, but in every place I've stayed, there's no delineated shower with a tub or a stall - instead, the entire bathroom is tiled, there's one of those removable shower heads mounted in one corner, and the water drains out through a grate in the floor. Bonus points if the shower is run through the sink tap and you just pull a tab out or push it in to switch between the sink and the shower head. Extra bonus points if you regularly forget to switch it when you brush your teeth and accidentally soak either your pajamas or your clothes for the day (I speak merely in hypotheticals, of course).

Shops opening late and staying open even later. Perhaps a product of city life, but most shops don't open until 11am or so, making it almost pointless to be up and about before then unless you're going to work. By contrast, things stay open absurdly late - a lot of barbecue places go until 2 or 3, some night shopping centers go pretty much all night, and it's a pretty regular thing to club-hop until 4 or 6am. Bonus points: are you out so late the subway has stopped running, but not yet ready to go home, and possibly slightly tipsy? Check yourself into a jimjilbang (bath house) for a cheap place to shower, eat, and sleep it off until public transportation starts running again. In my normal life, I'm a major night owl, so this would suit me fine, but as a solo traveller trying to pack in as many experiences as possible, not being able to get started sightseeing early and feeling it safest to retire around 10pm before things get *really* crazy leaves me a little out of sync with the rhythms of city life. Moral of the story: I should live here rather than just visit...?

[PART TWO: NAMPO]

I had chosen to stay in the neighborhood of Seomyeon because it was centrally located and at the intersection of the city's two major sightseeing subway lines (the green line to Jangan and the orange line to Nopo). Having explored the green line the day before, I hopped the orange this time and followed it South to a few clustered places of interest.

Jagalchi Market is the largest seafood market in the country and one of the largest in the world, and to talk to some previous visitors to Busan, you haven't really experienced the city until you have experienced Jagalchi. The multi-floor market is wall-to-wall fresh catch stalls, each fronted by a complex heirarchy of brightly colored bins through which fresh water runs via a system of calculated waterfalls, eventually draining away through grates in the floor. The ahjummas in charge of each stall are famous for their hard-selling gregariousness; at one point, just nodding back at one barking enticements and prices at me almost committed me to buying ₩60,000 worth of exotic sashimi. Why so many ahjummas? When the men went off to war, women took over these jobs and kept them after the war ended.

The quintessential activity at Jagalchi is to pick a fish downstairs and then proceed to one of the second floor restaurants to have it fried or grilled up on the spot for about ₩4000. Having heard of a particularly delicious and tourist-friendly joint (Jacky's Seafood), I indulged in an expensive but undeniably delicious fresh fish lunch with assorted banchan and sat for some time just inhaling it all.

After Jagalchi, I meandered just across the street to BIFF Square (short for the Busan International Film Festival, which is held here). Sort of like a Korean Hollywood Walk of Fame, you'll find yourself treading on the handprints and signatures of famous Korean actors and actresses as you explore the square's funky architecture.

Another staple of BIFF are street carts selling hotteok - a traditional Busan pancake filled with brown sugar, nuts, and seeds.

I also made another visit while in Nampo - to a local post office. Knowing that in the coming days I would be carrying my full bag with me a lot and also that I would want to start buying souvenirs to bring home, I made some room in my pack by shipping a small box of clothing back to the States. Go figure - even after months of planning and paring down my gear,I still brought almost twice as much stuff as I realistically needed. It really is true: pack, cut that in half, and then cut it in half again. It took sitting in the waiting area with my Survival Korean book practicing key phrases and a very patient clerk helping me through the process, but eventually - success. Lighter and freer, I plunged into the nearby market and shopping center with an eye to start collecting things.

With just a little time left before I had to catch my bus to Gyeongju, my next and last desination before Seoul, I found myself a nice coffee shop in a highrise complex and sat working on postcards there until the sun went down.

[INTERLUDE: NOT SO MUCH]

Things I'm sort of glad I'll leave behind when I return to the US:

Feeling like a salacious weirdo for wearing sleeveless garments. This is one of those things I read about before coming here and assumed was kind of optional in a way it totally isn't. Background: women in South Korea do not wear things that reveal their shoulders. Shirts have sleeves, dresses have sleeves, everything has sleeves. If you somehow get your hands on a garment which doesn't have sleeves, you get a blazer or a shawl or an overshirt and wear that over it so it effectively has sleeves. When I heard this, especially having had it framed to me as a modesty thing, I assumed it was something some people do or that people do in certain spaces (like workplaces, temples, etc), in the same way that if someone told a traveller to the US not to wear short shorts because they might be seen as risque and inappropriate for certain places, that doesn't stop women in the US from wearing short shorts all over the place. I also assumed that, considering how hot it can get in South Korea during the summer, people couldn't possibly follow this rule all the time and not get heatstroke. Reality: as if there aren't enough things about you that make you stick out like a sore thumb as a tourist, bare shoulders will instantly mark you as not from around here. Luckily, a lot of Korean overgarments are made of super lightweight, cooling fabrics that make them reasonably comfortable to wear despite the heat. Unluckily, with so many garments offered only in "free size" (usually something around or smaller than a US size 6), you will probably not be able to pick up any up locally that fit you to fix your mistake.

People walking up and taking selfies with me without introducing themselves or asking permission. This has happened to me twice and it totally weirded me out both times.

That death-defying pedestrian lyfe. This one deserves an itemized sublist all its own, including but not limited to:
• Many streets have sidewalks on only one side if they have them at all.
• Regardless of whether the street has sidewalks, you probably won't be able to use them anyway because people just park wherever, including quite frequently pulling their car halfway up onto the sidewalk and leaving it there. As such, the walking room is taken up by parked cars, leaving pedestrians to walk in the middle of the street while trying to dodge oncoming cars.
• There are no lanes or patterns to foot traffic. Most people tend either not to notice or not to care if they are either blocking your way or pushing you out into the street.
• On busy tourist streets, people will often stop as soon as they reach the other side of the street, leaving the people behind them stranded in the crosswalk while traffic approaches.
• There is also no space too small for people to try to shove through: you can be standing with your back to a wall trying to look something up on Naver and I swear at least one person will insist on trying to fit themselves between you and the wall just to scoot past you.
• While there are a lot of crosswalks, there are almost no lighted ones, even across really busy four-way stops or six-lane highways people are barreling down at like 70mph. You just have to wait for an opening in the traffic to dash across. My advice is to wait for an ahjumma with some gumption to just step out in front of moving vehicles, stopping them in their tracks, and just tailgate her across the street.
• At the lighted crosswalks, as well as in impossibly narrow and packed market aisles, you have to look out for oncoming delivery motorcycles, which wait for no man and will absolutely smash into you or happily run over your foot if it means making their delivery 4 seconds sooner.

In case you can't tell, pedestrian safety (or lack thereof) stresses me out a LOT.

[EPILOGUE: CHESUNGHAMNIDA]

Having made it to Gyeongju with a minimum of fuss, I checked my email to find this waiting for me:

Yes, that filming of a Kpop countdown show I had managed to snag tickets to after months of research and setting 4am alarms to enter lotteries as soon as they opened, has been cancelled. So for all the teasing I've received about how I'm in Korea primarily because of Kpop, I have done (and most likely at this point will do) zero things here actually having to do with Kpop.

Ah well. Ah well.

In consolation, I went to a local dessert cafe and ordered some traditional Korean gameunsaekhwaguinsaek cake.

Just kidding, it's just Oreo icebox cake.

* * *

I'm finishing up this post in just about the unlikeliest of places - a rural Buddhist temple outside Gyeongju. Things are looking up - I think Gyeongju is shaping up to be my favorite stop after Seoul! - but I'll have to fill you in on that when I'm done experiencing it.