Busan

The Lunar New Year is one of the biggest holidays in Korea, with it and the adjacent days considered part of the holiday. It was on a Monday this year, so we only had Monday and Tuesday off. Unfortunately, it doesn't involve massive parties, parades, and drinking like our New Year's Eve. All people do is go home to family and eat special food. I kept trying to find out if there would be anything interesting going on, but all the Koreans at work told me everything closes down and there are no holiday events. I told them they're boring and Korea doesn't know how to celebrate for shit.

I decided to just go to Busan, since it's only an hour away and I've been here a year without doing more than pass through it. It's the second biggest city in Korea and supposed to be pretty cool. I took a new friend I made who lives a few miles away from me. I figured even if nothing was open, we could at least find some bars and restaurants to go to, and check out the beach, one of the most famous and popular beaches in the country.

Here are a couple pics Haeundae Beach, which I found out broke a world record in 2006(?) for the most people on a beach at once:

It's too bad I never bothered to go there this summer. I'll have to get there in June before I go back home. There were a number of people on the beach, flying kites, walking, and smoking, despite not being able to swim.

Here is Haeundae market, where you can get a variety of Korean foods and stuff:

We looked around for a place to stay, and there were a LOT, but I got sucked in by the motel that looked like a castle, Zeus Motel:

I didn't take a picture of our room, but it was quite nice. It had two king size beds (or maybe queen, I don't know), two bathrooms, a big tv, water cooler, and toiletries, and it was only 50,000 won. The woman didn't speak any English, so we had some trouble checking in, and also got a surprise later in the evening. When she gave us the key, she called two young men over to explain to us about the heat, but they didn't speak any English, either. She ended up using like five English words and I supplied a bunch of my Korean to show that I understood and to help her along.

Unfortunately, I kind of misunderstood what she was saying. She said the boiler turned on from 9 to 1, and I verified with "ondol," the word for floor heating, and she said yes. So I assumed she meant that the heat was on from 9pm to 1am, which seemed fine. Usually the floor heat is pretty effective and a room stays warm for quite a long time after it's been heated for a few hours. However, when we got home at midnightish (yeah, that's kind of early, but we'd had a long day), there was no heat on and no hot water. I realized what she was actually saying was that the heat and hot water turned on from 9am to 1pm, and we should take our showers then. Considering that they called us at 11:40 the next morning to say checkout was at noon, it seems kind of stupid to keep the heat on until 1:00, and to bother telling us that. I think that this kind of thing is the only major problem with traveling in Korea. You never know exactly what you're going to get in a lodging establishment, because there don't seem to be any standards.

Because there was no heat at night, there were plenty of blankets provided in a big armoire. I slept with eight. I was still a little cold. I'd forgotten my jammies.

We went to two bars in Busan, one that was only six weeks old and off to a good start, and this one, with a strange name. It's hard to see, but under the lower Thursday Party sign, it says Atom Store. We weren't really sure what that was supposed to mean:

Here's me inside Thursday Party drinking a hazelnut beer. It had a very odd taste. When I first took a sip, I didn't get anything, and thought, gee, what a light beer. Then I realized the straw was busted. Who drinks beer with a straw?

We had supper at a really nice Indian place that was great, but overpriced, even for Indian food. We only ate two meals in Busan, though, as we were there not much more than 24 hours, so we saved money the next day by ordering a cheap set menu at a Korean place. I had very little idea what I was ordering for us, but it turned out to be a big soup with lots of vegetables, squid, octopus, clams, and thinly sliced pork. It was quite good, and it was a lot of food. When we went through most of the soup, a guy came over and added rice and egg to it, plus more broth, so we really got our fill. That plus a bottle of soda was only 15,000 for the total bill.

I had wanted to go to a bathhouse in Busan. Leon told me about one he went to that's supposed to be the biggest in Asia, and there was another one I saw in the guidebook that is supposed to be quite nice, and is located right by Haeundae Beach. We didn't end up staying long enough to go to either one, though. I'll have to catch them another weekend. It's close enough to not be a big deal. I tell you, I'm going to miss these bathhouses when I go back to the states. They're wicked cool.

The first thing we did was go to the Busan Aquarium, but I've got a lot of pictures and video from that (which are probably basically the same as the pics and videos from the other two Korean aquaria I've visited, but you can suck it up), so I'll get to that next time.

Final Day in Vietnam

After my tour of the city, I checked into my hotel, rested for a bit, then went out for supper. I stopped at some Italian joint where I was seated next to an American who had clearly spent a lot of time in Vietnam. He started talking to me, and I found out he'd been married to a Vietnamese woman (then divorced on good terms), and that he came to Vietnam every chance he got. We talked for a while and he ended up buying my meal, suite. Then I think I just walked around a bit before going back to the hotel.

The next day I tried to walk to the zoo that we had tried to visit on the tour. At the time, it had been closed for some reason until 2:00, and we didn't get a chance to go back before I decided I was done. It didn't seem to far from the hotel, so I figured I'd take the map and just walk there, since I had until 9:00 before I had to take a taxi to the airport. I am usually really good at reading maps, but for some reason I had a helluva time reading the Ho Chi Minh map. I think it was because the language was so foreign to me. Despite using the same letters (plus a lot of accents), the names were so odd to me, that I couldn't keep them in my head, from looking at the street sign to finding them on the map. Plus I couldn't tell which way was north, so even if I found the street corner I was on, for some reason, I could never figure out which direction I was facing. I was kicking myself for forgetting my compass in my suitcase back at the hotel. I've never had the occasion to use that compass in the woods or the desert, but I always need it when I'm in the city.

I never found the zoo, but I did do a little shopping, ate some crocodile (I've had crocodile before, though, and I swear this was just chicken), and ended up sitting in the park near my hotel, watching a lot of people playing this game that's like hackey sack, but with a sort of shuttlecock. I was approached by one, then two, then three, then four or five, young people wanting to practice their English. So I ended up spending about two and a half hours just chatting with them, in particular a college girl who is learning English and French, and I think Japanese, too. It's funny how many people I ended up talking to in that city in two days, knowing how antisocial I am.

Later I went to this random restaurant for a light supper, since I had eaten a late lunch, and ordered some soup. It took forever for it to come, I think because they made it from scratch, but it may have been the best soup I've ever had. The food in Vietnam is phenomenal. It was a cream of chicken soup.

Then I went home. I was quite disappointed with the flight. There was much less leg room, no personal tv screens, and the big screen either didn't have sound, or my sound system was broken. All they had was CNN, anyway. But it was a smooth and quick flight. I got to Incheon airport shortly before the five hour morning bus to Ulsan left, and got home in the early afternoon. I was glad to get back. Vietnam was good, but it still left me a bit wanting. Korea feels very comfortable to me now.