Busan

Busan is the second biggest city in South Korea - and that I found out by looking it up. South Korea is not that well-known in the UK and most of my knowledge, as ever, comes from sport and usually football. Luckily, I also know a little about gaming^[1] in South Korea but I cannot see how this could be in any way useful. South Korea hosted the first Olympics (Summer, obviously the Winter ones aren’t real) that I can remember in 1988 and also hosted the first ever shared World Cup with Japan in 2002. As a result, the cities of Seoul (Olympic host city) and Daegu (was a city that I could only assume England played in, but actually they did not -it must have had an impressive stadium) are lodged in my mind. As it happens, I do know Busan from holding a film festival (BIFF is an Asia focused film festival) but not much more. A lack of knowledge can usually be overcome with a search for some knowledge so I looked it up. And there it was, amongst other things - Busan is the second biggest city in South Korea and has a ferry service to Japan. Who needs more knowledge than that?

Hong Kong airport is stuck out in the middle of the sea and this allows it to run, without causing problems^[2] , as a 24hr airport so I got a flight to Busan departing at 2am and arriving at about 6am. This was going to be the start of a run of early morning starts, as I had planned it, but that is very much my style so I was^[3] ready for it.

Busan reminded me a lot of Japan initially although this was probably due to my limited frames of reference. I landed in daylight, which was nice and then took the metro to the hotel. I love getting the metros in new cities but it was not the most convenient of journeys although I was going to a fairly central location - it was very close to Busan station.

Once I got to the hotel to drop my bags off, they told me that I could check in too, which I was very surprised at so early in the morning but I was not going to complain. I dropped my bags in the room and thought I’d have a bit of a lie down for a rest. And then had a bit of a nap - which was not my plan as the nap stretched on a little longer than I wanted. A lot longer and it was afternoon once I was up.

Eventually, the nap was abated and I stepped out. I had noticed that there was a “hop-on” around the city bus service which seemed like a good way of seeing things and getting off to interesting points. I got out a little late so there were not so many buses left to go but I got one (more a coach) and we were driven around.

Busan felt remarkably industrial to me and I was actually a little shocked at the scale of it. The area around the train station was a fairly standard, pedestrianised area but once we got moving on the bus there were mainly big highways for lots of traffic and the scale did not feel particularly human. It was quite overwhelming in a way as it felt like we were on the way to somewhere rather than at a destination itself. In a way, we were on our way somewhere as the bus took us some distance away from the train station over a couple of bridges via the port areas to another part of the city for sightseeing, but was there anything to actually sightsee? Busan has a number of beaches around the city so the first place I stopped was Haeundae Beach to have a little walk along the sandy beach. It was a pretty cloudy day so it was actually quite pleasant to walk but it was also, effectively, a large high-rise area too. I don't really know what to do on beaches so I didn't stay very long and got on another bus to the area around the Museum of Modern Art which I didn't enter but walked around. It wasn't particularly interesting and the scale of Busan really struck me. It really lacked intimacy although some of the sculptures were quite nice. From there, I took the bus to the UN Memorial (to the Korean War) park. This was a pleasant place to walk around and, inside, felt somewhat human in scale but it wasn't particularly memorable.

One of the famous^[4] aspects of Busan is that it has a very active port area with good connections to other countries, such as Japan, to allow it to trade easily. Busan has a huge container port but the best thing for me as a tourist that a port like this gives is fish.

Near the sea, Jagalchi Fish Market is a popular spot to have fresh fish so I thought it would be a good place to eat dinner. Heading there at night on foot, it was far quieter than I expected and it seemed that many of the stalls in the covered market were closed. Even so, some were open so I found one and tried to make myself understood. Busan, being so close to Japan, has many Japanese speakers too to cater for the tourists but the elderly staff that were still present were not apparently bilingual. In fact, they kind of gave the air of not necessarily being monolingual either. They were, however, welcoming and tried very hard to explain what they sold and how I should order one of their platters which was reasonably priced and quite tasty. A lot of the fish available was served raw and there was a big hot pot to cook the other bits which the ladies in the restaurant showed me how to use. I was pretty pleased with the meal and would definitely recommend a visit for both the atmosphere of the fish market and the food itself.

The second day was one to enjoy the cityscape and although the weather was not ideal, I wasn't about to spend the day indoors.

A little bit of research suggested the coast might offer a nice walk so I made my way to () which felt like it was designed for a lot of people. I'd guess on sunny weekends that it would be a full and fun kind of place. Maybe it could still be fun when it wasn't sunny. As ever, you always need an exit strategy and I had booked my train out of Busan for the evening to arrive in Seoul at night so I knew my constraints. On my way to this park around the lighthouse, I decided to take the bus as this would be another adventure of sorts but walked part of the way.

The weather did not make it the most pleasant of walks but I walked around the Busan Tower park (Yongdusan Park) nonetheless. It was quiet and there was (potentially) a good view from the park itself but visibility wasn’t great. I wandered around and through BIFF plaza to the bus and then onto the Yeongdo Lighthouse. It was a local bus, and not brilliantly signposted (for me, anyway) so I worked out where to disembark from checking my location on Google Maps.

It was actually really quite empty around the walk to the lighthouse and I saw only a few people. I quite enjoyed that fact for this morning. It was grey, wet and windy but that felt totally appropriate for the area around a lighthouse. It was pretty photogenic, anyway.

I made my way, next, to Gamcheon Cultural Village, a steeply situated “village” within Busan that looked colourful and enticing. Well, in the photos taken in sunshine, anyway. This wasn’t massively far from the area that my bus had returned to so I made my way there. It felt out of the way and as I walked, I got the feeling of a local community that was a bit isolated in spite of proximity and good connections. As it got steeper, it felt like an area that wasn’t the same as Busan. Again, it was not a busy place and it felt a little deserted. It made me wonder if it was on the tourist trail and how different it must be with throngs of people. It was a pretty little place but not enough to take me into the evening so I made my way to Gwangalli Beach before my train to Seoul.

I was never great at managing the flow of time and I spent a little too long at the beach (having lost something there…) doing not much except looking out to the Sea of Japan. That meant I got to my hotel a bit later than I wanted to in order to collect my luggage. I’m not really sure why I do this to myself.

I rushed to the train station in order to get my ticket - I was cutting it very fine and had to run with my luggage which was not the easiest thing to do with asthma. I did make it to the counter and the staff kindly showed me exactly where to go so that I could run straight onto the train - just in time. Well, I thought it was just in time but the train did not start moving as expected. In fact, it stayed there for quite some time and I was very confused. I was so confused that I had my confused face on and so asked a less confused Korean girl why we were stationary. She giggled with her friend and responded that she did not understand me. Then she whipped out her phone (of course she did not, she had it in her hand already like any self-respecting Korean girl) and showed me a map of Korea and said some stuff that I did not understand. She then looked to the theoretically useful Google translate (this is a lot better than it used to be and it is better than Yahoo was in 2003 [link]) but I could not work it out - the pair of them tried - which I appreciated and then another man came and spoke to me in English and explained that there had been an earthquake so the train was not going to move. My confused face became one of concern (it may have retained a little of the confusion too - I think that part of my facial expression was always there) as he explained that the train would not be going to Seoul tonight and that I could try and find another way later. An option, but one that I did not really have so I spoke to another person and they told me that we would be going later - but we had the option of trying to find another way ourselves. I am a big fan of high-speed travel but, once we started moving, I realised that we had been speed limited as a result of the earthquake and we would not be travelling at the expected 300 kph. Seoul is not close and we had departed late so I had no real sense of when we would arrive and what to do when I got there. I knew I would at least be arriving in Seoul’s centre though - surely that would be easy…

I arrived in Seoul at 2am.

<sup>1. I do not actually know much about gaming in South Korea but I understand that they have a rabid fanbase for some PC games and there is a market for watching them played at a high level. I am not sure that I have ever, knowingly, played a Korean video game -they are a curio to me in all honesty.↩
2. The other way of not causing problems, especially in the Middle East, is to not particularly care about the problems caused by the noise of night flights and so ignore them. This is much easier in countries that are not exactly democratic.↩
3. I wasn’t that ready for it. I was tired and there was only really one way to resolve that.↩
4. well, you know… better known.↩</sup>