Joel In Seoul: 추석 in Busan: Part Uno

Here's is what I'm listening to right now. I know you wanted to know. New Bruno Mars with Damien Marley.

Chuseok holiday was last week and it was awesome. What is Chuseok you ask? Well, it is equivalent to thanksgiving in the US. It is a national holiday and harvest festival that is about three days long. Most Koreans will travel to their hometown and spend time with their families and eating good food. Samsung gave Tuesday through Thursday off last week for the holiday. Most employees used their holiday time to take Monday+Friday off for a nice long vacation. As interns, we do not get any holiday time off so I was pretty disappointed that I had to come in on Friday when almost none of my coworkers would be here. Luckily, my mentor pulled some strings and filed a holiday request for me so I ended up getting Friday off. Most Koreans actually book vacations, flights, trains, etc. in the summer in anticipation for the holiday. So it ended up being almost impossible to go anywhere or to travel at all on such short notice and my coworkers told me there are always major traffic jams throughout the country as most of the population is travelling somewhere. Then a knock on my door Wednesday afternoon prompted us to go to Busan.

Busan is actually the second largest metropolis in Korea behind Seoul and I am pretty sure it suffers from little brother syndrome. I think it's the fifth largest port city in the world...or something like that. We found out most people would be travelling to their hometowns earlier in the week and we saw some train tickets to Busan available for Wednesday night so we decided to take our chances and go to Seoul Station to see if we can snag some tickets. We wanted to travel light because we would be moving around Busan a lot...and I had ten minutes to pack. So I tossed some stuff in a backpack and was out the door. 3 hours later, the two other interns and I arrived at Seoul Station from Suwon. We found exactly 3 tickets spread across the train for departure in an hour. I swear the train station looked like King's Cross station from the Harry Potter movies/London...except filled with Korean people.

The KTX (Korea Train Express) is stupid fast. I think it goes like 300km/hr if I heard correctly? Anyway, the ride was pleasant and smooth and only took about 3 hours. We arrived at Busan station and proceeded to find a hotel/motel for the night.

right outside Busan stn.

We found a pretty shady motel room, but it only costs us 10,000 won (bout 10 bucks) each for the night. We decided to head out for the night to check out the local nightlife...it wasn't what I was looking for in a sense. Right next to our motel and Busan station is a street called Texas street. The street actually caters to foreigners, mainly US and Russian sailors who arrive at the port. I actually saw a banner that said "Welcome US Navy!" as we entered the area. As I was standing under that banner surrounded by all the bright neon lights, an old Korean lady wearing sunglasses (at night?) walked up to me and said, "You like Russian girls?" I looked up and down the street and noticed that this place was mainly a red light district for sailors. Half the signs were in Russian lettering and had Russian women sitting outside of the bars/whorehouses. I really hope these girls were not what you get if you pay because they were seriously a 4...out of 10 and that's being generous. We proceeded to a few somewhat decent bars and took it easy as we had to get up early the next day to head north.

We made our way to Geumjeong Mountain the next morning for some cultural action. It is the most popular hiking destination in Busan and the weather was spectacular. Korea's biggest fortress tower was on top so we decided to check it out. Here is our the city at the base of the mountain looked like.

So we made our way around the city and found the way to the mountain. You have to walk out of the city and little ways up the mountain and then you find a cable car that will take you halfway up the mountain if you don't want to hike the first part. We were a bit intimidated when we saw people with camelbacks and hiking poles taking the scenic route as opposed to the cable car, but we had some great views of the city from the cable car!

So we got off the cable car and hiked up for about an hour until we reach the South Gate of the fortress.

Then we hiked for another 45 minutes 'til we reached the first watch tower and saw some more pretty views and junk since we were pretty high up.

There are actually 4 gates along with 4 or 5 watch towers. It would take us about 6-7 hours to travel from one end to another...we weren't planning to spend our whole day like this. So we decided to head back down after we checked out the watch tower. We kinda got lost since there were various paths to get back to the cable car. We ended up taking the more scenic route...

This path had a more calming zen like atmosphere since we rarely saw another soul on this path and there were a lot of creeks/streams. So about 2-3 hours later we made our way back to the cable car. The sun was setting by then and we took the next to last cable car of the day down so we made excellent time.

We were starving by the time we got back into town as we didn't really plan this hiking thing out by bringing food. We found a local Korean restaurant and had some Samgyeopsal (grilled pork, bacon sliced style) Pork is actually the cheapest meat we have found in Korea. Beef is pretty expensive wherever you go and I do not find chicken that often.