Hooray for long weekends... A trip to Busan

Well, there are still a couple of months to go before Summer Vacation but this weekend was a long weekend so, a perfect opportunity for a city mini-break.... Ok, calling it a city mini-break is maybe a bit ambitious but there haven't been that many opportunities this year for a longer get-away, so "break" it is and I decided to go to Busan, on the south coast. Korea's second largest city and largest harbour port. For the most part it is more convenient to use long distance buses to get from town to town as they're cheap and cover most areas. If I could get to Daejeon however I could get the train and, even better get the KTX, Korea's super-fast-high-speed-as-good-as-the-Japanese-bullet-train, train. Saturday morning found me at 9.30am waiting at Jinchoen for the bus to Daejeon. Unfortunately the bus had gone at 9am so I was stuck for 2 hours until the next one arrived. No worries, I had plenty of time. My train wasn't due to leave until 2pm and it was simply my paranoia about missing it that had led me to get up and out so early. Jincheon has no train station, and Cheongju's isn't on the right line for the south coast, hence the trip to a much bigger city, Daejeon, to catch the right train.

At Korean stations they don't let you on to the platform until 10 minutes before your train arrives so rather like an airport you need to keep an eye on the departures board, where they will let you know if you're ready for boarding. I managed to finally figure this out after my ticket was constantly refused entry at the barrier gate to the platform. So, no hitches later I was ensconced on a luxury train heading 300km per hour through the countryside to Busan. I say luxury, it wasn't quite Orient Express and complimentary snacks, but the seats were comfy and had plenty of legroom, it seemed new, there was no graffiti, broken seats, slashed fabrics or cigarette burns. It was nice. The announcements were in Korean, English & Japanese and on the little TV monitor we were kept up to date with our location and speed. We stopped just once at Daegu on the way and a mere 2 hours after boarding we arrived in Busan. Busan is quite sprawling but fortunately has a good subway system. My yeogwan was in Seomyeon, slightly north of the train station but was one of the main subway stations and very easy to get to. Having arrived I set out to explore. It was a lovely sunny day and that is always good for putting you in the right mood about a place. I don't know if it was getting out of Jincheon fro a weekend or feeling like I was doing something more fun, but I took an instant shine to Busan. I had thought it would be very industrial after all it is a major port. But, like many Korean towns and cities, it is surrounded by mountains forcing the living and business areas to nestle in wherever suitable. It felt very Mediterranean to me as I walked around the main centre of town. The combination of narrow shopping streets, coffee shops, glorious sunshine and glimpses of the blue, blue sea in the distance seemed a far cry from what I associated with "Korea". Seeing as it was a nice afternoon, I headed for Yongdusan park. In actual fact a small mountain park, the way to reach it was on an escalator from the main shopping street. Once at the top there is the park itself and Busan Tower. The tower is about 100 ft and for 3000W you can take the lift to an a viewing gallery and, ubiquitous, cafe. If its a clear day its well worth the trip up as you get a fantastic 360o view of the city's layout. Heading back towards the yeogwan I wandered around for a while, not really wanting to shop but the lure of the big bookstore on the corner was too much. Always a sucker for books, especially here where I don't have ready access to them, this store had quite a large foreign language section. Yippee... There was a tempting looking Korean Italian pizza restaurant where a glass of red wine was calling my name, really the only thing I could do was oblige and check out the best yachae pizza that Busan had to offer.

the whole restaurant and his wife kept popping by to make sure I was ok and to keep refilling my free side dish of M&M's

As a foreigner there is sometimes the nagging feeling that are you receiving lesser treatment from people. On the other hand, you can find yourself receiving that little bit extra attention as people go out of their way to help you or make sure you understand. I think I got a little bit of the latter in the pizza restaurant. After the giggling had subsided, they couldn't decide who had the best English to be my waiter, I got a table next to the window, the whole restaurant and his wife kept popping by to make sure I was ok and to keep refilling my free side dish of M&M's (don't ask..) and I got super large pourings of wine in my glass. The pizza was pretty good too! Suitably wined and dined I decided to call it a night and traipsed back to the yeogwan. By day the street had seemed a bit dull and uneventful. Coming back at night, it was all a buzz. There was a proliferation of fish restaurants and the tanks outside displaying the ware were illuminated. Busan showed no exception to the neon fetish that every Korean town or city has and the place was brighter than in the day. The yeogwan itself was quite quiet, I met a Korean couple who were on a long weekend down from Seoul and that was it. I chose a video from a selection of 80's classics at reception and headed for bed...