Away to Busan

Wow, it's been a while since I've written. Time just flies by here.

The end of July brought about a week vacation, my first at my new job. Sarah and I decided to head down to Busan for a few days. Busan is on the southern tip of South Korea. The morning of, we got up early and took the subway to Seoul station.

(Seoul station - heading toward KTX tracks)

The subways here are really easy to navigate. Everything is labeled in English and Korean, and some Chinese. They also have really good signage and announcements of stations. I like them so much better than the ones in Toronto. They are much cleaner and better organized.















(Korean subway station) (inside of the KTX) (inside the KTX)

Anyways, we got to Seoul station and got on the Korean Train Express (KTX). It's a high speed train that travels around 300km/hr. Although it goes so fast, it doesn't feel like you are moving unless you walk down the aisles. It was interesting travelling through the length of Korea. No matter where you are, each city and each country side looks the same. There are not a lot of defining features.

The train trip was about 3 hours. We booked a hotel online, and we stopped at the tourist centre in Busan station, and someone told us where to go, and wrote the hotel name in Korean for us. So we hopped into a cab and were on our way. We went to the hotel, which we had made the reservation with. It was a really nice place. We got to the desk and they were very confused, which made us somewhat worried. They finally figured out that we were at the wrong hotel. So we got back in a cab, and drove all the way back to the train station. It turned out that the hotel that we wanted was a literally right beside the train station. So we spent $5 on cabs to right next door to where we were. The confusion was that we booked online under one hotel line, but I guess it transferred us to the more inexpensive one. It was a silly mistake, but it wasn't anything horrible.
















(view from our hotel of Busan station - we were that close!)


(a sign at Busan station)


So once we finally checked in, we went off to explore. Busan is a port city, so we went down to the harbour. We went to the Jagalchi fish market. It was interesting, but very fishy smelling - go figure. That's one thing that I noticed there, was that the water smelled really bad. It was a mixture of fish and sulphur. That's one of the reasons why I'm glad that I didn't move to Busan, but it's a nice city to visit. We walked around the area a bit, went into an underground shopping mall and were typical tourists.

(Jagalchi Fish Market)

(Busan Harbour) (Sarah and I at Busan Harbour)



Later that night, we headed down to a beach. There I walked along the beach at night and looked at the skyline. The bridge was all lit up. Other nights they have light art, but they didn't have any that night because there was a talent show going on.




(Busan sklyine at night)


(Busan skyline at night) (Gwangali bridge) (Talent show)

On our second day, we went to one of Busan's beaches, Songdo beach. We went on a good day, it was a little cooler so there weren't many people there. Even with less people, there were still umbrella's everywhere! Going to the beach is one of Koreans favourite past times it seems.

The first part of the vacation was really good. The second half was a little disappointing. We would be all excited about going to an attraction, and then find out that it wasn't what we expected. The most exciting things that we found were the simple, and free things like underground shopping and the beach.

It was really nice to visit another part of Korea, but it was also really nice to come home. Going to Busan made me really appreciate where I do live in Bundang. Everyone will tell you that it's the nicest place to live in Korea, and I think they're right.