We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, like all things, fades
And I can recall our caravel
A little wicker beetle shell
With four fine maste and lateen sails
Its bearings on Cair Paravel
Oh my love
Oh it was a funny little thing
To be
The ones
To've seen
(Joanna Newsom, "Bridges and Balloons")
It was my first intercity trip without the assistance of a veteran Korea-in-liver. We met at the bus stop at 5:20 p.m. Saturday, after I finished volunteering at the orphanage in Masan (see "Super Epic Kweekend For the Ages, Part I"). I had done a little Internet research on Busan, picking out a few places I wanted to see, and Gretchen had added a couple of ideas of her own -- but I didn't want to plan the trip too much. I didn't pick out a place to spend the night, for example -- I kind of wanted to sleep on the beach, just for the adventure of it. But we'd wing it and see what we felt like doing.
We took the city bus to the express terminal and bought tickets for Haeundae. Standing in line there, I watched all the destination cities flash by on the screen and hoped I was buying tickets for the right Haeundae. 해운대 seemed right. But didn't some of the Web sites I'd read romanize it as "Hyoondae"? Should I be looking for something like 휸대?
Well, there weren't any listings for 휸대, so I had everyone buy tickets for Haeundae. We got on the bus, and as it was pulling out of the station, I figured I'd let my compatriates know that I wasn't entirely certain this was the right bus. (I'll skip the suspense for this part. It was. This part, I didn't screw up. Dun dun dun.)
Let me tell you this, fellow Korean travelers: If you go to Busan, do not arrive on Saturday night. I assume the same is true of Friday evening. The traffic situation was a masterpiece of hilarity. At one point, traveling across Busan to the Haeundae area, the main highway is through a tunnel under a mountain. This tunnel is one lane in each direction. And there had to be nine hundred thousand people on the road to Haeundae at the same time we were. It was like trying to get from Omaha to Lincoln on a Husker Saturday with I-80 down to one lane at Greenwood. For you Colorado readers, it was like trying to get to Coors Field for a Friday evening game with a wreck closing down three lanes of northbound I-25 south of Auraria (a situation I've actually been in -- ew). Kansas readers, it was like... uh... well, there really aren't enough cars in Kansas to create a traffic jam of this magnitude, so you'll just have to rely on my hyperbole and your own imaginations to picture this one.
Eventually, we got to Haeundae, after being tossed fore and aft by the bus's whiplash stops and starts. Leaving the station, we took a short walk down the street toward the beach. This would begin a period of 20 hours in which some 14 of them were spent walking.
We tried a Korean restaurant along the road, but it was pretty bad (I normally like 순대, Korean sausage, but this place was nigh upon terrible). So we went to Papa John's. I had no idea there was Papa John's in Korea. It was fantastic, and we ran into some other Americans there, so we figured we'd hang out on the beach for a while with them.
We got to the beach -- it was dark and cool, so no one was swimming, but the place was still bustling. Not as packed as I expected, but active. All those travelers we shared the road with must have been in the bars. I walked straight out to the shore and stuck my toes in the water so I could say I've touched the Pacific Ocean. ("Sea of Japan!" Gretchen is yelling in the back of my brain as I type that. So what. It's the same water.) Gretchen and Michael followed soon, and we took some photos of ourselves touching the water. Yeah, those are my feet.We went back up the beach to find our new American friends, but they were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they got embarrassed by these rubes splashing around like they'd never seen an ocean (sea!) before. Whatever, I'm from Kansas. Heard of it?
I don't remember exactly why, but we decided to walk around the neighborhood at this point. We wandered for a while, then figured we'd find the subway station and visit some of the spots we'd picked out. We got... a tiny bit lost. After asking for directions a couple of times, we found our way back to the bus terminal and the subway station near it.
We took the train halfway across Busan to the Lotte Hotel, where there is a huge and glitzy sign for a casino. "Casinos in Korea? Seriously?" We went in. The place was tiny, and there was no Texas hold'em to be found, so we didn't stick around long. Gretchen did manage to break a slot machine when she hit "cash out" and it jammed on her credit of 250 won. An attendant came to hand-pay the balance, worth about a quarter. He kind of laughed at her and I don't think she ever got her 250 won. But since she had only played it because she found a 500-won coin somewhere in the casino, I didn't feel too badly for her.We left the casino and went back to the subway to get to Haeundae again. But the subways in Korea apparently stop running at midnight (OK, I should have done a little more research). We were quite a distance from Haeundae, and I figured a cab would cost us 20,000 won or more (not a huge amount by any means, but more than we're accustomed to spending on cabs). Gretchen and Michael suggested we find a place to stay in the neighborhood we were already in, Bujeon-dong.
Bujeon-dong is a happening place. It was packed with Koreans and foreigners. But while every building in Haeundae seemed to have a motel, they were hard to come by in Bujeon-dong. We walked and walked and walked, searching for a 모텔 (motel) sign. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then finally -- success! Kind of."You haven't really lived in Korea until you've stayed in a love motel."
Kristin, my touchstone for all things Korean culture
Now I know a tiny bit of Korean. Enough to get us to Busan and back. But when I tried to get a room for the night at this tiny motel, the woman prattled on in Korean to me as if I were a native speaker. We couldn't get a room for three people, she said. Two people only. She smacked Gretchen on the shoulder and told me again in Korean -- "three people, no." The rates on the office wall showed 200 won, which made no sense -- a 20-cent motel? We left and then I figured out, busting up laughing, that we were in a motel that rents by the minute, not the night. Whoops.
We went to a PC bang next to get on the Web and search for a motel near us. Only one showed up on the foreigner Wiki -- 금란 "KumRan" hotel. We wrote down the directions and set out to find it.
It took another hour or more to figure out where to look. Eventually, we found the bookstore and alley mentioned on the Wiki. But none of the signs down the alley said 금란. About 2 a.m., the three of us exhausted from being awake and walking, Michael pointed out a sign on a motel. "They take Visa. It can't be bad."
Oh, but it was! It was ridiculous. The rates were posted in "per-night" rather than "per-minute," which got our hopes up. But the owner was puzzled as to why there were three of us. (I can only imagine what she was thinking.) She took us upstairs to two separate rooms. One had a round bed with pink sheets that nearly filled the entire room -- there was barely room for a TV stand and a vanity that looked like it came out of my grandma's house. Across the hall, Gretchen's room wasn't much better -- while her bed was a bit more normal, the whole place was dusted with hair and one wall clearly showed a door to the next room masked over with wallpaper. Both rooms had dingy, moldy bathrooms. It reminded me of a hotel we stayed at once on a debate trip to Parsons, Kansas. Ah, debate road trips. Anyway.
Michael was horrified, and Gretchen and I couldn't stop laughing. Michael said there was no way he could sleep here, and while I was pretty tired, I figured it might be tough sleeping on the floor anyway. So we decided to sit in one room and play cards until morning. But the motel owner camped out at the top of the stairs and scolded us (in Korean of course) when we tried to get into one room together. Two in one room, one in the other. She wouldn't have it any other way. Finally, I tried to talk to her. I got almost none of what she said until she asked me: "러시아?"
"Lushia," I repeated to myself. "Lushia, lushia... Oh! Russia!" She was asking if we were Russian. "No, 아니요, 미극 사람 (aniyo, miguk saram -- no, American)". "미극 사람!" she answered, her face turning to a bright smile. She patted my arm and said something encouraging in Korean, then left us alone. We spent about three hours sitting in one motel room, resting our feet, playing Phase 10 and watching The Simpsons. Then, just before 5, we left to try the subway again.
The subway started running about 5:30 and we went back to Haeundae, hoping to see the sunrise over the ocean. The sky was far too cloudy for that, so we took a long walk up to a lighthouse behind one of the ZILLIONS AND ZILLIONS OF DECENT HOTELS AND MOTELS WITHIN A FEW STEPS OF THE BEACH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. It was a beautiful walk, although very long after spending most of the night on our feet already. Then we asked a cab driver to take us to McDonald's to have breakfast. We wandered back to the beach about 9 and took the 오륙도 (Oryukdo) ferry for a sea tour.
The ride out to sea was beautiful. The sun started to come out, and the sea breeze felt terrific. The views were nice, too. I left my seat and stood on the aft deck with some other passengers, some of them clinging to the railing and throwing chips to the seagulls. One 12-year-old kid, 태경 (Tae-kyoung) gave me some of his chips to throw to the birds and asked where I was from. I ended up talking with him for most of the trip about the U.S. and his friends. Korean kids love to show off their English skills for foreigners, and Tae-kyoung was pretty good.
A few minutes later, though, the weather started getting rough. Our tiny ship was tossed. It didn't rain, but the wind kicked up and the waves grew huge. For a while, it was a fun and exciting ride, clinging to the rail on the deck. Some kids who looked like students from a Buddhist temple held on and whooped as the boat crested and crashed down every giant wave. OK, I admit it -- I yelled "whee" a few times, too. But then, my Kansas-from-ness kicked in and I started getting seasick. So did Michael. Gretchen seemed unaffected, but Michael and I grew weaker and weaker. I closed my eyes and put my head between my knees. "Please, please don't throw up and make this really horrible," I thought.
But it was OK. We made it to the pier and scampered off the boat. Dry land. Still walking, we wandered through a few shops and then down to the Busan Aquarium, which is also right there on the beach.
By the way, Koreans are really good at safety. Every movie begins with an illustration of where the emergency exits are. And on the beach, there is a giant billboard diagramming the evacuation routes and safe areas in case of a tsunami. Worry not, Mom. I'm safe from tsunamis.
Now the Busan Aquarium is worth visiting, but my memories of it aren't very clear. At this point being awake for 30+ hours and walking for 10 or more was taking its toll. I literally felt myself falling asleep as we walked to the entrance. Every place that looked like it might support my weight, I sat down. Some high-school-age Korean girls talked to me in English for a bit, and I wanted to help them practice more but I just couldn't keep up the conversation. We saw the aquarium -- one highlight is the shark tank, where divers swim with the sharks while doing demonstrations and guests can ride glass-bottomed boats on the water -- and then stopped at Lotteria for lunch, then got back to the bus station and back to Changwon.
We survived. Everyone got home OK, and as far as I know, they're still speaking to me. We'll see how that goes this week. But Busan, man, Busan is off the hizzy for rizzy. I can't wait to go back next summer.
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