Busan and the Beach

This weekend I decided to take a trip to Busan (a.k.a. Pusan), the second largest city in Korea. Busan is in the Southeast of the penninsula, and is the major port city in Korea. It's also become a major destination for beachgoers, and this was the major attraction to me. Seeing temples and palaces is all good and well, but every now and then you need to just sit in the sun and smell the surf.

Busan is a little more than 300 miles away from Seoul, so to get there, I took the KTX, the high-speed train. I cannot emphasize how cool this thing is. It tops out at close to 190 mph, although sitting inside it you have no idea that you're going a third of that speed. The ride is smooth and peaceful, with the dulcet sounds of all the passengers' cell phones providing a soothing soundtrack to compliment the verdent countryside we sped through.

(Note: While the countryside is, in fact, quite beautiful, the part about the cell phones is a total lie. If there was an olympic event for "Most Annoying Cell Phone Ring Tones," competitors from South Korea would take gold, silver and bronze and would shame the competition with how far ahead they finished. Nobody--not even elderly men or women--are content to have basic ring tones. Shrill bird chirps or too-loud Korean pop are the sounds of choice, although one particularly malicious individual sitting behind me actually selected a ring tone that sounds like a crying baby. To borrow a line from Bill Simmons, I don't even have a joke here).

I arrived in Busan station at about 1:30 and hopped in a cab to take me to Hayundae beach, where I was staying. My cabbie was an older man, and perhaps to make up for the speed with which the KTX took me, he set records for yellow lights yielded to and most times being passed on the right. I got the sense that he was once a great driver, but had simply succumbed to old age and fading eyesight. It was sort of the taxi equivalent of watching Mike Piazza hit these days.

I finally made it to Hayundae around 2:30, and was not disappointed. I grabbed a quick lunch and hit the beach, where I was pretty much encamped for the next 26 hours. You can see the pictures below. Hayundae is commonly referred to as the Waikiki of Korea. I've never been to Waikiki, but it struck me as more like Coney Island. The beach was rocky and a little dirty, and very crowded. There was a small boardwalk, along which vendors sold tchotchkies, fake tattoos, and refreshments such as corn dogs (no joke), enormous dried squid and the ubiquitous silkworm larvae. There are concessions where you can pop a balloon with a dart and win a prize, and even an acquarium. Unfortunately, the Cyclone was closed.

I spent Saturday afternoon/evening and Sunday morning on the beach, managing to get myself a decent tan for only 24 hours (and managing to burn only the top of my right foot--go figure). I walked into the town for lunch on Sunday, looking for seafood since there's so much fishing in Busan. I settled on a place that specializes in crab, and got bimimbap with cold, marinated blue crab. The crab meat was sort of congealed and gelatinous, but was still quite tasty. There was a jellyfish salad on the side that was excellent. Then I went back out to the beach to finish tanning.
One other cool thing--you know how you always have to wash the sand off your feet when you leave the beach? Here, instead of having those cold water showers that never quite work, they have little high-pressure air sprayers that you can use to blow the sand off your feet. This rivals the KTX for awesomeness.

At 3:45 I caught a cab back into town. We got to the train station pretty quickly, so I didn't mind that much that my cabbie clearly went a long way to jack up the fare (I paid almost twice as much as for the ride in--I think we went to the station via Bangkok). I caught an earlier train home. I was initially really excited, because I was seated in first class on the train ride back (at no extra charge!). However, it turns out that first class is in no discernable way different from coach. I guess it's always first class on the ol' KTX.