A week in the Life (Part 3)

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Saturday, November 24th, 2012



Having arrived late Friday night in Busan Jen and I woke in our modestly priced Love Motel, a place where young couples escape their parents watchful eyes for some heaving petting and business men meet their mistress' after a night out wheeling and dealing in the whiskey bars. Us, we just wanted a cheap place to stay for the weekend. We rose early and I went down to meet Jon, Christina and Phil, the three friends that had made the three and a half hour train ride from Seoul, they're journey started sometime around 5:30 am but they'd been up since 4:30 and I seriously wondered how they would do through the day and well into the night.





As 11:30 rolled around we made our way to the aquarium to meet our dive instructor. Michael, an expat from Toronto walked us down into the aquarium and through back doors and down corridors until we made it to the training room. After our initial presentation and preparing for things we would do for the day we were split into two teams with Jen, Christina and my self on the first team and essentially the guinea pigs. Jon and Phil had decided to sit this one out and were no doubt somewhere warm in mid beer as I was told to not to shuffle and squirm if a shark was to swim towards my testicles. This will make the shark nervous our guide was telling me. Uh, no problem I thought. Yeah, I'll just stand my ground as a missle with teeth heads straight for me, wouldn't want to upset the little guy.



We were placed in the training pool to practice our hand signals and breathing from our regulators. This seemed to take about an hour and as we stood in the cold water I held back the urge to pee. I'd been curious if urine would attract the sharks, especially with them already being a potential testicle magnet. Michael told me he wasn't aware of any sharks being attracted to urine but still I decided to hold off as long as I could.



After our training was complete the gate was opened and we descended into the tank. As I made my way under water to and lowered myself down to the bottom and 8 foot sand tiger shark was gliding 5 feet away from my face. Well, I thought, I guess we're going to get straight into it. Slowly I made my way down, careful to not wave my arms or any other limb in a way that might suggest to the perfect killing machine that I was in anyway an acceptable food source. With all of us in the pool we took our walk along the bottom.

The biggest shark in the tank started to make his way in our direction and it's hard to tell if they can even sense you in the pool. They're eyes are completely glazed over and they're barely even moving, yet they glide smoothly through the water. He split our group in the middle and we all hunkered down just a little bit to give him more space. The unnerving part isn't seeing an 8 foot shark swim past your face. The unnerving part is when he goes buy and he turns behind you and you've lost sight of him. The only thing to do is to watch the faces of families on the otherside of the glass and hope that they aren't making some horrified excited expression as a fish with a chainsaw for a mouth silently makes his way up behind you.



At one point we were led to the center of the tank and told to crouch down. As we did so the sharks seemed to understand their que and swooped in to circle all four of us in some kind of shark tornado, which is possibly the worst kind of tornado. I'm sure the sci-fi channel actually has a movie about one. We sat with our bodies still and our heads constantly moving wo keep track of each one as they surrounded us and paced back and forth.



We were scheduled to be in the tank for thirty minutes and we were but the entire experience felt like ten minutes. We made our way out, congratulating ourselves and smiling unsurely about what we had just done. A quick count of limbs and fingers, then we made for the showers.



That night, still high off of our dive, we headed to a small tapas restaurant for dinner and drinks. Jen and I had checked it out the night before and were excited to go back and eat such rare foods like chorizo and spanish olives. They tasted as good as I remembered them. Afterwards we drifted from bar to bar, looking for the right scene. Christina did her best to tell each waiter that it was my birthday and as a result I had more than a few shots. One of them covered in a blue flame that I had to drink down with a straw to avoid buring my lips. I don't know what it was, I only know that the 151 proof rum sank to the bottom and gave me my last mouthful. We ended that night in a skyscraper bar overlooking the beach and Christmas tree lit bridge. The bar was quiet, in fact I think we were the only ones there but was the perfect place to hang out with some good friends had share some laughs.

We made our way back to the motel eventually but not without being denied food at the Burger King down the road. We'd just missed the closing time and would have to go to bed without a greasy Whopper soaking up the german liqours and flaming booze from our stomachs.



Sunday, November 25th, 2012





The night had been great and the morning was rougher on some of us more than others. We shuffled down the street with our bags for the Wolfhound, a Irish pub that's pretty famous over here and known for their all day breakfast. We spent our last few hours in town eating fried potatoes, steak, sausages, eggs, toast, and a few morning mimosa's and pints to equallize ourselves. I was unsure about having my 30th in Korea but it turned out to be one of the best birthdays I've had.

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