Blogs from Haeundae-gu, Busan, South Korea, Asia

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 ... read more

Day 32 (Sun 7thOct) So my time has come to leave behind Beijing and China, a place that I have enjoyed very much. Next on the agenda is South Korea, and firstly Busan. The day started with a 5:30am start after getting in at half 1 so I was slightly tired. I tried to make as little noise as possible leaving the hostel room. Seems there’s 3 Siberians in 2 beds which means they’re multiplying as there were 2 the previous day. Made it to the airport and went through the usual procedures. Boarded the flight and away from China. The flight lasted around 2 hours to Busan Gimhae airport. Off the plane and through the painful customs processes, filling in questionnaires for health and illness, reason of visit and so on. This all takes longer ... read more

It was curry for breakfast after all. Chicken and veg curry with rice. And some red things in a sauce that I didn't try in case they were spicy or fish. Actually it was very tasty but way too early for someone who usually has a weetabix and a banana for breakfast. Yesterday I visited the UN cemetery in central Busan. When the North Koreans initially invaded this south eastern corner of the country was the only part they didn't manage to occupy and therefore it was here that the cemetery was created after the war. I was surprised that there are as many as 885 British soldiers buried here, the largest of any nation that fought as part of the UN response ( most of the other nations repatriated their soldiers). There was an interesting ... read more

Another Busan blog update! Hope its not boring to keep reading about Busan as this time we had some different experiences! The original plan last weekend was to go to Busan, stay in a jimjilbang on Friday and camp on the beach on Saturday. The weather forecast for the whole weekend looked dreadful but Ash and I along with Nat and Drew and Louis and Philne decided to continue with our trip and make the most of the weekend even if we couldn’t camp. We rushed to Daegu station after school and boarded the Mugunghwa (slower and cheaper than the KTX) train to Busan. It took an hour and half to get there but the upshot of this was the train having a really good snack bar with computers, a mini noraebang room, a room with ... read more

Jules’ dramatic entrance I can’t explain how excited I was when one of my best friends in the world Jules told me that on her way home from travelling in South East Asia she was taking a two week detour to South Korea. I was also ecstatic that my other very good friend (and ginger brother from another mother) Rowan just happened to be on a month long holiday in Japan at the same time too! We coordinated all of our diaries and arranged to meet up in South Korea. Exciting times. Jules arrived in to Seoul in dramatic style and realised she couldn’t get money out of the ATM which meant I spent the evening in sporadic Skype contact fretting about her. Luckily she sorted her problems and got to her destination. She arrived in ... read more

We caught the 7:10am KTX (fast train) to Busan. Train tickets in Korea can now be reserved online at www.korail.com - a very user friendly website! We arrived in Busan just before 10am to rain. It took us while to find our ‘hostel’ as it was actually just some guys apartment that had bunk beds in it. It was in an apartment high rise in the business and bar district of Busan. The 'hostel' was cozy but not as clean as the rest of the hostels we stayed at in Korea. We spent our first day in Busan going to South Korea’s largest fish market, the Jagalchi Fish Market. We wandered the alleys checking out all of the sea creatures for sale and watching old ladies clean fish at a rate so fast it was almost ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, …Mafia Man, Casanova, the three engineers and a personal trainer are teaching us Korean under a tarpaulin on the side of the street in Busan whilst Laura, drunk from soju and beer, is being fed somebody else’s fish dipped in some sauce from the woman who has just cooked us it! Joanna, Claire, Laura and I pose the simplest of Korean questions to our new friends, “norrebang?”, which is met with an uproar of approval… So where do I begin from last week’s blog? After our awkward meeting on Friday afternoon, we went out for a drink with Betty and Chris at a local bar. The next sentence would probably send shock waves ringing throughout all the bars and pubs in England since on a Friday night, in this small bar in Boeun, ... read more