Busan trip, early October

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Scottathan, who I met at the Korean burn invted me to come to Busan whenever, so I went over a long weekend. Seocheon is a great place to get some rest on a weekend. How's that for a backhanded compliment?) All together it took about 5 hours to get to Busan from my front door. 5 hours is on the long side of traveling around this country, per most opinions I've received. Anyway, it was a good bus ride. Korea has great roads, much better than Yunnan province in China. I never held on to anything to keep from crashing into another person, or feared the bush might also crash. Expectations. Keep them low and you're bound to be pleasantly surprised.
After arriving at the Busan Central Bus station, which must have been named on Opposite Day, I took the metro for 50 minutes to get downtown. I arrived at Scott's place toward midnight. We went out for some drinks, one of which was a vile concoction (name forgotten) of 151, JD, and Tequila. Cheap, but it even tasted toxic.
The next day started moderately hung over. But never fear, there's a Costco for that. Scott's friend Hongdae wanted to go to Costco for cheap Jim Beam and cokes. Costco pizza sounded pretty good. At the store, I felt a touch of home. Who'd have thought that a warehouse store would bring a peaceful easy feeling. Good idea, mostly. It was crowded. Full of Koreans and expats of all kinds. After pizza, we shopped, and I got some chocolates (Ghiradelli and Ferrero Roche) for gifts for my coworkers. Brilliant. If I lived near a Costco here, I'd definitely get a membership. Really, I couldn't pass up 4 lb packages of bacon, blueberries, or cheese.
Post Costco we went to Gwangali beach to hang out, and Hongdae had to go to some function or other. We ended up meeting back for dinner, some kind of kimchi soup, which was spicy and tasty.
I brought my poi (Scott is a burner, so of course fire is on the agenda). After an unsuccessful search for kerosene, we scouted a store selling zippo lighter fluid refills. I soaked my poi with them, and lit up a couple of times on the beach.
Afterwards, we ended up going to German Bar, which serves their own brewed beer in 2L or 3L (I know there's a technical term for this) bottles. Fantastic brew. And there's an Armenian band playing a mix of Korean and western songs on stage. This place is huge, and nearly completely full. Who'd have thunk it? Scott and I ended up going back home at midnight or so. I wanted to save some energy for Sunday. On Sunday, I left Scott's apartment in the afternoon, and I won't give a report of that evening. 😉
I ended up getting back to Seocheon Monday late afternoon, tired, happy, and definitely with a crush on the city of Busan.

p.s. At the poorly named Busan Central bus terminal, there was a guy selling new sneakers for 5,000 won (about $5). If you want to cheap sneaks on the go, that's looks like a good deal, but the largest size of the cheapies are only 250 (Korea size).

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