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Published: July 28th 2009
First of all, I owe everyone following this blog a huge apology! I have been TERRIBLE with updates, and I promise to do better from now on! Anyways, the good news is that today I'm taking some time to get it all together and do a huge, retroactive update!
I'll start with my first entry, which is a tour of Busan with my English teaching, globe-trotting friends, Malcolm and Louise. We took a weekend trip just to check out the second largest city in South Korea. There is a really nice and large beach there, the "Heaundae Beach-ee" (Konglish pronunciation!). These photos are from March (again, sorry!), so it was still fairly cold and no one was on the beach. These days, however, there are supposedly up to 1 MILLION people that visit this area. I hope to go down there and get some photos, but I will be quite busy for the next couple weeks and might miss the peak times for weather.
We also went to a large Buddhist temple there. The styling of the temples in Korea seem to be fairly uniform, but this one was particularly large. All the paintings, statues, etc. were familiar from
other temple visits.
We took a walk through a street market, as well. Naturally, you can find some very strange things there. Whole pig heads, live octopi trying to make a run down the street for freedom, etc. are quite commonplace.
The highlight of this trip was the day of scuba diving in the aquarium. There is a western scuba instructor living here who hosts a dive into the main tank of the aquarium every couple of weeks. On a side note, the guy is a bit of a jackass, a real "power trip" sort of personality. We got lost in the morning trying to find the meeting place and ended up being about 5 minutes late, and the guy wasn't going to let us join or return our refunds. So after a small scuff, he rolled his eyes and got us going. Anyways, no big deal. We weren't going to let him ruin our day. Continuing... For the morning we did a scuba instructional course, since not all of us were PADI certified to dive (including myself). But after some simple training, we got geared up and jumped into the tank which had all sorts of sea
life in it, including 2.5 meter long bull sharks, a 1 meter long sea turtle, and a couple of giant Australian groupers, to name a few! The sharks were meat eaters, but not aggressive to humans. Apparently their teeth and jaws were not strong enough to "tear limbs off", so it wouldn't be worth it for them to attack for food. Speaking of their teeth, these sharks each lose around 30 000 teeth per year, and we had the chance to pick them up off the bottom of the tank for souvenirs, which was a nice treat. We also got to feed and touch the turtle, which I'm sure would be strictly forbidden in many other aquariums!
So that's all for this entry, but I'm going to post up another one right away!
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