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Published: July 24th 2010
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I made my way down to Busan and was surprised on how nice the train was. I guess I am use to Chinese trains and forgot what a nice train looked like. People go to Busan for the beach and so when I arrived I made my way down to the beach. There I found that the people there were all wearing clothes on the beach and about half were wearing life vests. This I thought was very odd. Why would a person go to the beach and wear shirts and pants, even in the water? It seems that at the beach you have to protect yourself from the sun to an even greater degree than normal for the fear of getting darker. While all the white people were laying out wearing as few clothes as possible to get maximum exposure. I guess this is one of the great ironies in life. The beach also had three layers of shark nets and lifeguards on jet skis making sure that the people didn't go in further than their waste.
My first sights around the city were to a temple that was located near the fortress it was about an hour journey
to get there by subway. Once I finally arrived I had to get the bus up to the temple. This did not go exactly as planned and I ended up walking, the walk was not easy in the heat and I should have spent more time trying to figure out the bus, or asked someone. I do know 'yes' and 'hello' in Korean that should have been enough I think. The temple was ok, then the fortress was another 2km up the hill?/mountain. In the heat it felt like a mountain. It seemed that I would walk for 30min and see a sign saying I only went .2km. I thought about turning back many times, but the only thing that kept me going was some illusion that this fortress was going to be amazing. When I finally made it, I was greatly disappointed and walked back, not even bothering to see the rest of the sites, they were after all 2-3km away. I later found out there was a cable car I could have taken.
While in Busan I also enjoyed the local fish market, and being on the coast it was quite large. There were octopi, eels, and
things I'm not sure I have ever seen before. The place didn't smell nearly as bad as I was expecting, but maybe that is because I went in the morning. Then made my way to the Busan Tower, not very impressive after seeing the Seoul Tower, but it was something to do and I could tell that filling the day was going to be very hard to do. The nights, however, were much easier to find something to do. On my last night in Busan a 35 year old Korean checked in to the hostel. He wanted to go out and drink Soju (a rice wine, aka vodka). That was really the last thing I wanted to do, but another American and I went out with him to have a drink. It was clear that he already had a couple bottles after dinner and we walked to a bar where we had a beer. I didn't understand much of what he was saying, but I am pretty sure he wanted to go to a bar where you pay women for services rendered. We talked him out of the idea, but we kept walking around the city for an hour trying
to find some bar when finally I told him that I was going back to the hostel (we were now back in front of it anyway). The other American came back as well. 30min later the Korean comes back to the hostel and says he found the place and that we should follow, we told him we were tired and staying in for the night. Around 3am we heard him come back. Then we heard snoring, then we heard yelling. Someone got up to wake him up so we would quit yelling. He got up and started walking around when another group of people came back into the hostel. He thought they were robbers and assaulted one of them and was going crazy. We all got into the dorm room and locked the door. He then went out onto the fire escape where he tried getting in through the window. That is when he started talking about calling the police. 20-30min later the police showed up and took him away. Sadly it was not to arrest him, it was to find him another hostel to sleep in for the night. The owner refunded his money and the police took him
away. I couldn't believe that he got his money back and that the police were going to take a drunk guy to find a room. What country is this where they take someone that drunk at 4:30am on a ride around the city looking for a room? The only place I could think that would accept him was the jail, but I guess they do things differently here in Korea.
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