…Busan/Geyong Ju
One of the nice things about working in a different country, I feel is to use the (little) time off to see new things, work and play, so to speak…
So after my class in the morning on friday, where we are really on a roll and have good discussions, I hurry to the appartment to get my things. I walk over to the busstation to take the expressbus to Busan, the 2nd city of Korea. A funny thing, this expressbus. Costs next to nothing, and drives to all the major cities, really easy. also, because of the distance it stops somewhere at some parkingplaces with shops and toilets at the side of the highway to get something to eat and drink in the bus (i really don’t see bus 182 from Leiden to Alphen do that ;-( )…
i arrive in one of two busterminals in Busan in the west of the city.
but as always, my experience is that when you take a couple of minutes to understand the subwaysystem of these types of cities, you go anywhere, anytime at no cost… and Busan os no different!
so i take the subway to my hotel, nice and neat, next to a big business center and close to one of the major beaches, Haeundae beach. from my room, i give my friend Sung Min a call; gonna meet him later. for now, i start walking, my favourite means of transportation when it comes to getting to know a city… i cross the river from my hotel and ignore the biggest shopping mall in the world (according to Guiness anyway, for what it’s worth), the Shinsegae Centum City mall… then i walk into the Suyeong area, a nice, kind of messy folky type of neighbourhood. when i get hungry, i pass a japanese restaurant, where the waitresses are very giggly and the food looks amazing; enter Arvid!
the sushi indeed is fantastic and i get the giggly waitress passing me and giving me new dishes, looking great and tasting better! too bad we cannot figure out the english fishnames used in the sushi…
i walk back to the hotel to meet up with Sung Min and it feels as if we saw each other yesterday. he first shows me Haeundae beach and although not very applicable to the two of us, this is a very romantic place (proof of which are the couples sitting on the benches at the cliffs)… the start of the beach is this around the (apparently) famous Westin hotel and you follow the wooden walking paths around the cliffs ending up on the actual beach. this beach has a very classy audience, couples walking hand-in-hand and people having drinks at the boulevard. so are we. we sit down and keep up the catching up; this is one of the things i like so much about talking to Sung Min: i can ask him anything i want about his culture and he can ask me anything about mine…
we walk back to the car and shows me the other beach,
Gwangalli beach. this beach has a totally different atmosphere: there is a rockconcert going on, many young people, nice and noisy, fortune tellers at the beach (“you will be very relaxed real soon”); very vibrant! sung Min shows me the raw fish market here: a big hall at the ground floor of a huge appartment building, where there are all kinds of reservoirs with water and the most exotic fish in them. the idea is to indicate which fish you want to eat and then to have it delivered to any of the restaurants on one of the floors above… indeed, all of the floors above the groundfloor are restaurants!!! Sung Min and i are not hungry, so we go to the Thursday Party, a great bar at the boulevard, where we do some drinking…
when we walk back to the car, which is parked at a parking lot, the owner asks Sung Min where i am from and starts to Hiddin-Gu me (Hiddink is a dutch football coach who has pushed Korea to a higher ground when he was their coach and consequently is considered the reincarnation of Buddha here..). i get a drink from him, nothing alcoholic (probably because he drank most of that himself) and he starts to become kind of affectionate… Funny thing is, that in the Netherlands if you would approach a man like he does, you are wondering if you ended up in a gay-bar. i have understood, that because of the invisible fence between men and women (especially when you are not married), men amongst men and women amongst women are very physical in that they are very used to touch each other, even when they don’t know you so well, like my new friend. after we part from our friend, we get into the car and head back to my hotel where Sung Min drops me off. i say goodbye to my friend and fall into an amazing sleep…
saturdaymorning i get up and head downtown to Seomyeon to have some great coffee and a muffin at one of the international coffee places… nice jazz!
after my coffee i walk about over all of the little markets where it is great to be able to pass and look without having to say ‘la, shokran’ every time! by the way, maybe there is a lesson here: people work for their money, so far so good. but principally everyone works for his money! it is a shame if you don’t work! because if you are not in an office or a store, you can always grow vegetables and sell that?! you continuously see mainly old ladies at the side of the road, pealing peas, organizing carrots or leaves of lettuce and putting them into containers, cleaning fish or cutting chickenlegs; activities of which you thought they were just done by machines, but where they prove the contrary… but it is also a social gathering, your friends are sitting here as well or visit you ‘at work’, you have your family with you; this is Maslow visually explained!
i pass the markets on my way to Busanjin market through the “i-got-the-most-amazing-old-shit-for-sale”-market… i love walking the back-alleys. like in Seoul, they are crawling with small booths forming one particular type of market. and it is so funny: no matter how many restaurants there are, they are building and starting new ones everywhere! and in all of these markets there is a whole lot of the same! like in all of these countries there is absolutely no diversification. now that intrigues me, although i do like the customerorientation: it is very easy to find specific stuff!
i take the subway to the last, most northern station to take the bus to Geyong Ju. at this time, the subway is nice and busy for me to observe all kinds of different people and how they differ from their peergroups in Holland! young women, grandfathers with grandchildren, young teenagers, schoolchildren, old people, twenty-somethings… and in everything they seem more naïve than their counterparts in Holland. younger and more carefree, without the feeling to have to be tough and distant; at least that is the impression i sometimes get in Holland. people here are carelessly sleeping in the subway and others look at you totally open, straight in your face; try doing that in 010: “what’cha looking at catweazle? am i wearing something of yours?!”… even in the street, people bump into you, but never aggressive, just absent-minded: “sorry” (in korean)…
Sung Min told me to bring an umbrella by the way, because very bad weather was expected; apparently the RKMI (republican korean metereological instituut) has the same capabilities as the knmi in Holland; the weather is amazing! so now i am in the expressbus once again and again, this is an amazing means of transportation! flexible, comfortable… i really don’t know whether this would work in the Netherlands, but here it is fantastic (please in Holland with dutch drivers, cause i haven’t encountered any good one here; gas/break/change lanes/break/gas and then there is no car in sight, can you imagine what they do when they pass a truck!!)…
after about 40 minutes i arrive in Geyong Ju and the hotel is just around the corner. now, i understood this place is actually kind of a big, open-air museum with large distances and around the corner at the hotel, i saw a rental-motorscooterplace… hmmm…
although the two boys tell me i need an international driver’s licence, i self-confidently point at the little motorbike at mine and add i already did this once in korea (true, but that was a small moped at Jeju-island!)… Anyway, 50 or 125 cc, they ask me… duhn. the 125 is pretty fast (down the mountain, wind in my back about 125 km)… Cool wind in my hair (under my helmet), warm smell of the kimchi… anyway…
they explain to me how to get to the most beautiful places, Bulguksa temple and the Seokguram grotto… it seems simple and later it actually is, but the map is not to scale, so everything seems much closer than it is. these two places are about 30 km down the valley; thank god for my scooter! so hit the gas and head down to Bulguksa. the whole area stems from the Silla dynasty and this temple is about 1250 years old… beautiful complex with all kinds of prayer-areas and buddha-statues… from there i get to Seokguram and i like this even better: a small temple carved into a rock up in the mountain with a normal front… the buddhas in it are also carved in the mountainrock, really beautiful! small but lovely!
from there i drive back along all kinds of remains; a temple here and there (but after Bulguksa and Seoul, more of less), i pass the Anapji-pond, where king Munmu founded a big pond with temples to house animals and plants (foreseeing!), Cheomseongdae, the oldest astronomical obeservatory in East-asia (for what it’s worth) and the Daereungwon royal tombs, which are tumuli, big hills under which the royals were buried…
A little bit later than i should have i return the motorscooter, but they don’t mind and i go for a bite. Then i notice, that the rest of Geyong Ju is really nothing much. I find a nice restaurant where i have some meatsticks and a plate of undeterminable (at least
for me, as i don’t speak Korean 
) meat, which is not so good… I impersonated a chicken and the girl nodded, but if this is chicken, it is very tough parts of it… I’ll just leave it… (later, when i ask Paul, he says they were the chins of chicken…)
after dinner, there is really nothing much to do here, so i get back to the hotel…
the next day i take the amazing bus back and check in again at the Haeundae Centum city hotel. i am visiting william and veronica, two former students of mine, about 10 years ago. they have gotten married and are living in Busan. William invited me to celebrate his birthday with them and some of their friends.
we had a great lunch with all guests in a nice italian restaurant and drinks up in their beautiful appartment overlooking the ocean…
After this relaxed atmosphere, drinks and nice people it is very hard to get myself moving again. but i want to do a little more sightseeing so i thank them for their great hospitality and take the subway to Jagalchi, the famous fishmarket… it is the most crazy amount of fishbooths and fishstands that you can imagine and then you have the inside market still…
i walk over to the other side of the main road and enter a vibrant area, where it is immensely crowded and very energetic. not so at the hotel where i return, because most of the guests are probably preparing for another day of congresses and seminars… i have to say, i love Busan, the way it is built around all of those mountains in the city, creating different areas… loved it!
let’s go to sleep and return to the vibrant, energetic Gwangyang in the morning…
