Busan

We went to Busan yesterday which is the 2nd biggest city in Korea. It's at the southern tip of Korea so surrounded by lots of beaches. We took the bus (only $7 per ticket!) and it only took an hour and 20 minutes. I think the speed limit is 100km/hr on the highways, but most buses and cars go about 140km/hr. There are big signs on the highway that tell you when you're approaching a speed trap (cameras take pictures of your car's license plate), so as soon as you see one of those signs, you slow down to the speed limit. It is really strange.

Our day seemed to be filled with a lot of bad luck. We spent most of our time wandering in circles trying to find particular places. Despite our Korean phrase book, it was extremely difficult to ask for directions! We spent a good hour wandering around trying to find a non-Korean place to eat dinner, but in the end, we wound up at a Korean restaurant and didn't really touch most of the dinner. We tried to order a non-spicy vegetable stir-fry with rice and ended up getting rice with onions, garlic and carrots covered in hot sauce.

Before leaving we had written down directions to a part of the city with lots bars/clubs with foreigners and must have walked for about 3hrs trying to find it! We finally went to a "PC room" to get the phone number of one of the bars. We hopped into a cab, gave the # to the cab driver so that he could call and ask for directions. He dropped us off on the side of a street and pointed to a dark alley. Anyway, we ended up finding the bars although there were pretty much empty.

We decided to go to a "noory" bar which is like karaoke but you get your own room. It was so much fun! There were tons of English songs, so we plan on frequenting these places on a regular basis in an attempt to become professional karaoke singers.


Afterwards, we went back to the sketchy alley to see if any more people were there, but it was still pretty much deserted, so we found an old drunk man and asked him to take our picture before heading back to the bus station at about 12:15am.

When we got to the bus station, we found out the last bus for Pohang had left an hour before, so we ended up having to take a taxi back for $60. There was a mosquito in the car and the driver had the windows rolled up the whole time.

The next stop for us will be Seoul in October. Korean Thanksgiving (Choosok) is next weekend so we have a day off, but apparently the traffic is horrible because everyone's going to see their families so we will most likely go the following weekend (with lots of maps).