By: akane
Travels, ,

Korea day 6 – Busan

On our sixth day in Korea we took the train to Busan. The trip took around four hours, and we were excited to visit a new side of Korea.

I always take a photo of the beds at the end of our stay. In a few years I’ll have a nice collection of these.

We heard good things about Busan (meaning we watched a lot of videos that talked about Busan), namely the food.

On long trips, I try to always start off without iPads, and only give in if they ask for them more than once. This was already a long trip embedded in a longer trip, so I gave in faster.

We arrived in the afternoon and headed towards the hotel, around the Nampo-dong area. We went to Egg Drop for something to eat before heading out to stroll around.

We kept getting these warnings in Korea. I’d take a screenshot and then use Google Image translator (a must) to translate the message. These were mostly due to very hot weather conditions, but we also got some due to the rainy weather and floods. The first time we got one of these was back in 2014, our second time in Japan. I bought an iPhone* there and it was still configured to Japanese settings (except the language), and it started beeping like crazy at 4 am. We didn’t know where the beeping was coming from but as it was quite loud, we got it fast. There was no Google translator with images back then, so it took a while to understand what was going on. Eventually we opened our window and there was also a warning outside coming from the street speakers…all in Japanese. Turned out it was an earthquake warning, but everyone was going about their business as usual, so we did the same. These warnings are now quite normal in our country unfortunately.

Busan was less humid than Seoul, less rainy, but also hotter, because the sun was out more often. We went first to Yongdusan Park, which is on a mountain, Yongdusan, and there’s a 120 meter tall tower that I initially thought was a transmission tower of some sort, but it actually isn’t. There’s a cafe at the top and you can go up for the view (which we didn’t).

From there we walked to Sinchang-dong, where we found a street market full of locals and local food. We grabbed something to eat after walking a bit more and went back to our hotel to eat and get some rest.

I immediately loved Busan. It seemed to be less touristy than Seoul, and there was a certain personality there, a vibe, that was authentic and raw, and I liked that.

The best was yet to come.

*I don’t recommend buying an iPhone in Japan – I don’t know if anything changed (this almost 10 years ago), but in Japan it’s (was?) forbidden to silence your camera shutter sound when taking a picture, so by default it always makes a sound (quite loud) when taking a photo. You can’t turn it off either. I wasn’t taking pictures up girls’ skirts on trains so it didn’t make a difference to me, but it was still annoying.