South Korea - Chapter 8.5: A Bus to Busan
Somehow I managed to miss posting this chapter and since I already have a chapter 8, this one becomes chapter 8.5. :)
The next stop on our journey was the second largest city in South Korea: Busan. It’s in the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula. The only ways to get there from where we were (Gangneung) are by car, by train which involves going back to Seoul and then taking another train to Busan (which would take a total of 5 hours) or take a bus directly from Gangneung to Busan which also takes 5 hours. It turns out that on the Korean mainland, renting a car as a foreigner is fool’s errand. They aren’t set up to charge you should you not pay for a toll road so they just don’t rent to foreigners. The bus runs along the coast and would be easiest so we opted for that.
The seats were quite comfortable and the scenery most of the way was nice. We stopped at the half way point for a 20 minute break. When we arrived in Busan, we had to take the metro to the residential tower in which we are staying. The tower has 40 floors. Our unit was on the 35th floor and had a balcony which provided for some spectacular views.
The unit is small (as is most everything in South Korea) and basically a studio with an open area downstairs and a bedroom. Upstairs there’s a small living room and the second bedroom though the ceilings upstairs in the living room and where the bed is in the second bedroom are not designed for you to stand if you’re more than 5 feet tall.
Clearly the owner is a fan of the movie Léon: The Professional. It’s one of my favorites and at just 12 years old, it was Natille Portman’s first motion picture role.
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Gary Oldman plays the primary villain and he was perfectly cast for that role. While he plays an American DEA Agent, he’s such a phenomenal actor that you’d just never guess he’s actually an Englishman.
When we visited South Korea in 2017, we went down to the beach in Busan and found that there were three, very tall residential towers under construction. They are now of course finished. The three towers are 1,113 feet tall each with 5 levels underground and 85 above ground. Their massiveness isn’t completely captured in this video:
The three towers are sitting on top of a large, three level indoor mall. We walked over to check it out. Unfortunately, someone did not do their homework as most of the mall, perhaps 90% of it, were empty units. That means that most of the three towers are no doubt empty as well. My Father-In-Law likes Busan as he has always wanted to live near the beach so he walked into one of the many real estate offices that occupy many spaces in the mall to find out how much the residential units cost. Keep in mind that we checked into a view AirBnB units in this buildings as my Father-In-Law wanted to stay in one of them while we were in Busan. None could comfortably sleep four people. They would have a queen-sized bed and then a single-sized bed in another room. They also rented for 3X the cost of the unit we ultimately rented. As it turns out, if you want to buy a unit that faces the ocean, they are for sales for $2 million USD. It’s no wonder that so many are sitting empty and thus so is the mall. Clearly the demand is not there. I’m assuming the developer has deep enough pockets to hold out until such demand appears.
I took this picture with the .5 lens so so it’s a bit stretched but this is taken from the beach side. The views out into the ocean and along the beach are quite nice.
The mall contains a very nice, high-end grocery store similar to a Whole Foods Market. As I walked through it, I saw a grand total of one other customer and a lot of very bored staff.
Busan is bidding to host the World Expo in 2030 which is a kind of World’s Fair. By the way they are advertising it around the city, you’d think they had already been selected but that doesn’t take place until this November. I think I am on safe ground when I say that it would be impossible to visit Busan right now and not leave without the assumption that such a decision had already been made.
As I said earlier, Busan is the second largest city in South Korea. It has a little over half the population of Los Angeles, California but with a population density that is 1/3rd greater than Los Angeles. Not long ago, the Mayor of Busan proposed that they make English the official language of Busan. Yes, English! He wasn’t suggesting that they stop speaking Korean. He wanted to show that they are very friendly to foreign business interests. Apparently that initiative is moving forward.
Later we went out for dinner and afterwards took a taxi to get back to where we staying. Wait. Did I just forget to give you a review of that meal? No, I didn’t. It was good but not noteworthy. Moving on.
The taxi turned out to be a Hyundai Ionic 6 which is an all-electric vehicle.
It has two large LCD displays. We were moving so the image is blurred.
The driver told us that he gets a subsidy from the Korean government as they are encouraging cab drivers to switch to all-electric vehicles. I did some research and discovered that for 2023, this car won the awards for World Car of the Year, World Electric Vehicle and World Car Design. There are four models, the second of which has a 361 mile range which easily beats the Tesla Model 3 and Y. It’s on my short list of possible electric cars. The only thing I don’t like is that some of the features (like being able to use your phone as your key) only appear to come with the more expensive models that oddly enough have a shorter range. Having said that, it supports Apple’s CarPlay which is very important to me.
The next day, unsurprisingly, my Mother-In-Law wanted to check out the local market.
Like the others, it was huge and there were vendors specializing in all kinds of things from knives,
to lighting,
to shower fixtures,
to kitchenware,
to more kitchenware,
to clocks and watches,
to a store that sold rugs and comforters and much, more more of course.
At this last one my Jeannie decided to buy a blanket. Fortunately the had equipment that allows them to put it in a plastic bag then suck all of the air out to make it as compact as possible which is make it easier for us to get it home. You can see her holding it in the picture above. That’s a king-sized blanket. The husband and wife who own the place told us that the inherited it from one of their parents. It’s been in this location for 75 years.
When we entered, they were having dinner at a small table right in the middle of the shop. While this would be strange in the US, it’s not here in South Korea. I often see shopkeepers eating, watching TV, chatting with other shopkeepers and sometimes even taking a nap.
Busan is, as I said, a seaside city so there’s a lot of fishing going on here and thus a lot of fresh seafood as well.
For dinner we went to a seafood restaurant in the market. They had live king crab in a tank outside. Jeannie had never had it that fresh before so she ordered it for the table. We saw the owner go get a crab that was the size of a small dog and Jeannie waved her off. That was too big. The one we ended up with was still large. I’m not a fan of crab myself. I don’t dislike the taste. I’m just neutral on it and for the cost and the effort required to get so little meat out of it, it’s just not worth it to me. I also must confess that seeing a live creature one moment and having it served to me fully cooked on a plate the next, doesn’t sit will with me at all. I know it’s not much different than buying meat at the grocery store but it just is different to me.
There was a vendor making 호떡 (hoddeok - my most favorite of sweet Korean foods) and it looked like it had to be excellent because there was a line requiring that we wait 10 to 15 minutes to get one so we did.
It’s had been raining a lot since we arrived in Busan. When we woke up the next morning, it was extremely foggy and then started raining again. That's just the end of monsoon season in a seaside town. By the time it stopped it was time for lunch so we went out looking for a place to eat. Now I know I’ve been talking a lot about eating in these posts but as I mentioned in the beginning, eating is a bigger part of Korean culture than it is of most other cultures. If there’s any doubt, watch a few Korean dramas. The genre of the drama could be about doctors working at a hospital or an autistic lawyer or a zombie apocalypse that starts at a high school. It doesn’t matter. Somehow, some way, there will be scenes with people cooking, eating in restaurants, talking about the food they are eating even when it appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the plot. There’s even one called Let’s Eat that was so popular, it produced that rarest of things in Korean dramas: a second season. Thus a big part of the reason for our tour of South Korea is to eat lots and lots of good Korean food. Here in Korea is has to be good because there’s more competition than there are ants at a picnic. And as I have mentioned before, Koreans are Olympic-level eaters. Despite their often svelte appearance, they can pack away far more food than most other people I know. But it’s not so much about the quantity. They simply enjoy the act of eating more than most. That’s how important it is in Korean culture.
We had no idea where we were going for lunch but apparently my in-laws had picked up on the fact that as much as I like Korean food in general, I prefer Korean barbecue so we went out looking for that. A building quite close to where we were staying appeared to have just such a restaurant on the second floor so we headed up there. As it turned out, it was a quite upscale place that typically requires a reservation.
As a result, they asked us to wait while they prepared a room. Prepared a room? Yep, this was one of those places where each table is in a private room. I had seen these in Korean dramas (of course) and now we were about to experience one. If there’s something that I almost universally don’t like about restaurants, it’s the noise level. I want to be able to comfortably have a conversation (which I don’t believe is in any way unique to me) and yet restauranteurs seem oblivious to this. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In addition to the lack of sound-absorbing material, they play music which makes conversing even more difficult. I have a suspicion as to why this is. They don't want you to talk. They want you to eat. OK, I get that but part of the experience for me is being able to converse with the people with whom I am sharing a meal.
This restaurant was nothing like that. The only things to break the silence were our conversations with each other and the staff who came in occasionally to bring us more food. It was wonderful. And as it turned out, this was no typical Korean barbecue even with the private rooms. Instead, what you ordered turned out to be a 12 chorus meal.
It started with rice porridge and water kimchi soup.
Next they brought out a salad, a dish of cold noodles (which are a thing in Korea) mixed with vegetables, a radish dish and a largest display of mostly raw fish.
It was beautiful but raw meat is not my thing. I did try the raw salmon. It didn’t have much of a flavor. However, the texture was not to my liking at all. It was kind of mushy. Apparently Jeannie and her parents feel the same way. We told the wait staff upfront that we don’t eat raw fish and asked if we could swap it with something else but they don’t do that. Regardless, we did end up eating most of it.
I have noticed that every single Korean restaurant we have eaten in since we arrived has the exact same napkins.
They are quite small and are single-layered. It doesn’t matter how cheap or expensive the restaurant is, it will have these same small and simple napkins. It’s as if someone has cornered the market on restaurant napkins and is just making a fortune from it. They are, in the Korean tradition, very efficient. You generally don’t need a large napkin anyway. I’m sure a lot of the real estate on the ones I’m used to using back in the US goes to waste. A visit to South Korea makes you realize just how much we Americans waste.
Next came out a dish that was fried sweet potato and fried fish with some kind of sweet sauce. That was quite good.
Then came the actual cooked meat starting with a meat stew. It wasn’t bad but my mom made meat stew not unlike this quite a bit when I was a kid so I was not interested in it at all. I was waiting for the barbecue!
That began next and started with actual hot coals.
The meat was cooked in front of us as is often the custom in Korean barbecue restaurants. It wasn’t large in quantity but it was in taste. Delicious.
They then brought out another soup and rice.
There were some other minor, less noteworthy dishes as well along the way.
Lunch ended with what I thought was tea but in fact was dessert.
This is not a bowl. It’s more of a small cup and what I thought was tea, was actually a sweet drink that strongly tasted of cinnamon. It was wonderful. All this for about $53 USD per person. Not bad at all. It was a great experience. That’s one of the many things Jeannie and I have in common: we love having new experiences especially those we weren’t expecting.
It was raining (again) so we walked back to our place to rest and let our wonderful lunch settle.