Let's start at the beginning, when I decided to go to Busan for the fireworks festival, despite being warned that the crowds would be insane. My options at the time were: leave immediately after school, take the 8:10 pm bus and arrive around 1:30 in the morning, take the midnight bus and arrive at 6:30 am, or take an expensive KTX* train in the morning and arrive around noon. I wanted more time in Busan but didn't want to have to look for lodging in the middle of the night, so I took the overnight bus, thinking 6ish hours of sleep on a bus would be fine. The bus was actually great. You pay a little extra for a midnight bus, but it's worth it. The seats recline all the way and you even have a footstool. It's still not the most comfortable way to spend the night, but it's nearly as comfortable as sleeping in a vinyl recliner. I brought a pillow (Thanks for the travel pillow, Jessi and Josh S.) and blanket and prepared to settle in. And then the guy next to me started the small talk. "Where are you from?" The small talk continued for several minutes with me irritably removing one my headphones every time he asked a question, trying to make it obvious I didn't want to talk. Eventually I just reclined my seat and spread out my blanket and pillow and he finally took the hint and left me alone.
I slept pretty well on the bus, aside from being woken up at every stop. Then, but when there'd been a long stretch of no stops and I'd fallen into a nice deep sleep, was woken by a concerned fellow passenger shaking me and speaking to me in Korean. I made a sound like "gnahhhhh?" and he said "Haeundae! Haeundae!" which is the name of the my stop (the final stop for that bus). I was extremely confused, because it was still pitch black outside, and I was sure that I shouldn't have had to wake up until dawn. The clock on the bus said 4:42, so I asked the bus driver and he confirmed that I was indeed in Haeundae. Great. I normally love it when my bus arrives somewhere early, but not when I was planning on getting six hours of rest on the bus and ended up with less than 5! I wandered down the main street considering going to a nearby jimjilbang**, and also keeping an eye out for any 24 hour coffee shops where I could order something hot to drink and then doze off in a comfy chair in the corner. Nothing was open except bars clubs, and seafood restaurants, which didn't look very appetizing at that time of the morning. I wandered back towards the bus stop thinking I'd get a taxi to the jimjilbang and then stopped to check the metro sign and realized the first train was at 5:20. I went down into the station and dozed off on a bench there for a while before catching a train to Busan station. My hostel was near there, but I couldn't check in until 4, so I put my backpack in a rented locker, bought my return ticket via KTX to Seoul for the next day, got some coffee and breakfast and then picked a random location from a flyer at the tourism info booth. Gupo market.
The market has a lot of clothing stores, but it is mainly famous alllllllll the many different foods, especially seafood, which is mostly live and wiggling in tanks and buckets of water in front of the vendors stalls. I saw all kinds of snails, oysters, clams, mussels, eels, fish, turtles and shrimp.
Sadly, also had a street devoted to vendors selling these:
No, those aren't pet stores. Those are dogs being raised specifically as food. This was the end of the street, I saw the dogs, snapped the picture and immediately did a U-turn because I couldn't stand to walk down there. They were crying. They look so sad in their cages, and it's bad enough to see them while they are alive, I had no wish to see the dead ones being sold as meat. This is one Korean dish that I just have no desire to try.
After a full morning of shopping and taking in the sights at the market, I was hungry, so I headed back to where I had arrived at not quite 5am- Haeundae beach. I knew there would be good seafood there and I was not disappointed. About a block from the beach various restaurant owners began calling out to me when I showed the least bit of interest in their signs. I chose one that looked promising and settled in to enjoy this lovely, lovely meal:
Mmmm... Yes, all that food was for me, and I ate nearly all of it. The seafood soup was delightful. I even ignored the stares of the Korean diners and used my fingers to eat the crab. Because it is just wrong to try and use chopsticks for that- you end up leaving half the meat in the shell. It was SO good. If I lived in Busan, I would probably want to eat this for dinner almost every night!
After lunch I wandered down Haeundae beach for a while
and then headed back to Busan station to retrieve my backpack and check in to my hostel, which turned out to be the beginning of a very unfortunate 'adventure.' You see, I had been a bit desperate to get a room because I'd been waffling about whether or not I was going to go to the festival for so long that everything filled up. I snagged a bed at hostel that had less-than-stellar reviews and hoped for the best. Later I realized I should have looked into the place a little more carefully. The directions I had led to Busan Station and stopped, but I figured, google maps would come to the rescue. Not so. The address provided was missing important info like parts of the street names.
Not panicking, I called the number to ask for directions and was greeted by a pre-recorded message informing me that "the number you are calling does not exist."
Still not panicking (well, not too much) I asked at the tourist information desk. They couldn't help me. I asked random people on the street. No one had seen it. I gave up, as I was already late for meeting my friends at Gwangalli Beach for the fireworks festival. I emailed the hostel begging them to call me with directions and caught a very crammed subway to Gwangalli, where I began to realize slowly the extent of the crowds and impossibility of finding my friends in such a press. I made it almost to them when the first fireworks went off and the crowd completely solidified. I was unable to move in any direction, could barely breath and very luck if I wasn't being viciously elbowed. The fireworks were INCREDIBLE. Really gorgeous, but it was painful being in that kind of crowd. I didn't take any photos or video, mostly because my arms were pinned down by the crowd and I was terrified of dropping my cell phone. Also because I was being elbowed in the head by people holding up cellphones and camera, and I knew that by the time I got around to posting in my blog, there would already be posting it on you tube. So I decided to just enjoy the show as much as I could in my contorted position and post some links for it later. So here you are:
The show was about an hour long, and by the end, the crowd was getting to me. I don't usually panic over things like that, it's just a crowd. But I was legitimately afraid that if I fell over, I could be trampled by the crowd and seriously injured. As the finale neared, people began trying to leave by forcefully shoving their way through the crowd and the solid mass of people around me became one wall of viciously flying elbows. People were screaming and yelling and trying to protect their children from being crushed. I began to panic. Just as the show ended in breath-taking explosions of light and color, a fight broke out next to me. Seriously, two men beside me were throwing punches and it was all I could do to stay out of the way. Maybe it sounds a little funny now, or maybe it sounds like I'm being over dramatic, but I think that may have been the most terrifying moment of my life so far. I completely snapped. Usually when I'm upset, I get frustrated and angry. I have never experienced sheer panic like that. I guess there's no way to describe it other than to say I was having a panic attack. I felt like I couldn't breathe. The wife and two little girls of one of the men were crying and screaming at them to stop, and I got shoved into some steps (which were pretty much invisible in the crowd) and nearly fell. I was rescued by very elderly gentleman who had taken refuge on the steps. He saw me falling and grabbed my pack and practically lifted me up onto the steps by it. I was so grateful I could have hugged him!
After a few minutes the crowd thinned a little more and I was able to fight my way against it into a nearby convenience store where I bought a bottle of water and some tissues and tried to calm down before sending very a pitiful text message to my friend Chris asking him to come and fetch me. Finally seeing a familiar face in that crowd was a huge relief! Chris took me to a bar where his other friends from Wonju were waiting and I was able to calm down and enjoy the rest of the evening. Unfortunately, I never did hear back from "Guest House Korea Busan Station" because their email account was shut down. So basically; I got scammed. Hopefully Hostelworld can get my money back. Meanwhile, the company from Wonju missed the last bus back, so we all slept in a fast food restaurant in the bus terminal. Not how I planned to spend my weekend getaway! But we all survived, and at 7:00am we said our farewells and they got on the bus to Wonju while I hopped on the subway back to Busan Station and exchanged my 12:30 KTX ticket for the 8:30 train instead. Three hours later I arrived in Seoul Station.
Some of the highlights of the rest of the trip home:
I was in line for the bathroom and an adjumma*** yelled at me that I was in a wrong line. She was very shocked and embarrassed when I turned around and she realized that I was actually a girl. Then she told me that I was actually really pretty!! I can't blame her though, I was wearing a puffy down coat, carrying an enormous backpack, and hadn't showered in more than two days, so my hair looked... interesting.
Then, just minutes later, I was on the subway and an adjoshi**** came up and began chatting with me. He asked several times if I was Russian, despite my firm denials (If you don't know what the connotations of being a "Russian Women" are to the older generation in Korea, here is a video explaining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7DrBbyosDQ). Then he asked if had a boyfriend. Thinking this was a way out, I lied and said yes. He nodded as though this made sense and then said "Many boyfriend."
"No!" I said, indignantly.
"Russian person." He insisted, and then added something in Korean which I think had the words "How much?" in it.
Luckily as that point we reached the stop. I was annoyed when he got off too, but I made a quick escape and managed to duck to the side and get on a different car from him when I transferred to the other line.
*KTX is the highspeed train system in Korea (as opposed to bullet trains which are Japanese).
**Korean Sauna. It's a very cheap place to stay when you don't have any other options. You get a little pillow and a tiny blanket and crash on a (in my one experience very, very hot) stone floor with about a hundred other people. Not my top choice as a place to sleep, but still a place to sleep.
***adjumma is an older woman in Korean.
****adjoshi is an older man.
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