Come Along on the "Dynamic" Busan City Tour Part 1

On the way down

Some sort of mill at the park

Sardine anyone?

Southgate

Standing guard

Restin' the dogs

Huffin' and puffin'

Sajik stadium and the world cup stadium

On the way up

Barrio amusement park

Korea loves to team up it's city names with catchy adjectives and wow are they clever. Let's see, we've got "Sparkling" Korea, "Soul of Asia" Seoul, "Colorful" Daegu, and saving the catchiest for last "Dynamic" Busan. Oh, yeah...Sounds pretty frickin' dynamic. All kidding aside, Busan is a very diverse port city. This metropolis has so many different feels and atmospheres to it. In one day you could literally hike or mountain bike one of the many mountains around the city, catch some sun, sail, jet ski, or swim around the city's various beaches, do some fantastic shopping in one of the outdoor markets where you can pick up anything from knock off designer wear to whale meat, or drop some serious coin on Prada at one of the top-end designer department stores, then get down with the dharma at a Buddhist temple, and when the sun goes down put on that new Prada and party until the sun comes up and the dry cleaners open.

I'll take you on my virtual tour of Busan. We're gonna have to do it in instalments because I'd be very hard pressed to accomplish everything I listed above in one day. Hopefully y'all will enjoy it enough that you head over to cheapflights.com after reading this, take out your credit card, and pick up a ticket to come visit. Cheers everyone.

Mount Geumjangsan

On Monday the fourth Eun Jin and I needed to get out of the flat and get some fresh air. We live in a damn shoe box, and I don't care if we open all the windows, it tends to get just a bit stale with some funkiness in there. We had Dan's going away party to get to that night, so we couldn't be goin' far and riding the subway all over the city. Thank goodness we live in "Dynamic" Busan 'cause there's always somethin' near your front door. In our case that 'somethin' is the Mt. Geumjangsan (금장산) cable car. We grabbed a few books, the camera, threw our bags on our backs, headed out the door, and grabbed a few gimbab 김밥 (rice with some veggies and meat rolled up in a sheet of dried seaweed; similar to a sushi roll) at the corner store for a snack.

It's only about a 10 minute walk to the cable car from my building. At the foot of the mountain there is a little park with food vendors selling pajeon 파전 (Korean onion pancakes), soju 소주 (Korean vodka), and dong dong ju 동동주 (Korean rice wine). Nearer to the cable car is an amusement park reminiscent of those off of I-45 down in the barrios of Houston. You couldn't pay me to get on the Indiana Jones stomach turner. The POS looks like it came off the line when Raiders of the Lost Arch premiered.

A roundtrip ticket to the cable car only costs 6,000 won (about $5.5o) and a one way ticket is 3500 won. I wanted to purchase two one way tickets and walk down, but Eun Jin wasn't havin' it. She said what she always does when I'm tryin' to get by as a cheap skate. "Don't be a Canadian. (Slang among the Korean Ex-pat community for a cheap bastard.) I don't know the way down." I went ahead and payed the round trip fare but only after tellin' her, "I'm from Utah. I'm what's known as a mountain man. You might as well call me Jedidiah. I'm not gettin lost in no Korean wilderness." Then I handed the operator the round trip tickets. That comment would later bite me in the ass.

The 1268 meter climb takes about five minutes. On the way up the view is spectacular. You can see just about the whole of Busan from my neighborhood, Dongnae, to Sajik stadium, where the Lotte Giants play baseball, also the world cup stadium next door to it, and all the way to Gwangalli and Haeundae beaches. Now, your preview to views of the whole city, but you've gotta fight for them, because they overcrowd the cable car worse than a vietnamese motorbike. I enjoyed the ride, however I was glad to be off it when we reached the top.

After gettin' off the cable car, we found a boulder to hang out on, eat our gimbap and take some photos of the view. After our modest picnic we decided to hike to the southgate 남문 of an old fortress in the area built to repel invading armies from Japan. This is when my earlier comment bit me in the ass. In my defense, however, the signs up there were posted by a gilchi 길치 (person with no sense of direction). The southgate is only about 1.3 Km from the cable car, but Eun Jin and I probably hiked about 3.5 Km and circled back to the cable car twice. Signs to the gate were pointin' all over the place. I probably should have trust my mountain man instincts and stopped to check which side of the trees the moss was growin' on. Alright, I put my foot in my mouth. None of the Adjuma 아줌마 (older woman) selling pajeon and booze would help us because we wouldn't buy any damn pajeon. As you can tell by the photos, we finally made it to the gate.

On the way back we stopped to point the way out to an older Canadian couple (you can tell by the flags stitched on their packs not by the beady eyes as some may lead you to believe) who were obviously confused by the retarded signs as well. The weather had become overcast so the view wasn't all that hot on the way down. It was a pleasant day and I'm glad Eun Jin and I spent it together. I'm happy Mt. Geumjangsan is in my backyard. I plan on hiking it more extensively; however, I plan on staying away from the signs and stickin' to my mountain man roots.