No, it is not Halloween, it is Chuseok. Chuseok is a holiday in Korea when relatives travel across the country to visit each other, eat and exchange food gifts, it is a lot like American Thanksgiving (except no football). For us waygook (foreigner) teachers in Korea it is a long weekend that allows us to travel and see Korea. I will admit the placement for Chuseok this year (holiday is based on the Lunar calendar) was right after our first full week of teaching and was essentially a 5 day holiday, Sat-Wed. The logical choice of destination was Busan, so we started to think about planning a trip. A group of us had briefly thought about traveling down to Busan during a long weekend at orientation, that plan ultimately fell through but just as well because it would had been a 5 hour train ride each way. Orientation was up north, and I am placed in the southern half of Korea (in between Gumi and Daegu). Long story short, Busan is less than two hours away now.
If you have never heard of Busan before, or don't know its location is Korea go educate yourself by google-ing it. Busan is a coastal City, 2nd largest City in Korea, famous for its beaches, resorts, and things of that nature.
We had a group of 8 people, 2 hotel rooms, tickets to a Baseball game, and an otherwise blank schedule. ..We also had a tropical depression heading towards Korea that had just blitzed Japan as a hurricane the week before, lets go to the ocean!
On friday I hopped a train to Gumi (I am super glad Gumi is only 15 minutes away) to have dinner with some of the people that I was going to Busan with, they had traveled to Gumi to crash the night because they don't have a train station near by, bus station, etc. We had a nice dinner at a Korean-Italian place that was decorated in 15 shades of pink. I enjoy Korean cuisine, but it is nice to have something else once in a while. After dinner the group was going to go back to the train station to meet up with another person...This waiting for people thing gets pretty old when the group gets passed, say, three people. I have a limited quota available for waiting per week, it gets used up pretty fast. Fully knowing that I was going to have to do a fair bit of waiting during the coming weekend I took initiative and told the group that it was going to be a better time for me if I didn't wait with them at the train station and went straight to the bar instead. As I had predicted I was not the only person who thought this, so the select genius group of Davey-Dave, Meeker, and Myself went to go have fun, and left the lame people to go wait for the next hour and half at the train station. If you are keeping score... Team fun decisions: 1, Team waiting: -100. What happened next is a repeating occurrence, 80% on me, 20% to the people who I choose to be friends with... I had every intention of taking the 12:30 train back to Waegwan because I had no interest in sharing a one room apartment that has tile floors with 5 other people, unless I was guaranteed a spot on the bed, no me gusta. I am always one to have a contingency plan, so before leaving, I checked what the next available train was (in case of some unforeseen event that required me to miss the one I originally was planning to leave on). 2:30am. Not the latest train I've taken, but at least I knew it was there. Apparently having fun fall under the category "acceptable reasons to take a later train". This will bite me one day, but not today. Besides, in my defense, by the time the rest of the group made it to the bar it was nearer to 11:30 anyways. In retrospect this should have been a foreboding event to take note of. Fast forward...Dancing, soju slurpees, and a trip to the norebang and it was 2:15! Time to go and find my way to the train station. My friends were sad to see me go, I was thinking "I am going to see you in Busan is literally 12 hours, everything is fine". Then Sam let it slip... "If you go back now, who will cook us breakfast like last time?", everything makes sense now. I told them they had peanut butter and oreos in their cupboard and they could figure it out. Adios! I found my way to Gumi station and did my best to conceal the fact that I had broke a pretty decent sweat hucking my way back to the station (it was raining so this helped). At 2:31 I had my tunes going, riding a train back to my apt. Pretty decent friday night, after all I had planned on doing laundry and drinking tea. On to BUSAN!
Busan, summarized in a haiku
Busan by the coast.
Late night odd clothes, Haeundae!
Sunburn, baseball, fun.
The first day we were there we got our hotel, and eventually wandered our way from the center of downtown to one of three Lotte department stores. We walked around, had diner and headed back to the hotel by subway to change out of exploring clothes and into going out clothes. Somewhere along the way we decided that it would be the best idea to buy heinous looking clothes and go out in them... I was the last person to be informed of this, but all 8 of us were involved and, thus the newest K-Pop group "8PM" was formed (this is a play on the already popular Korean Pop group 2PM). This picture explains the night pretty accurately...
I think any questions you might have right now can best be answered with a simple "yes", whatever they may be.
Not everyone in the picture is dressed up (8PM group), just the people that look like they did it in the dark... using the dress up clothes from when they were children.
Later that night I used perfect Korean to get us a cab back to our hotel, I believe it was something like this, "Anyeounghaseyo Busanyuk joo-sey-yo, gamsa habnidda". I say it was perfect Korean because no sooner than 3 out of 4 doors were shut we were on a roller coaster ride over Busan. Red lights meant nothing, speed limits meant nothing, and any concern I had left for the personal well-being of myself and others meant nothing. I think we arrived before we left as a result of the fold in the space-time continuum the cab driver made when he peeled out of Haeundae. Yo Yo Ma. No sooner had we gotten back to the room before I was in the deepest sleep I have had since back in Michigan.
The next day was the baseball game! I was sort of defacto travel guide and leader person because I had gotten the most sleep, I knew how to get there on the subway, and I wasn't cranking back soju like it was going out of style, before too long I felt like I needed three child leashes that you see parents tie to their kids (my friend lauren said she had one when she was a kid so I know they are a real thing). We made it there with zero problems and got the tickets with zero problems, yay! It is a smaller stadium (25,000 people) than Comerica park, but it was very cool none the less. Going to the game made me miss Tigers baseball a little bit, this was augmented by the fact that for once we are not collapsing in September and I am going to miss being in Detroit for MLB playoffs. It is okay, I am having enough fun here in Korea to kind of make up for it. One of the oddities of the Busan Lotte Giants is that in the 8th inning instead putting on your rally caps, doing the chicken dance, or singing take me out to the ball game they pass out orange plastic bags that you put on your head. So close your eyes and imagine 25,000 people with bags on their head... I know it sounds like some sort of mass cult suicide, but at a baseball game in Korea it is just a normal 8th inning...
Later that game another TaLK scholar came down and said hi, we asked him how he found us. His reply, "we saw you trying to start the wave". Yeah. We were all pretty wiped out after the game but somebody had the idea of meeting up with the other people and doing this and that and whatnot. We were all meeting in front of the stadium and leaving, so I left early and bought my super cool Lotte Giants jersey and proceeded to find them. They were not hard to miss, the group waiting was probably close to 16 or 17 people. Ugh. I love my people, but that group is too big to walk in anywhere and get anything done (subway train, deciding where to go, fitting into a single restaurant, waiting for everyone to use the bathroom before we leave. I was about to just split the group and meet up at the hotel later when Meeker said, "I am getting pizza from across the street". Get out your scorecards kids! Team Fun Decisions: 2, Team waiting and getting nothing done: -500. Somebody noticed us leave and asked where we were going, we said "Food. We'll figure it out and meet up with you later". This was a good decision, two people do dinner better than 20. People were pretty tired so we stayed in Sunday and rested up for the beach on monday!
The weather was smiling on us today! No sign of rain or clouds, just bright sunshine and a light breeze. We bought a frisbee and a volleyball and spent the next 4 hours at the beach and in the ocean. We played volleyball and for some reason attracted a decent sized crowd. A few people who were exchange student came and hung out with us for a while, they were from Finland, France and Portugal!
We had yummy chicken for dinner, went back, changed into regular going out clothes, paid entirely too much to get into a club, waited, got over waiting and took a cab back with 1/2 a group and hit the pillow. The next day we took the most crowded smelly train back with standing room only tickets. Got back to Waegwan, took a fantastic 2 hour nap, made dinner and went to bed.
It is Wednesday as I finish this post, I have two days of teaching before I have another weekend, spoiled I know. I got invited to have lunch at one of the teachers homes this weekend sometime, I am looking forward to that! Judging how my plans expand exponentially when the weekend approaches I am sure I will have more adventure updates too!
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