another saturday in busan

i went into busan again yesterday to meet up with Kat. our friend Angela who lives in Tongyeong (further south than us, near the ocean) also came in... we only met up at five so i didn't have much time with them since i wanted to come back to gimhae. we walked around what is known as Foreigners Street for a while. it's a really strange area. it was originally named for foreigners because many US soldiers would hang out there during the Korean war. over the decades it has evolved and is now known as a sort of chinatown. i didn't take enought pictures! sorry, i'll go back and really shoot it up... anyway, though it is known as chinatown now, it is mostly occupied by russian foreigners. there are phillipino restaurants, russion shops, chinese restaurants and lots of other little stores and restaurants. it wasn't very happening at 5 pm on saturday so we decided to suss out something more fun. but before we left the area we went for dinner at a korean barbecue buffet. this was one of the most interesting restaurants that i've been to in korea.

in every table there is a grill and you go to the buffet and pile up on all kinds of meat: chicken, pork, beef, duck, and squid. you bring it back to your table and cook it yourself. there are a bunch of side dishes - pickles (which are nothing like the kind you know - they pickle everything here, we had some kind of white vegetable, not sure what it was, but it was tasty), a sort of kimchi (not cabbage, something else, again, language makes it virtually impossible to know what you're eating), garlic, onions, hot sauce, sesame seed oil, soy sauce, apple salad (very popular here, it's apples mixed with mayonnaise - a little weird, but ok...) anyway, we ate a feast and checked out our maps to decide where to go next - Gwangalli beach.

here's a photo of Gwangan bridge - no tripod makes for difficult photo taking at night. i have to get one asap... (didn't bring mine - it was too heavy). anyway, Gwangan bridge is the country's longest marine bridge at 7.42 km's. it combined a central suspension bridge with a duplex carriageway, each level has four lanes... haven't crossed it yet, but i will! if you check out last weeks' post on busan, you can see it from the other side in the day... since it runs from near Haeundae beach, which is where we went last week. after walking on Gwangalli beach for a bit, we went to a restaurant/bar for a drink - 17 floors up - in a building by the water. i had to leave early for my hour and a half trek back to gimhae, so i left at 10. i still don't know what time the last bus leaves the subway at, so i didn't want to chance missing it. i actually made it home in record time only and hour and fifteen minutes! call me lame for leaving early, but i have a cold and didn't feel like spending the night on the floor of a bath house - which is what the girls were planning on doing. this is one of the cheapest ways to stay overnight somewhere. it only costs about 7-8,000 won (about 7-8$ cad) but again, you sleep on the floor. this is a picture of a sign for a bath house/motel. if you read it in korean it says "shiti motel" - had to take a picture of that, especially since the sign for bathouse looks like a steaming pile of dog poop! i just couldn't resist. hope you enjoyed this installment... please leave comments, email me, or just keep in touch in general... it's nice to know that i'm not writing this all for nobody... and that i actually have a few readers out there. stay tuned for more adventures - this week is chuseok and i'll be away in Ulsan for a few days and then Kat is coming to Gimhae and then we're off to Jinju for the annual lantern festival (more reason to find a tripod)... so this should be a good week for posting if i find the time.