Cross Country Adventue!

So I had a fabulous weekend in Seoul Busan ! It was Chuseok, Korean thanksgiving, which, for a Korean, means lots of delicious food, visiting gravesites, paying respect to your elders, and much unnecessary stress (sounds pretty much like American thanksgiving, no?). But, for an expat like myself, it means four days sans lesson planning, time to travel, and excessive amounts of soju and noraebang.

Initially, I was going to Seoul with a group from Wonju, to meet up with some other EPIK Daejeon and Gangwon-do people. We got there on Friday, and a mere 20 hours later on Saturday morning my entire group decided to call it quits which left me all alone. My Daejeon friends never let me down, and I ended up finding a place to crash with them at their hostel but I still felt somewhat out of place and abandoned, to say the least. But then, very Superman-esquely, Akta came down and saved the day! We had a 10 minute text messaging exchange the likes of:

Me: This sucks.
Akta: Lets just go to Busan.
Me: Cool, okay! Let's do it.

And less than 45 minutes later, I was on the next KTX (complete with an Asianized version of The Beatles's "Let it Be" on repeat for the first 20 minutes). The KTX, Korea's high-speed train, is, incidentally, my first time on a train - ever. It was like something out of a book, and exactly what I came to Korea for -- complete spontaneity. Busan's break down: 2nd largest city in Korea; 5th largest port city in the world; 3.8 million people and most importantly ... 330 km (or 3.5 hours by speed train) from Seoul. Busan was, essentially, as far away from Seoul as I could go.

Half way through my train ride, and I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about Busan. In fact, I didn't even know it had a subway system until I exited the train station. Luckily, I have some friends who live there who told me the "hoppin errias" to go out in, so we ventured thata way to find a hostel. This was easier said than done. We looked for the infamous love motel symbol -- ♨ -- but couldn't seem to find it anywhere (really? we were by 4 other universities, but knowing my luck...). Our CMC minds finally realized that we should just go to a PCBang (see: Internet cafe, but seedier and filled with pre-pubescent boys playing WOW and Starcraft for hours on end) to find somewhere to, well, sleep. Luckily, we found a place and it turned out not to be too bad, with people that seemed fairly decent.

We went out and did the whole "I'm a 20-something travelling the world" thing where we went to clubs, met random hostel friends, and woke up hungover and nearly missed checkout. But my favorite part of Busan, I must say, was the beach. It reminded me a lot of California, which I miss more and more everyday. We didn't go in because having, oh, 30 minutes to pack wasn't enough time to think to pack a bikini. But I did bring enough books to satisfy myself and a friend, and we sat listening to the ocean, and reading about Frank McCourt's horrendous childhood for one of the most relaxing experiences since I've been here.

Nevertheless, the trip ended up being amazing -- leaving on the drop of a dime, not knowing what to do/where to stay, and I didn't even know how to get home until 2 hours before I found the bus terminal. The entire weekend was exactly what I signed up for -- with a side of delicious Mexican lunch courtesy of a real metropolitan city.

Sadly, though, I have lost the cord that goes from my camera to the computer, so everyone will have to hold out a bit longer before I can proudly display the abundance of photos I took. Soon my friends, soon.

In the meantime, love/miss you all.
xx