Weekend in Busan

On Friday after work Fred, Steve, Steve's friend Justin and I headed down to Busan. Busan is the second largest city in Korea, at the southern tip of the country. Fred and I spent our summer vacation there when we arrived in Korea July, 2009. We would also take a bus there for the day from Pohang, which is only about a 70 minute ride. We left work and headed to the Suwon train station. Once we arrived in Busan we found a hotel and went to bed.

We woke up on Saturday morning and headed to Busan Tower. Fred and I were acting as tour guides so we tried to hit the main tourist sites in Busan in a short time period. After visiting the tower we went down to Haeundae Beach. This is the main tourist beach in Busan. It turned out that the Busan International Film Festival was taking place in Busan. We did not know this before our trip but we lucked out with getting train tickets and a hotel. There were festivities all along the beach. There were tents with magazine samples, food, beer and many other give-aways. There was even a man walking around with a cooler backpack giving out samples of traditional Korean rice-wine. We watched a little show on a stage near the beach then headed to Busan Aquarium. After this we sat outside and played cards and watched the fireworks.

Busan Tower


Busan International Film Festival

On Sunday we took Steve and Justin to our favorite temple in Korea. It is on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Sunday was a very warm and sunny day. After touring the temple we relaxed on some ocean-side rocks before getting lunch and catching our train. We took a KTX train back to Seoul. The KTX is Korea's bullet train system. We arrived in Seoul after a less than 3 hour ride (going from one end of Korea to the other) and had dinner at an Indian restaurant before coming back to Suji.