Buddha, Busan and Biking

Kaley’s adventures the end of May and beginning of June!

Lantern festival – May 16^th, the Sunday before Buddha’s Birthday weekend. We discovered that even though the celebration of this “enlightened one’s” birth wasn’t for another week, KoreaKorea because everywhere I looked was foreigners. I hadn't seen this many in one place since I left America. It was bizarre! was going to kick the celebration off early and have a lantern festival! There were all types of lanterns but all had a lotus flower on it somewhere. After getting off the subway, we were pulled into a stand where we could make our own lotus shaped lanterns. The Korean man who “convinced” us to make one was very enthusiastic. He practically pulled the camera off my neck to take pictures (pretty good ones actually) for me. We then walked down the closed off street and observed hundreds of other foreigners participate in the many booths that lined it. It was hard to tell that we were even in Korea because everywhere I looked was foreigners. I hadn't seen this many in one place since I left America. It was bizarre!

Busan - Happy Birthday Buddha! Though over half of the religious population of South Korea are now Christians, Buddha’s Birthday is still very important, and therefore a National holiday. In the past couple years the Korean government has cancelled some National holidays such as Parent’s Day and Teacher’s Day, so days off of work are few and far between. This holiday was the first three day weekend we were going to have in over two months…so Holly and I decided to do something special…Busan and your beach, here we come!

Now, normal people take the 5 hour train to Busan…but Holly and I somehow (don’t ask me how) found flight tickets there for virtually the same price. Amazing! So…Saturday morning found us boarding a plane for a 45 min. ride to Gimhae airport near Busan. It’s like flying from Kansas City to Garden City, as a reference for those living in Kansas. We then found our way (only getting lost a few times…really…just a few) to our hotel, and headed to the beach! Yayyyy the beach!!! Busan’s most popular beach is called Haeundae, a movie was even made about it recently, but we decided to visit a closer/smaller/hopefully less crowded one called Gwangalli. When we arrived, we found a spot in the sand, spread our towels out and relaxed. It was fantastic. Holly took some amazing pictures of nearby children who were playing with seaweed (yeah, that’s what I said). This one of the boy is my favorite. So stinkin cute.

We decided not to swim because as stated in previous posts, the weather had been unusually cool this year. Lying in the sun was perfect, but swimming would have been quite cold, though we did wade in the water, until we saw how dirty it was that is…

After awhile, we had to move because the nearby buildings shadows were encroaching on our original spot. As we stood up Holly said, “uh, Kaley, correct me if I’m wrong but…is that Laura?” “What?! Haha! Yeah! It is!!” We had inadvertently stumbled upon some church friends who chose a spot about 100 feet from ours. A very bizarre occurrence that would prove to become uncannily more common then one would think with our amazing South African friends.

We spent the evening with our friends and then decided to meet the next day at the fish market whenever we got up and around. Note that no particular time was decided on… The next morning, we woke up to a cloudy, rainy looking sky and a quote from Pooh the Bear is quite fitting in this situation: “Oh bother.” So much for our sunny, beach filled weekend! We’ll just have to find something else to do!!

Holly and I made our way to Jagalchi fish market to check it out while we waited to hear from John, Laura, and Ian. Watching our step as we walked through the rain/fish/trash covered ground, we looked up to the sight of our three friends walking around the corner. Wow…again, not planned. We’re getting good at this!

We ventured to the indoor part of the market and decided to pool our money for some sushi, barbequed fish, and lobster…and this is where it gets interesting:

Laura found a man who spoke some English and told us that we could buy a fish and lobster from him for cheap. Was this price too good to be true? Read on to find out…but for those of you impatient ones about to fall off your seats, I’ll just say that yes, it was. When the man had successfully selected our lobster, beheaded, skinned, and sashimi-ed half our fish (quite entertaining let me tell you) and sent the rest upstairs to be cooked, he grabbed the calculator and typed in what we owed. I’ll pay you cash money if you can guess how much the total was…but as you are probably making a guess in your head, and won’t actually be able to inform me, since I’m 6,000 miles away, and the fact that you’re probably making your guess in American dollars… I’ll hastily say “nope, that’s wrong” and tell you that it was 180,000won. That’s about $150.00. Ouch. We only had 148,000won between all of us, not planning on spending such a hefty amount of money for ONE MEAL. We tried to convey to the man our dilemma, with John and Ian actually showing him their completely empty wallets. We asked if we could get a smaller lobster to maybe bring down the cost, but after some deliberation, the man decided to just take what we had and sent us upstairs. With a sneaking suspicion that we’d been had, we sat down and ate some tasty sashimi. Then our fish was brought to us, as well as our surprisingly difficult to eat lobster. Ian actually bent a chopstick trying to break it’s “really strong elbow!” As the picture shows below:

After finishing, we decided to head back outside to look around the area some more. We put our shoes on, grabbed our umbrellas, and started to walk away when John spotted another foreigner that we had spent some time with the night before. Not knowing we had lost a comrade on the way out, he was inadvertently left behind when the “fish guts” hit the fan. The “fish guts” being that a woman grabbed Holly as we walked away because apparently, if you thought that the fee for cooking the fish was included in the humongous sum you paid for the fish, you’d be wrong. Holly’s great intuition told her that we were about to be swindled again, and she told us to “Go! Go! Go!” We then left at high speeds, trying to get away because we were very literally, all out of money. When we got outside, we turned around to discover that John was missing, and feared for his life/wallet. Will they make him stay to wash thousands of tiny side dishes for the rest of his life?! Will he have to empty and recycle bottles and bottles of Soju?! Will he, oh there he is, let’s go! We then relocated to a less conspicuous spot, particularly one that didn’t smell like fish, and John told us that the lady was trying to charge him another 80,000won! Ridiculous! He somehow got away by gesturing that he was going to find us…and that, my dear friends, is how I dined and dashed for the first, and hopefully the last, time.

The rest of the day we walked around Busan’s China town…but it should have been called Russia town, because everything was Russian. Then we hung out and talked in a coffee shop for several hours, hoping the rain would stop, but it was stubborn and didn’t. So we parted ways and headed back to our respective hotels. Holly and I relaxed until our flight the next day and returned to reality. It was an interesting and good weekend.

Gwangalli Bridge at night.



Lantern's for Buddha's Birthday

Seonyudo Island biking!Look how excited we are!!

This adventure took place on the last weekend of May and the weather was perfect! All we needed to do was jump the transportation hurdle for the promise of a relaxing weekend. So, we rode a 2 hour subway, 3 hour bus, and 1 hour ferry to our destination. The ferry was the only mode of transportation to this island, therefore there wasn’t much traffic. I saw a few trucks but mostly people rode around in golf carts, or rode their bikes. The island actually consisted of three different islands connected by bridges, so a bike was really the only way to do it anyway. When we arrived, we took our bags to the hotel, and hopped on our bikes for some relaxing pedaling.

The whole group totaled about 80 foreigners so we broke into smaller groups to explore the island. Our group was quite small, unintentionally replicating the fantastic four and contained:

Kelly from Connecticut, Chris from London, Kaley from Kansas and Holly from Minnesota. Poor Chris stuck with all those girls, what’s a nice guy with an accent to do!? Well…at one point, he joined forces with Kaley to eliminate Holly with a fishing rope. Fist pound. Haha!

We like being silly sometimes. Anyway, as I said before, the island only had three bridges, so we were bound to meet the other groups of foreigners. We spent some time with Jackie’s group and then split off again, but later learned that Jackie had had an accident involving a pot hole, some pedestrians, a hill, one of those golf carts, and some high speed. It ended with her catching the last ferry to the mainland to get some stitches on her chin, but boy was she a trooper!

Later that evening I was able to spend some time with a lively, funny and very friendly group of South Africans, thanks to my rock climbing buddy Naomi. The next day we went hiking and explored the phenomenon called “The Moses Miracle” that the island is known for. During a specific time of year, the tide goes out far enough that a pathway is uncovered to a smaller island in the middle of the bay. When normally you would have to swim to get to it, at this time, you can just walk there. It’s pretty awesome and Holly, Kelly and I experienced it together!

Our group watching/having fun, waiting for the sunset.

A bamboo bo staff fight also took place during this trip…I shall include the video below. I won’t make any excuses about why I lost *ahem* putrid, vile, substance landing on my FACE!... I’ll just admit my defeat to one Holly Vail Bonnema. Touché my friend. Touché.

To finish the weekend off, on our way home from Seonyudo on the Subway, as we stood waiting for the train to make a complete stop so we could board it, who did we see? You got it, Ian and Laura. Hey guys...this is getting weird...but I kind of like it. :)


Enjoy this post! More to come soon! Love you guys.