We just experienced the Korean thanksgiving festival Chuseok. It's the time of the rice harvest in Korea and it's traditional to celebrate by visiting your ancestral home and giving practical gifts. This means large traffic queues as everyone leaves Seoul (no ancestral homes there apparently) and supermarkets stocked with rather odd gift boxes. As with Christmas, Spam is one, as it tuna, olive oil, and toothpaste. The strange thing is it isn't cheaper to buy ten tins of tuna like that, in fact it might be more expensive, but as it comes in a box people hand over the dosh like nobody's business. I got a gift set from school of coffee, they know me so well. It's good because I love coffee, but at the same time I drink coffee out of the machine at school and then don't drink it at home in the evening. So I'm not sure I'll ever use it. But it will be useful for the Transiberian train.
For those who care the Spam box would set you back 20 of your British pounds, the smaller tuna box 11 pounds and the larger box 16 pounds.We got 3 days off (plus a weekend, so 5 days of holiday) for Chuseok, so we headed down to Busan to enjoy the city and meet up with some friends we made at Pentaport festival. The trip was excellent, though getting down there was a bit of a chore. We found out the KTX train (one of the fastest in the world, based on the French TGV system) is fully booked months in advance for Chuseok, so we missed out on that. Instead we had to take a bus.
On the day we toddled off to pre-buy bus tickets we went to a travel agents in Seoul first to order our Russian visas. The girl who served us was from Busan and she told us trips on the roads are stupidly long and it would take us at least 9 hours by bus. At least! She was jolly polite and made the trip yearly, so we trusted her judgement. We went and got the tickets anyway, as we had no other option, but had to make some serious preparations before bording the bus the next week. We stocked up on food, made sure our various MP3 players were fully charged, and I ripped out a couple of Super Sudokus from a book. I'd noticed the buses were sans-toilette, so we also made a concious effort to stop drinking water an hour beforehand and use the toilet as much as possible pre-bording.
In the end we put in all that effort for nothing. Well, not nothing, but not the 9 hours travel lady had said (or the 13 hours a Korean colleague had predicted.) The first half of the main road from Seoul to Busan has an inside bus lane, so whilst traffic queued we zoomed along. The bus stopped twice at service stations for ten minutes, so the toilet wasn't a problem either. Finally, the bus terminal turned out to be right at the northern tip of Busan, but still thankfully on the subway line, so there was no inner city traffic to deal with. The estimated time buses normally (on non-holiday days) take to Busan is five and a half hours. We made it in.... five and a half hours. The moral - never trust travel agent ladies, no matter how polite they are.
This photo is of the friends I went with from the north. L-R John, Ben, Mick, Flick, me. I nicked this photo from Flick, so I hope she doesn't mind!
Busan was lots of fun, and it's definitely where I'd choose to live next if I ever came back to Korea. It's a city but it's so relaxed compared to Seoul. It's on the coast, so you can party on the beach, go swimming, or just sit and watch the sunrise after a long night out. We went to many places, met many people, and drank many beers. Our hostel was located in an apartment block. I think the owner had simply bought an apartment and put in some bunk beds. She lived 5 floors above (smart lady) so there was no curfew and no hassle. Excellent stuff. We didn't do too many touristy things as we became mildly nocturnal, but no-one cared. It's strange, when I live in a country I tend to forget to do tourist things. I suppose I just don't think of myself as a tourist here.
(Busan is the 3rd largest container port in the world. Not surprising really for a peninsula country whose only land border is with North Korea.)Coming home was more of a chore, as people began flouting convention and using bus lanes for normal cars. The traffic coming into Seoul was considerably jammed We booked the same bus one of our friends was already on and got the 3.50 from Busan, which should have got into Seoul around half past nine. We hadn't really thought it through, but that didn't leave much time for lateness and getting to Seoul station to catch the last trian home at 10.45. We failed, considerably. We got into Seoul at 11, with a travel time of seven hours and ten minutes. Slightly closer to the predicted nine than I would have liked. In the end we had to take the subway an hour and a quarter north to Ilsan, a city half an hour from Munsan by road, and then a taxi. I eventually stumbled into bed at half past one with the exiting promise of 6 hours sleep before starting work again. The next day was, I must admit, something of a sleepy blur.
Well, that blog was more about the bus than Busan. But nevermind.
