Stumbling Through Busan: A Retrospective

This past weekend was one of our few long weekends off from teaching, thanks to Buddha’s Birthday, which was on Friday. After a week filled with drama club (better and better!) and an open class in which I was silently judged by my students’ mothers, I found Zach, a friend from the college salad days, and Brandy, and we set off for Busan. I had failed to make any arrangements for this long weekend far enough in advance, but Zach was planning on playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament on the beach. I decided to join him, against my better judgment, and Brandy came on board after realizing that she too had nothing else to do.

So after a meal of ddokgalbi (spicy chicken with rice dumplings and vegetables; I could eat it for days) we hopped on a train. There were no seats left on this train, mind you, so we all did our best hobo impressions and sat in the very back of the caboose (can you still call it a caboose?), which was not as fun as it might sound. Mostly it was sweltering hot. Anyways, we got to Busan, where we discovered that the whole city is actually in another dimension and you can only get to it by traveling through the Stargate.

Somebody get Kurt Russell.

After entering this mysterious Busan dimension, we quickly found a place to stay for extra-cheap, got some pizza (pizza does exist in the Alternaverse), and met up with some friends on the beach to have some drinks and wander around. Then we went to bed, and woke up Saturday for some frisbee.

My history with ultimate frisbee is not long or pleasant. Before this weekend I’d played maybe three times, and each and every time I got hit in the face with the disc, usually in the nose, once in the teeth. One time I got hit so hard that my nose began to bleed. Essentially, I have been conditioned to be afraid of a frisbee that is heading in my direction. I usually imagine it has teeth and huge claws that are going to tear my face apart the second I try to catch the thing. I drew you a little picture so you can better understand where I’m coming from:

That is indeed my blood you see trickling from its fanged maw.

Naturally, I had to overcome my fear of flying circles of plastic in order to have a good time on Saturday. It wasn’t easy, as you can imagine, but I managed to do just that for the most part. That might be because I was more afraid of the jagged rocks that were hiding under the sand of the beach than I was of the frisbee. I even managed to not get hit in the face by the disc across three whole games of ultimate, which I count to be one of my greatest accomplishments in Korea so far. My team went 3 and 0, too, although that was really through very little help from yours truly. I mostly ran around and provided someone for the slow guy on the other team to amuse himself with (but I did it well!). Also, it was pouring rain by the end of the day, so we all wound up covered from head to toe in sand.

That’s where jimjilbang came in. Jimjilbang is the Korean term for a public bath house, which is a place where you nude up and get clean in a big room with a bunch of other dudes. It’s better than I make it sound. In this particular jimjilbang there was a hot tub, a cold tub, a hotter than hot tub that made me feel like a lobster five minutes before meal time in Maine, a sauna, and a steam room. After a day of sprinting barefoot on sand, all of these things were pretty stellar. It wasn’t enough to work out the knots in my legs that have been making climbing stairs a Herculean task for the past two days, but it was a start. Add to that the hilarity of one of the other nude patrons of the jimjilbang trying to get us to leave because we were pretty much sand monsters, even as an employee told us to just go on in, and you have yourself a pretty fine first trip to a public bath house.

Anyways, the rest of the weekend consisted of a crazy post-frisbee party featuring some seriously intense Jenga action, and noraebang (I told you, you can’t stay away), followed by a Sunday that featured lots of exhausted trudging and the only halfway decent Mexican food I’ve seen in Korea. Looks like someone finally figured out the whole meat/cheese/beans combo is what really makes it tick. We also stopped by the World’s Largest Department Store, which was… well, it was very big, and it was a department store. Not sure what else you want from me on that one. On the way back, we tried three different routes before Brandy and I finally gave up the cheaper bus route and took the train, where Brandy got her fingers slammed in the bathroom door “for awhile” (that’s how she put it) and had to go to the hospital on Monday when they turned black. If you’re reading this Brandy, I hope your fingers have returned to a somewhat normal hue.

SO INTENSE.

While I didn’t see terribly much of Busan on this first effort, I did see enough to know that it’s probably the prettiest city I’ve been to so far in Korea. The whole beachfront area is gorgeous and shiny and filled with these awkward casinos which Koreans aren’t allowed into because it’s illegal for them to gamble (okay for us foreigners though; apparently the law cares not for our moral compass). I missed out on Korea’s largest fresh (read: live) seafood market this time out, but next time that is Stop #1.

This is where we played frisbee. Unfortunately the cones mark out a field, not a hidden-jagged-rock-free zone.

I realize that I have been totally crapping out on the whole “Short Creative Nonfiction” angle of this blog lately (okay, for at least a month), and I do apologize for that. I would make a go of it today, but I’m still exhausted from the weekend. Coming up, though, a possible MIME FESTIVAL! and an overnight excursion at a gorgeous Buddhist temple near Busan. Maybe I’ll have a more specific story to tell after those adventures. ‘Til next time, dear readerssszzzzzzzzz…