Tag Archives: beach

40th Busan International Kite Festival

Adventures, trains and train stations, travelling in Korea, ,

I have a soft spot for kites. In fact, it’s somewhat of a family thing. They’re pretty and fun and watching them is a great way to while away an hour or two. So, I was pleased to discover there would be a kite festival happening in Busan this month. I was even more pleased when I discovered that they’d moved the dates so that it no longer clashed with my trip to Seoul.

I got moving a little later than expected but decided to go anyway, figuring that getting out of town and seeing a new part of Busan would be fun either way. The KTX from Daegu to Busan takes just over an hour and winds through beautiful rivers, hills and farmlands. A cursory search of the internet had suggested that there were two ways to get to Dadaepo Beach for the festival – bus or subway and bus. I chose the latter because I was a little worried about time. I was struck again by the contrast between the Daegu subway, new and shiny and modern, and Busan’s more down-to-earth, slightly run-down version. I bought a day-pass (3500 won) and went down the stairs to the dimly lit and 70s-looking platform. The station was the last on the line (Sinpyeong). The carriage slowly emptied stop by stop until it was just me and a mother and son. I felt the familiar tingle of nervousness at being in a completely unfamiliar place as the train emerged from the subway and we disembarked.

I was still not at my destination but 20 minutes on bus number 2 got me to the Dadaepo Beach stop. I stood on the pavement at an unfamiliar bus stop in an unfamiliar city with no beach and no kites in sight. Nine months in a foreign country is a great way to learn not to panic. The trick, I have discovered, is to pick a direction and start walking. Along the road and around the corner, I spotted a brightly coloured kite fluttering in the distance. I crossed a road and found a policeman directing people and traffic, which seemed a lot of security for a kite festival but what do I know? It made more sense when I noticed a temporary stage set up on a paved square with a sound-check going on. Beyond that, down a hill and along a slightly muddy road, I found the beach.

The number of kites flying above the beach wasn’t huge. This may have been because I arrived rather late – there wasn’t all that much activity around the tents on the beach, either. There were some huge octopus-like kites soaring in the breeze, however. They were beautiful. Blue and pink and multi-coloured giants fluttering above us. In between, smaller kites bobbed in the breeze. Some were birds, some just shapes. My favourite was a full, rigged, pirate-type ship. Some were anchored in the sand, like the big kites. Others were flown by adults or children. I loved looked at them and seeing all the colours and shapes. As I was walking along the beach, looked at them all, someone started flying a 2-stringed, 3-story triangle-shaped kite with two long, long tails. I couldn’t see who was flying it through the scattered people but he or she was good at it. The kite twisted and circled and danced in the sky.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of this type of competitive stunt-flying going on, but there were groups of men standing around who I gathered from the whistles and the tension were involved in competition. It took me ages to figure out what they were doing. The kites they were flying were fairly ordinary looking pale squares, each no bigger than about 50cm square and with a round hole in the centre. It wasn’t until I saw one of these kites flutter down without its string that I realised they were kite-fighting. Anyone who has read The Kite Runner will have some idea of what I’m talking about. The two kite-flyers battle it out as each tries to cut the other person’s string with his line, without getting trapped and his own string cut. It was fascinating (for a while at least) to watch the desperate silent battle high in the air.

On the other side of me, a far younger and more modern crowd were harnessing the wind in a very different way. In the shallow sea-water where the river meets the sea were the kite-surfers. I haven’t seen anyone kite-surfing in ages. There is something about the power of the wind and someone flying across the water under that power that is particularly beautiful. Behind a dark grey layer of cloud the sun was tilting towards the horizon and the light shining on the water silhouetted the surfers and their kites against a silver sea.

I walked along the beach towards the rocky hill at the other end, enjoying the light and the water and the ordinary, precious moments: the man standing on the sea-shore with his little daughter, a Saturday afternoon beach-soccer game, a couple walking along the sand. Against the rocky hill at the end of the beach there is a wooden boardwalk. I climbed the stairs and walked along the boardwalk, enjoying the views. The beach is in a little bay, so there are no real expanses of the open water, but the views are still beautiful.

As 5pm approached, people were starting to pack up and leave, although the kite-fighting matches were still going on. As I walked back towards the road, there was increased activity in the direction of the stage. In the open area down the hill from the stage, I noticed that the single police bus that I’d seen on my way down had been joined by three others. Food stalls had been set up and a crowd was starting to gather. In the open square area, where the stage and chairs were set up, I sat down to change my camera batteries. Once I was sitting down, I saw that there were many more people in the square. To the side, I saw an ambulance parked. People were milling around in front of the stage and being moved back by volunteers in orange vests. I saw men in suits and women in high heels and people wearing blue sashes over their shoulders. There was something about the energy that was so familiar – I could almost feel the adrenaline of eventing coming back to me.

And then I saw a photographer. In Korea, people wandering around with large, expensive-looking cameras are a dime a dozen. Everywhere I go, there seem to be people taking pictures of each other, sometimes in groups and sometimes in amateur photo shoots. This wasn’t one of those. Over one shoulder, he carried a fancy tripod, over the other a particularly large and impressive looking camera. Instead of taking pictures of pretty Korean girls or family snaps of the groups of people, he was walking the area, trying to see the stage from different angles. He obviously knew what he was doing. After looking at every possible angle, he wandered off to the side and had a cigarette. Thinking about it now, I do hope he didn’t notice me watching him but his presence and the way he was acting were a clear sign to me that something important was going on. I decided to stick around and see what happened.

I didn’t try and get a chair, most of which were already full of Korean families, with children running around and mothers pushing prams and grandparents getting settled. I sat off to the side and just watched. A group of people in sleeping bags arrived and walked the open area in front of the stage. Ok, not actual sleeping bags but the kind of puffy long winter coats that make the person look like he or she is wearing a sleeping bag.

Before long, the sound of drums and gongs started in the distance. A group – I assume the same people who had been wearing the sleeping bags – were marching onto the square in a procession, all in traditional outfits. The front person carried a flag and all the others had drums or gongs or cymbals. They wore white with black waistcoats and yellow and blue and red sashes and the strangest white hats that looked as if they were wearing bundles of candy floss on their heads. They processed past the chairs and into the open area in front of the stage and dancing and playing their instruments. In all my time in Korea, one of the things I haven’t managed to see is traditional music and dancing. It was great to find it by accident today. The music was so different. It is strange to think that traditional music using the same instrument (drums) that I’ve known for so long, can be so different to what I’ve known. The dancing was different, too. I’m so glad I saw it.

After the dancing, a swing band played lovely music. Just as they started, the sound system distorted badly and two people, obviously the ones running the show, tore across the square to fix it. I had a moment of nostalgia for my days of running events. I listened to the band for a while but the evening was getting colder and I had a long trip home and increasing activity of the police and volunteers and people in suits suggested that the evening may shift quite rapidly to speeches and other things in Korean, so I headed back to the bus stop. The bus took ages to get back to the station, but I had a lovely time looked at all the things in the city. I may not have been paying that much attention because I definitely thought I saw a chicken shop called ‘Syndrome’, a bakery named ‘Alientots’ and a bus stop for the ‘Korea Cast-Iron Pig Refinery’. Also a sign for one of the suburbs (Gu) of Busan which has taken the tradition of each place acquiring a trite and often inappropriate adjective (‘Dynamic Busan’, ‘Colourful Daegu’) to another level, calling itself ‘Nice Jung-gu’.

A trip back on a particularly smart-looking KTX and I reached Daegu feeling tired and hungry after the sea air but still managed to stop and pick up a lemon meringue cupcake before taking the bus home. Kites, beach, silver-sea and traditional dancers – a good afternoon. Oh, and the cupcake was delicious.

Beach in the rain and a strange city (Busan part 2)

Adventures, travelling in Korea, ,

The second part of Sunday’s trip to Busan was a little different. After visiting the 40 steps and Jagalchi Fish Market, I was determined also to accomplish my original and slightly less tourist-y objective in coming to Busan: to see the sea (less tourist-y in that the urge afflicts me whether I live by the sea or not).

I took the subway back to the Busan Station stop and then went to find a bus. Buses are a much better way to see a city than subways. A subway allows you to get from place to place quickly, but you don’t really get a sense of what the city looks like. A large part of my exploring has been done from the windows city buses. That said, buses in strange cities can be a little intimidating, not least because you don’t know small but remarkably important things like what how much the bus fare will be, which stop to get off at and how long it will take to get to that stop (which is particularly important when the announcements are in incomprehensible Korean). Luckily, a bit of guesswork and tiny scraps of information gathered from the internet can help. I didn’t know how much the bus would cost but I surmised, correctly, that the price of a fare was unlikely to be more than about 2000 won.

Across the road from the subway station, I finally found the right bus stop. While I waited, I spotted a little Korean restaurant and was very tempted to stop and get Mandoo for lunch, but I wasn’t sure how often the buses ran, so I decided to wait until I reached Gwangalli Beach.

The world through the window of a bus on a rainy Sunday afternoon is a strange place. Because buses are the way many ordinary people commute – as opposed to a tourist thing – they travel through places where tourists wouldn’t normally go. I watched Busan pass by. All the cities that I have seen overseas before have felt vaguely familiar. Either they’ve been a lot like places I know well, or they have seemed to combine elements of those places.  This city felt different.

Perhaps it begins with the fact that Busan station opens into an area which feels like, and is, a port-city CBD. Instead of the tourist centres in other Korean cities, this one felt like an ordinary, working city. In spite of the obligatory statuary and bits and pieces clearly put up as a gesture to the tourists, this is a place where people rush about getting on with their business. There was someone preaching in the busy square as all the people hurried by. The people waiting for buses were determined and impatient. The subways were full of ordinariness, without the veneer of modern tourist-pleasing. The working port had cranes moving containers about. The fish market was full of locals, not foreigners. I felt somewhat out of place and no-one looked at me with the kindly eyes of people who see you as a source of foreign money. The place felt gritty.

On the bus, the occasional announcement was in English but most were in Korean, with a dialect or an accent I found difficult to understand. The places we passed were city places. There was beautiful graffiti on some of the walls. People with umbrellas and children and shopping hurried down busy streets. Cars wove in and out of traffic jams. The whole places seemed to be in motion – a strange, real motion that I haven’t seen for a while. The people on the bus looked normal. That sounds so strange when I write it, but that was the sense I got. Sitting on that bus, passing through the city, I felt like Busan was real. It’s odd how sometimes a contrast brings into sharp light what you didn’t realise you were feeling about another place. Being there, Daegu suddenly seemed artificial, like a place that was carefully constructed to fit into certain boxes. All the tourist places in Daegu, all the parks and sights, the artificial lake (Suseong Lake), all seemed somehow sanitised. This place (Busan) didn’t feel like that. Even Seoul, although it is very different, felt when I was there like it was a little bit magical, almost like being in a specially prepared bubble. Busan just felt real.

And a real city has problems. I saw areas where the houses weren’t well maintained and hotels that were run-down and obviously dodgy. I noticed city-centre pavements starting to crack and flowerbeds that weren’t perfectly weeded. Near the station and from the bus window, I saw people who looked confused and who didn’t seem altogether there. And even what looked like one or two begging. There was graffiti on some of the walls. There were shops and what looked like actual shopping centres. I found myself thinking two things.

Firstly, this was a city that hadn’t been planned and controlled – it was a place that had grown and developed naturally, with all the messiness and ordinariness that goes it. Secondly, that this city was not trying to hide what it is. It’s a city without veneer and pretense. That surprised me, I suppose because what I have seen so far of Korea have been places that, now that I think about it, seemed to be cleaned up and made to look pretty and modern – perhaps for foreigners, but more likely to cling to the idea of Korea as a truly modern country without all those messy developing-world problems.

I was surprised by my reaction. My reactions. I found myself feeling a little melancholy that the veneer might not run deep. I know, if I’m honest with myself, that there are things very wrong in Korea and I guess I had a sense that it was all pretense, but it was nice to be able to pretend for a bit. Busan was like a bubble bursting, or perhaps just like being offered the option to see the world outside the bubble.

Even when I was wandering around the 40 steps and visiting the fish market, Busan didn’t feel 100% safe. I don’t mean that in a negative sense. Feeling completely safe isn’t real. The sense of this being a real place with real problems was like waking up from some sort of fantasy-world dream and returning to reality. Everyone misses the illusion of perfection when the dream is gone, but too long in that dream or that bubble stops being fun, stops being good. It drives you a little mad. The cold wind of morning, or in this case the pouring rain of Busan, is refreshing, even if it means a return to the real, unpretty facts.

All this swirled in my head as I sat on the bus trying to hear the announcements, in the vain hope of not missing my stop, and watching the rain begin to fall. After a while, I decided that we must surely have gone far enough but I still couldn’t understand any of the announcements, so I got off the bus to find a route-map to read. My rudimentary knowledge of written Korean is thankfully sufficient for me to figure out (given enough time) things like bus route-maps. I established that I was two stops early and got onto the next bus to come along. Once I finally reached the stop that the random internet site had suggested, I got off and walked (in now pouring rain) along the road. And then along another road. And another. I am quite glad that I have a reasonable sense of direction, and that I’ve known enough beach-front cities to know that the tall hotels are probably right on the shore (and therefore to walk towards them), or I imagine I might still be wandering around this suburb of Busan.

The beach was beautiful. This is not to say that it in any way rivals the beaches back home (in SA), but I’d been desperately wanting to see the sea for so long and it’s a proper sand beach. I walked along for a while, just breathing in the rain and the sea air and looking at the water and sand. I had hoped to find a Korean restaurant along the beach to have a (by now very) late lunch. Unfortunately all the Korean places appeared to be closed so, after rejecting a KFC and a Starbucks, I settled on a burger place that looked – based on their lack of ability to use English correctly – like it probably wasn’t all foreigners.

The waitress tried several times to convince me that I’d be happier inside instead of on the covered veranda overlooking the sea. I gently refused – much to her chagrin – and stayed firmly rooted to the chair I’d chosen. It wasn’t a particularly exciting lunch – burger, ‘fries’ and a coke – but the view of the beach in the rain was exceptional.

I love beaches in wet weather, perhaps even more than in sunshine. There is something so beautifully empty and lonely about walking along a beach in the rain. This time, my life was complicated a little by the fact that I also wanted to take pictures. In the interests of staying dry, I have recently procured a water-proof jacket and my backpack has a built-in waterproof cover, so I didn’t bother bringing an umbrella. This, it turns out, was a mistake, not because I got wet, but because taking pictures became impossible during the rather heavy rain. After a while, I put the camera away and just walked.

The buildings along this waterfront felt a little bit like Sea-point or Camps Bay – bars and restaurants and huge hotels, all with some sort of sea-theme or serving some specific type of food or entertainment to differentiate them from one another. This beachfront must be packed and crazy in mid-summer. On a a rainy late-autumn day, it was fairly empty.

Not entirely empty. There were couples wandering along, huddled under umbrellas. And fishermen launching a boat. There were lone souls rushing along trying to stay dry. When the rain let up, there were jet-skiers and three children playing at the water’s edge.

The beach didn’t have any proper waves but the occasional ripple was enough to create the sound – that sound of the sea the permeates my dreams and makes me feel at home, even though I’ve never lived at the beach. Seagulls cried overhead and sat, miserably damp, in rows on the beach in the rain. The sea was blue-grey, stretching to the shore or the rocky-edge on three sides of the little bay. On the fourth side, the sea stretched to the horizon –  the open space that makes me love the sea – but there was also a huge, long bridge stretching right across it. The bridge was pretty. I like bridges and this one was attractive. I didn’t realise how huge it was until I looked through a couple of view-finder things on the shore and realised that it was a double-storey bridge – with one direction of traffic passing across the top layer of the bridge and the other on the lower layer. Huge trucks scuttled across this massive structure. I watched clouds rolling in from far out to sea beyond the bridge.

On the far side of the little bay, there were rows of blocks of flats, each one marked with a primary colour, screaming their purpose as holiday flats to all the world. I felt at home here in this beach-front world in the rain. I’m not good at tourist beaches when they’re packed with people partying their summer away, but I’m quite fond of them in the rain.

Eventually, with a last look at Gwangalli Beach, just as a stray ray of sunlight lit up the water and the bridge, I took a bus back to the station and the KTX back to Daegu.