Tag Archives: busan

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.

40 steps and Jagalchi Fish Market (Busan Part 1)

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

Daegu is not a coastal city. But some days the wind blows in a certain way and the glare is a particular way and the air has that feeling of moisture that makes me think of the sea. I think that is the reason I’ve thought a lot about coastal towns since I arrived here and have, several times, made vague plans to go and find the nearest beach I know of in Busan (also called Pusan). Plans have fallen through or been shelved several times. I came close to going with friends to the Pusan International Film Festival last month and then decided against it at the last minute. This weekend, in spite of predictions of rain, I finally went to Busan.

I woke up early, thanks to a mosquito launching a concerted attack at 7am so I got my things together and headed off. The 814 bus got me to the station at 10am. A taxi would have been quicker, but I wanted to try the bus. I bought at ticket for the 10:28 KTX (11500 won) and went to find breakfast. After rejecting a ‘garlic glazed’ doughnut, I retreated from all food-related-adventurousness and picked up a sandwich at the 7eleven.

The KTX from Dongdaegu to Busan takes roughly one hour. I sat back and enjoyed the trip through rural-ish areas, watching with joy as we passed autumn vineyards. One of my favourite sites is grape vines in autumn. These could, of course, just have be table grapes but they were still pretty and familiar. Closer to Busan, the train wove it’s way through mountains and alongside and across wide rivers, or perhaps just one river – as far as I can gather, Busan is at the end of the Nakdong river but I’m not sure of that.

Outside Busan station, I wandered around feeling lost . I’m not very good at strange places with lots of people. I was going to take buses because they’re a better way to see a city but at that point I saw the subway and had had no luck finding the right bus, so I retreated to the familiar and easier option. This subway station was very different to those I know in Daegu. If you’ve ever travelled from the Eastern Cape to Joburg by bus, you may have stopped at that slightly dodgy, glaringly out-of-date place where all the buses stop in Bloem. This felt like that. Everywhere was red-brick, too many columns, primary colours and floor-tiles that screamed ‘institution’. And particularly odd murals and décor on the walls. It really all felt very 80s. The Daegu subway stations feels new and modern and efficient. This felt like a relic from a bygone era. The Busan subway system didn’t feel at all efficient and modern and first world. I eventually managed to find the ticket-machine and buy a one-day pass (3500 won). Once I’d figured out how to use the pass, I caught the train (which also seemed far from new) to Jungang-dong station.

When I visit a new place, I tend to start by searching for information. Because I’ve planned to visit Busan several times, I’ve done quite a lot of this information gathering. One of the places I wanted to see, in spite of the reports on several travel websites that it wasn’t worth the effort, was the 40 Gyedan Cultural Tourist Theme Street. The reason the guide books and sites say that it’s not worth a visit is that there isn’t really all that much there except for a few statues on the street and an information board or two. But I have a fairly powerful imagination and an equally strong interest in social history. This little area – which is really just two short streets – has been important at various points in history but the bit that caught my interest was the role it played during the Korean War. During the war, there was a time when pretty much the whole of the peninsula was under the control of the North except for a small area around Busan called the Pusan Perimeter (correct romanisation at the time). This, of course, meant thousands of refugees flooded into the city. Most of them settled, temporarily, on the hills above the port area in Dongwang-dong. These two streets are just below there and would have been an important economic and social area for refugees and residents alike. At the end of one of these streets is a set of 40 steps leading from the lower street to the higher-up residential areas. These are the 40 steps and it is here that refugees would pass to try and find work and food to survive and here they ended up gathering to try to find any information about missing family members. This set of steps became the main place for separated families to seek their loved ones, for some to be reunited and for others to wait in vain and go home sad.

The Koreans are not all that good at memorialising places like this but they have placed statues in bronze around the area representing ordinary people at the time –  like father sleeping on a traditional A-frame pack at the end of work and children carrying water. One the flight of steps, about half way up, is a statue of a man playing an accordion. The story goes that he is playing a song written about the 40 steps, commemorating that time. When I was there, he was silent but the poignancy of this figure on a deserted set of steps, in a neighbourhood that was almost eerily quiet on a chilly, overcast Sunday morning was not lost. I’m not sure I agree with the way in which the area and it’s history have been commemorated. I certainly wasn’t particularly impressed with the information boards and the wooden lampposts – complete with fake pigeon that would have been right at home at Monte Casino. But that doesn’t change the history of the area and I’m glad that my internet meanderings turned up the info about the history of this place and that I was able to visit it myself so that I could visualise something of what that time must have been like.

After the 40 steps, I heading off to one of Busan’s most well-known spots – the Jagalchi Fish Market. This huge market is really meant for locals but it’s significantly large and interesting enough to make it into all the guide books. I could probably have walked there but I didn’t have a map of the area and I was feeling a little lost already, so I took the subway to Nampo-dong station. I walked out of the station (Exit 2, as per sign indicating Jagalchi Fish Market) and along a road that seemed unrelated to fish, until the first side-road on the left, down which I could see the sea. My first sight of the fish market was rows of tiny covered stalls, each with a table and chairs serving as an outdoor restaurant. Opposite them were various slightly larger restaurants. It seemed as if everyone there was trying to get people to stop and buy their seafood dishes. Turning, I saw the huge multi-story building that houses the main markets. Before I reached it, however, there was an Ajumma on the pavement with a market-cart (stall on wheels) covered in fish. She laughed at me as I stopped to take a picture of her wares – rows and rows of dead fish hanging on spikes with other fish, some filleted, some whole, in baskets on the little concrete pavement stools not far away. In Mozambique, I came across people selling fish on the street but none as enthusiastically or in such  volume as this.

Inside the doors of the first floor of the main building, the world became a blur of lights and crowds, people in yellow aprons and black gumboots and rows and rows of tanks where every seafood imaginable splashed and swam and, in the case of the crabs, tried to escape. The huge hall is arranged a little like an expo – with some stalls along the walls and others back-to-back in two or three rows in the middle. Each stall had at least 10 to 15 tanks of different kinds of fish and other sea creatures. There were eels and crabs and lobsters and shell-fish of all sorts and actual fish of every shape and size, from small lightning-quick flashes of silver to big solid-looking 30-cm swimming-lunches. Some where flat with eyes on the top of their bodies, others were thin and slimy looking. I walked through the huge crowded space. People were examining the fish and bartering with stall-holders. Women standing behind stalls currently without customers were expertly cutting up and filleting. I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of seafood swimming around in tanks in that hall. I’m not squeamish about the fact that what I eat used to be alive at all but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much swimming seafood. The wriggling and splashing and looking at me became a little too much. I went outside and found an escalator to the second floor. Here there were people sitting at low tables eating some of the things from the floor below. The tables were clustered in groups around the room, crowded between stalls selling dried fish and fish-related products of every shape and size. I considered sitting down and having lunch but most of the tiny restaurant areas were full and they didn’t seem geared up for a solo traveller.

The other side of the main building faces the sea, with views across the water of bridges and ships and a working port. There were also what looked like Sotdae except that they were fish instead of birds. Perhaps fish spirits guard this coastal town. I watched the seagulls circling for a while and breathed in the scent of the sea.

Back on the street, I joined the throngs walking down the street. I kept stepping out of the way, just to look for one moment – hardly believing my eyes – at yet more seafood-still-swimming, some in tanks as inside the building, others in large plastic basins. At one place a woman was cleaning and preparing a crab taken from a tank of crabs each with a body quite literally the size of the woman’s head. On the other side of the road, a man was selling fishing rods and gear. Little women scuttled out of each little restaurant to try and convince the Korean couple walking ahead of me to stop and have lunch in their establishments. A women on the pavement sat cleaning something beside a plastic basin of large, wriggling octopuses. Further along, a pair of women worked on a table next to a row of basins teaming with splashing fish.

I turned up a side-street, between yet more fish restaurants, and headed towards a main road. The last I saw of the fish market was a basket of filleted fish sitting forlornly on a stool on the pavement, with their owner nowhere to be seen, as crowds of people flowed past without even seeming to notice.