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.