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If you’ve ever travelled from the Eastern Cape to Joburg by bus, you may have stopped at that slightly dodgy, glaringly out-of-date place where all the buses stop in Bloem.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.