Docked and back in Japan!

Hey everybody! It's been a long week for me here in Japan. Last Friday I went left to Busan, South Korea with 3 of my friends. It was a wonderful trip! I had a lot of fun spending lots of time with my friends. Korea seemed like secondary really. It was more about laughs and having fun. We ate some delicious food, we hiked in Korean mountains, we wandered aimlessly through hordes of people trying to buy fish at an outdoor market and dodged reckless drivers in the street!

We started our trip with a boat ride. I didn't really know what to expect on the boat ride. However, I did know that it would be a 18 hour ride. The boat itself was a bit old and dingy, but it had a certain personality to it. Once we finally entered the boat we had to grab our room key. The room was a 4 bed bunk. It was very small and cramped but somewhat cozy. We put our luggage down in the room and continued to explore the ship. We went to the top deck of the ship to enjoy the views and the sea air. It was nice to get out of the big city. At about 7pm that night they served dinner. Surprisingly, the food was excellent. It was a buffet style with various Asian foods with a smattering of random western food like fries. That night we bought some beers from the vending machines and drank on the top deck. It was quite chilly and windy up there, but the beers went down well. My friends girlfriend felt a bit sea sick so she went to sleep. The rest of us went to run around like kids on the top deck with hurricane force winds at the top. The sea was quite ruff and we were swaying and hitting waves like crazy. Looking back on what we were doing, it was dangerous, but it was sure fun and a bit wet! haha

Here is sunset on the boat. With a view of the world's longest suspension bridge in Japan.

Sunrise on the boat, about 6:20 am.

This is a view of Busan, South Korea from the boat. The seas were so choppy!

When we arrived in Korea, we rode a taxi to the hotel that was on the other side of the city. The taxi was cheap! Only about $15 for a 30 minute taxi ride! South Korea in general is a very cheap country to visit. I brought $700 but I only changed $400 and I still had $100 dollars left from that. Our hotel was dirt cheap and it was not a bad hotel at all. It wasn't the nicest place on Earth but it got the job done. Plus, the beach was only about 10 minutes away. The streets of South Korea are a lot more dirty than Japan. There are parts of the streets that smell of horrible sewage. But it's not overpowering or anything. I was quite surprised at the the condition of some parts of Busan. For example, the Beach area is quite nice and there are very nice restaurants, a beach etc. In an area called Jalgachi, there are some areas that look like a proper third world country! Old women sitting in the middle of the road selling fish. We saw a lady literally preparing, gutting and cleaning fish on top of a drainage gutter. I wonder where these fish are coming from! Occurrences like that never happen in Japan. So to see it in a "rich" country like South Korea, I was surprised to say the least. At one point I was taking pictures of everything I saw, sometimes I would be far behind my friends because of my camera happy shooting. An interesting experience!

This was the beach about 10 minutes from our hotel.

One of the nicer areas of Busan.

On our last day we went to hike in the mountains. Now none of us were prepared to hike really! I was wearing some Converse all-stars and jeans. But we continued on our way anyway. My friend (following his Korea guidebook) lead us on a 2 hour journey to a lovely temple at the top of the mountain. It was very nice and worth the trek. The only problem was that after we finished the trek to and from the temple, about 4 hours had past and we were completely exhausted! We didn't really want to see anymore temples. It was all worth it in the end though.

The lovely temple that we hiked up the mountain for!

A brilliant view from the top of the mountain.

Our last night we used another useful travel guide to lead us through some dicey streets to a wonderful 5 star Kalbi(BBQ ribs) restaurant. That food was absolutely delicious. The workers were very friendly and helped us cook the food. We were all happy and full after that meal. At night my friends girlfriend showed up in our hotel room and gave us some Korean face masks she had bought from a cosmetics store strangely called "skin food". Apparently they are very popular to buy for the Japanese. So she strongly suggested that we use them! We all put them on our faces and look completely ridiculous. We started to act like we were burn victims in our beds. Hard to describe how funny it was. It made our last in Korea a memorable one.

Five star meat on the grill.

Overall I left Korea with a nice feeling. I learned a lot about the country in the short time that I spent there. But I know there is so much more to know about that country, so I want to return again soon! On the other hand, I gained a profound appreciation of how wonderful Japan is. The old saying goes, "You don't know what you have until it's gone.", and the rings true for Japan. I'm really glad to live in a place like this. This is not saying Korea is a bad place, because it's not. However, I feel I am lucky to live in a prosperous and nice country like Japan. Well there is a lot more to say about this trip but I just wanted to give you a small taste of what happened. I will be back soon with more posts soon OK!

peace

vince

p.s. if you want to see my photo album of my trip, send me an email at trancewave2000@hotmail.com and I will send you a link!