Our first day in Busan

A few weeks ago, Luke and I took a long weekend trip to Busan; the second largest city in South Korea. Seoul, is said to be the New York of Korea...whereas Busan, is compared to San Fransisco. It's a large, spread out port city, with mountains and beaches.


We had "standing only" tickets for the long train ride there. So we sat in the cafe car of the train...with LOTS of other people.

After we arrived, we dropped our bags off at a small guest house that was run by a little old Korean lady (she spoke ZERO English), then walked to the nearest beach. On our walk, we saw the first buds of spring!

At the beach, we saw a lot of people bowing and praying towards the sea. They would light candles, or throw flaming pieces of paper in the air, then bow several times.

We walked along a beautiful board walk (with a neat bridge), that led us to a light house.

Then we found out that this was a very special weekend, where they celebrate the first full moon of the lunar new year. Several beaches in the area were getting ready for the festival.

We wondered away from the beach and found a neat little outdoor market.

Lamp Rays...mmmm

Sweet Potato animals

Pick your clams!

On out way back, we discovered that our tiny guest house was close to the largest department store in the world!...So of course we went exploring.

Out front

Inside

They had an enormous food court area, with cuisine from all over the world; it was all Koreanized though :)

For dinner we shared a huge meal that came on two giant platters. It was a random combination of food: spaghetti, pizza bread, rice, a potato, soup, side salad, donkas(egged and breaded pork, that's fried), an omelet stuffed with rice(known as an "omerice" here), a fried egg over a meat patty, and of course...kimchi.
This was all for 11,000 won. Quite cheap! Less than $5 each.