Weekend in Busan

What a nice break from Seoul to head south to the beautiful city of Busan, still a big city, but with a more relaxed beach life attitude, and amazing seafood! The weather was breezy, sunny and 60 degrees. The company was wonderful, and again I say.... the food! It was so great. Busan has a population of three and half million people, and is known for it's long sandy beaches and an incredible bridge that lights up at night.

 It was nice to breathe the sea air and smell fresh fruit from vendors along the streets, while encountering some odd sights along the way.

the street our hotel is on

a strange amusement park just outside our hotel

We stayed just a few steps off the beach, at a dumpy but cheap hotel in the fish market neighborhood. The streets were lined with huge tanks of crab and eel and flounder and so many species of fish and seafood that I could not even name them. Trucks came and unloaded at all hours of the day with the freshest catch and restaurant workers came and picked up, a constant flow of fish. It's amazing how many people the sea feeds.... Including us! We had a FEAST of crab one afternoon. It was really amazing. We selected our crabs, live and crawling around, and the man took them away while we were seated on the heated floor and served scores of small dishes of food and lots of beer while we waited for the main dish.

we selected our crabs here- so many to choose from!

the table at the beginning of the meal

peanuts, quail eggs, and a touch of salt

How quickly it seemed that it went from this:

to this:

to this:

and finally this:

After feasting on the succulent crab meat they took the empty shells, with the remains of the brains and guts (mmm...) and stir fried it up with some rice and veggies and served it back to us. It was actually quite good! The perfect amount of saltiness and sea taste.

The aftermath of any Korean meal thus far has been a very messy table with lots and lots of little plates with traces of the food that once filled them. The way food is done here is so wonderful. I feel a little sad when I make myself dinner and it's just one or two dishes of something, I have become so accustomed to the Banchan that accompanies every meal! And of course, it is perfectly accepted to lie down on the heated floor after indulging so....

After the incredible lunch we made dinner plans with our friends and set off to explore some more of Busan, encountering nice markets and busy city streets and a cool bar on the beach, a perfect place to watch the day turn into night.

Gwanganli beach

Lunch was topped only by our interesting dinner experience. We traveled slightly out of town to eat dinner in a tent! Little did we know that dinner would turn out to be 5 hour affair involving somewhere close to 20 bottles of soju and an dessert of live octopus. We had a private tent for the 9 of us, with open fires and grills at each of our two tables, gravel below us and some Balkan Beat Box on the ipod. Large trays of shellfish came our way and we grilled them in the shell and ate as we pleased, throwing the leftovers all into a pot and making a stew of mushrooms, seafood juice from the shells, chopped scallops clams, oysters, onions, kimchi, fresh rosemary, potatoes and anything else we could find on our tables. It was so good and spicy as usual and we successfully washed it all down with our ample soju and beer and laughed until the night was black and chilly, and after a walk on the rocky seaside we made our way home for a good night sleep. 

the food on this plate was still moving when we ate it! The tentacles stuck to our tongues and cheeks

What a good trip it was, and also so good to be back in Seoul at the end of the weekend.

More photos are available on Nicole's Flickr site.