First Salsa Trip to Busan

This weekend has been pretty decent.  Friday evening, Alan and I were recruited to teach a beginning ballroom lesson at UNIST for the English Commons program.  We introduced ourselves and we had the ever amusing "OOOOOOOOOO" of shock as Alan introduced me as his wife.  Everyone seems to think we're too young to be married.  XD But, I must say, I feel some of Samara's pain now.  She has a hard time getting Case engineering students comfortable touching each other.  Korean-raised engineering students were infinitely worse.  When we told the men to find a partner, you would have thought I told them to eat worms.  I had to push most of them across the room and then drag people by the wrists and make them dance with each other.  Very few seemed capable of actually asking a person to dance.  And even after physically forcing a couple together, some of them ran away.

That's not an exaggeration.  They ran away.


Once we had everyone organized, the lesson went very smoothly.  We taught cha cha first, just the basic, new yorker, and alemana.  And we spent the second half of the lesson on tango, just doing the basic and progressive link. We were a little worried that tango would be too hard to start out with, but everyone was able to do it by the end of the lesson.  Our voices weren't too fond of us by that time, though.  We really enjoyed ourselves, and though this one was a one-time event, we're hoping that next trimester it will become a regular thing.


Right after the lesson, we headed straight to Busan.  We were going to spend Friday and Saturday night dancing, but we were beat by the time we got to the hotel.  We stayed at the Goodstay Queens hotel in Seongmyeon and it was a really nice hotel.

Generally it is fully light out by 6:30am here, but these windows had shutters on them that blocked out every last photon.  We were able to sleep in comfortably.  We went back to Arun Thai for lunch. The place is a foreigner trap.  As it should be...if you google places to eat in Busan, it's pretty much the first thing that comes up.  It's probably one of my favorite restaurants in Korea now.  The food is delicious and the restaurant is beautiful.  And they serve you plum tea for desert after dinner.  I can't wait to go back again.



After lunch, we took a walk over to Busan Tower.  It's not hard to find from the restaurant, but you can only get in from one cardinal direction and the hill you have to climb is rather steep.  They had a few cute little picture points outside for couples that we took advantage of before going up the tower.

Busan Tower

The tower had a really good view of the city (which is absolutely enormous), but "pretty" is not necessarily the word either of us would use to describe it.  The city is dirty and the buildings are poorly made with little to no design put into the architecture.  Things are falling apart everywhere.  We came to the conclusion that because Korea was forced to rebuild everything so quickly after the wars just 60 years ago, that everything was just thrown together.  It's unfortunate, really.  Traditional Korean architecture is very pretty.

North side of Busan

That evening, Alan and I went to dinner at a TGI Friday's located on the 9th floor of the Lotte Department Store in Seongmyeon.  We discovered that this should be a rare treat.  Everything is about double the price it is in the States.  Our burgers were $15 each.  Western food is very expensive in Korea.  

This is all you can see from the street.  The club is down the stairs on the left..

We ventured out to go salsa dancing that evening.  We had found a club named Caribe online but discovered that it is no longer in existence.  It has been moved to a place called Bar Latino.  It was a hole in the wall down some side street, but the inside of the club was nice.  

We had heard that the cover was 10,000 won a person ($10), so we were stunned when she told us it was 20k won a person.  But, we soon found out that there was a performance going on that evening.  The cover typically is only 10k won.  

The club is extraordinarily loud.  Alan wasn't able to stay.  He went to walk around for 20-30 minutes and let me have a bit of dancing.  Such the gentlemen he always is.  :)  I soon found, however, that we are completely outclassed by the dancers there.  We had heard that the Korean salsa community is very advanced, but it made me feel like I was starting all over back at the View when I was a beginner being thrown everywhere.  And they dance on 2.  Which I was thankfully forced to learn during my brief dance partnership with Myriah.  :) But I guess I just need to practice before we go back.  

Next week is Chuseok!  Two day work week!  Woo!