Adventures and Anniversaries in Busan

Since we had our LASEK surgery done in Busan, we've had to go back every few weeks for check ups.  We've enjoyed the onsens of Japan and we wanted to try the jjimjilbangs of Korea.  So back in June, we took the opportunity to visit Spa Land after a recommendation from a friend.  It is located in the Shinsegae Department Store in Centum City and is Busan's largest and most modern spa.  We paid ~15,000won each to get in and we were given four hours to do as we pleased.  Alan and I went our separate ways and I headed to the baths.

The onsen we visited in Japan was remote, quiet, and peaceful, with few people present.  Spa Land was crowded and noisy but it had dozens of baths to choose from. There are baths ranging from cold to very hot, sodium bicarbonate baths, salt baths, and an outdoor bath.  As per bathhouse etiquette, I soaped off before getting in.  There's also a room off to the side where you can get a body scrub from the professional scrubbing ajummas dressed in the professional bra and panties scrubbing attire.  They just charge the fee to your locker key and you pay the balance when you turn it back in.   The old ladies took me in and had me lie on a slab where they promptly dumped water all over me and proceeded to scrap my skin off...I mean scrub me.  It wasn't the most comfortable of experiences I've had and she certainly wasn't shy about making sure ALL of me was clean.  But when I came out, my skin was soft, shining, and gorgeous.  


After I finished bathing, I got dressed in the cotton shirt and shorts provided for you.  The women were dressed in red, the men in beige.  I headed out to the communal area where Alan and I peeked through the saunas.  They have all sorts of different sauna designs that are supposed to promote specific things as you sit and relax.  There was a snack bar and an outside foot bath as well as a restaurant, massage chair area,  and other fun places on the third floor.

It was a good experience, both cultural and just for relaxation's sake.  My fellow expats in Korea should definitely give it a go.

Foxy Botique (Busan)

Chocolate Motel (Daegu)

Hera Motel (Daegu)

Hera Motel (Daegu)

This past weekend was our first wedding anniversary and I can't believe that it's been a year already.  We had another eye checkup in Busan so we decided to make a weekend of it.  Friday evening, we took a bus from the Intercity Bus Terminal directly to Haeundae where we booked a love hotel for two nights.  Now, if you've never stayed in a love hotel, you should....because it's always quite the experience.  The buildings are bright and full of colorful lights and the interior is decorated with amusing attempts at romantic or erotic quotes.  They're generally quite a bit nicer than normal hotels as well.  I've included pictures from a couple different ones we've stayed at this year.

A street full of love motels in Haeundae, Busan

Crazy Mr. J's magic show

That evening, we grabbed dinner at Hello Thai, which was just down the street from the hotel.  It was a nice restaurant with the fastest service I've ever seen.  The waitress waited a bit from our table until we were ready to order and within 5 minutes our food was on the table.

We took a walk down to Haeundae Beach after dinner where Alan ended up being recruited to help with a magic show.

At the peak.

We spent Saturday hiking up Jangsan.  The trails aren't always well marked and it's not something that really gets the heart pumping, but it's still a great hike and we really enjoyed ourselves.  And it's located on a mine field.  So it's generally advisable to not wander off.

We came across the whiniest cat I've ever seen.

Watch out for the mines.

Stone River

View from the stone river.

We had dinner that evening at the Wolfhound, an Irish pub.  The food was excellent and it seems to be a pretty popular foreigners' bar.  We topped our anniversary weekend off with some ice cream from Baskin Robins before heading back to Ulsan the next morning.





Our life at the moment is like the calm before a storm.  In just over 2 weeks, we'll be headed to Budapest for a week and a half, spend a day and night in Hong Kong, followed by the zouk congress in Malaysia after that.  After all of that, we'll come back to Korea for four days before flying home to the States. Everything is winding down and the goodbyes have already started.  Being an expat has its ups and downs.  I'm so excited to go home, see all of my family and friends, and start the next stage of our life in Colorado.  But now that it's actually time to go, I know that there's a lot about my life here that I'm going to really miss.


So here's what I'll miss about living in Korea...

1. The community.

I don't want to get overly gushy, but I've loved being a part of the community here.  I'm going to miss these incredible people, both expat and Korean, that I've spent so much time with every week for the past year.  Even if it hasn't been very long, I feel that we were able to make some strong friendships that I hope will last.  We'll miss you guys.


2. Fast internet and cheap data

South Korea has an average download speed of 53 Mbps.  The internet at my workplace gets 72Mbps download and 43 Mbps upload.  And I get unlimited data for my smartphone for ~50,000won/month.  Who wouldn't miss this?


3. The food

I really hated Korean food when I first got here.  Coming from the high sugar, high fat, processed American diet, everything tasted bland and unsatisfying.  Now after a year of eating Korean food every day, the cravings for food back home come less often if at all and I actually find myself craving Korean food instead.

4. Public transport

Neither of us own a car in Korea and we haven't even driven since we got here.  There's no need to.  We can get anywhere we need to via public transport.  Sometimes, I think it may even be more convenient to take the bus and not have to worry about parking.  And long commutes are much better when you can occupy yourself with something other than the road and cars in front of  you.  I'll definitely miss not have to drive.

5. The challenge

During our Christmas stay in Hawaii, Alan and I felt like we were being spoiled.  Everything was too easy being in English.  We didn't have to work to understand anything.  In Korea, I get a mental workout everyday trying to converse in Korean or even just trying to communicate in and understand broken English.  I also feel that my prestigious miming skills will go to waste in the States.  As inconvenient as it can be at times, I will really miss the immersion.

6. Our apartment

I like the interior style of Korean apartments.  Everything is completely modern, the sliding doors are pretty cool (even if they're not exactly sound proof), and it's much easier to clean your bathroom when it's made to just hose down.  Plus, we have mountains in our backyard to hike through and the path along Taehwa River just a few minutes walk away.  The scenery is beautiful and we've had so many wonderful conversations wandering about the mountains and river.  And we can dance on our roof! I'm going to miss our first home together.


We've made so many memories here in Korea and it makes me somewhat sad that it's time to leave.  It certainly has been an unforgettable first year of marriage.

Worldly Things

This week has gone very well.  Wednesday our entire kindergarten (all three floors) went to Busan for a picnic lunch.  I asked my co-workers what else we were going to do there.  Nothing.  Just eat, take some pictures, and come back.  And that's all we did.  We drove 2-2.5 hours both ways for an hour long lunch.  Not that I'm complaining at all.  It was a really easy day of work.  I sat with a couple of my students on the bus ride there where I was roped into playing "rock, scissors, paper" as it's called here.  I've tried to explain to the kids that it's actually "rock, PAPER, scissors" and they seem to think I'm kidding.  It's definitely "rock, scissors, paper".  They are incredulous whenever I say it wrong.

Our picnic was located at a horse racing arena.  It seemed odd to take children to a place of gambling but it seemed to be decently kid-friendly.

Fall seems to be the holiday season in Korea.  So Thursday we had a day off.  It was very hard to go back to work on Friday when you felt like it was already the weekend.  There's another holiday coming up on Wednesday but then there are no more holidays till Christmas.  

So, with the holiday next week, I have a really easy work week.  My supervisor told me that I have to go with her to Seoul next Thursday-Saturday for a teaching conference.  It's basically a training seminar for the particular ESL program our school uses.  Although I have to be at the conference during the normal work day, I get evenings free.  So I basically have a free trip to Seoul!  I'm pretty excited about it.  And it also works out well because it turns out that Alan has a business trip those days as well!  Thursday and Friday, his lab group is going to a polymers conference.  So we're both going to go travel a bit and have a good time.  I'm going to attempt to find some dancing.  :D 

Friday, I was a little irritated with my school.  You know that medical exam I had to do for my ARC? They made me re-do it.  Why?  Because the Department of Education wants the paperwork and they can't find the papers I gave them.  So I had to pay $50 for a medical exam that I had already taken and passed.  I'm not overly thrilled about it.  

The rest of the weekend has gone well.  Since we got married, I got Alan started on playing League of Legends.  So, Saturday afternoon (Korea time) the League of Legends World Championship event took place.  We haven't kept up with the season matches, but we weren't doing anything else and thought it'd be fun to watch.  The live stream was available online.  Korea's SKT vs China's Royal Club.  Royal pretty much got raped.  SKT destroyed them.  The Koreans are the LoL world champs!

We spent that evening at the Ulsan World Music Festival.  They had various food booths representing different countries and had bands from all over the world.  We saw an electro/flamenco fusion band that was pretty cool.  Although I didn't necessarily prefer the singer's style, they had a flamenco dancer that did an absolutely beautiful job on stage.  

Stage for the Electro/Flamenco fusion concert.  

We also saw a Hungarian folk group that ended up being my favorite. (Alan didn't favor one over the other at all). It was a group of mostly elderly men and a couple elderly women that were good-humored and entertaining. They had some Hungarian folk dancers with them that danced for us and even had all of us dance too.

Hungarian Folk dancers

The dancers wanted everyone to dance.

They had a couple salsa performances that evening as well.  They ended up being the same dancers that we saw perform at Bar Latino in Busan.

Here's to another short work week!

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!

Visas, Birthday Suits, and a New Home

So, I'd like to say that, after all the stress and worry and extra cash the E2 confirmation number caused by showing up late, I think it was worth it.  Japan was an amazing and beautiful country and I can't wait to go back someday.  While there, the visa process even seemed sort of secondary.  I dropped my passport off on Wednesday which took just a few minutes.  They told me to come back the next day at 1:30pm.  I showed up, expecting it to take some time to finish the proceedings.  But they had my passport waiting there, showed me my picture and asked if it was me, and handed it to me.  Couldn't have been easier.  My passport, however, feels infinitely more valuable after all of the legalities and time that went into that visa.  I treasure it dearly.


So after the two minutes it took to grab my visa, I got to cross something off of my bucket list.  Alan and I traveled an hour and a half up into the mountains of Japan to visit an onsen.  We found a few blogs online about the Ajisai No Yu onsen, here and here.  One of the blogs suggested calling ahead to see if they were opened.   So Alan called and they spoke absolutely no English.  But someone answered, so we assumed that meant they were open.

So we grabbed a train to the Yahata station about an hour away.  There's a free shuttle bus that shows up to the bus stop I think every 20-40 minutes or so.  (Probably whatever a round trip from the onsen takes).  We got lucky and the bus happened to show up 2 minutes after we got there.  Which is good because we had no idea where to wait.

The bus is pretty discernible and looks like this. 

The view on the way through the mountains was beautiful and really got me excited for the hot springs.

So we got there and had no idea what to do.  I took a few steps inside and was pleasantly greeted by an angry Japanese woman indicating that I should take my shoes off.  

We kind of just stood there a while until we figured out that you have to buy your admission tickets at a sort of vending machine.  They cost about 800 yen ($8) each.  You can also buy things like shampoos, towels, hairbrushes, etc for extra fees.  We gave our tickets to the above mentioned Japanese lady who now was actually pleasant after we had removed our shoes and she gestured that we should go downstairs.  

Down the stairs, you'll find the entrances to the male and female baths.  In blogs, I had read that ladies generally go through the red curtain and men the blue, but we waited to watch someone go in to be sure.  They have private baths for couples or families that you can rent out, but that defeats the purpose of experiencing an onsen, right?  I can bathe with my husband at home.  It's not every day that I have to don my birthday suit in public and bathe with the old Japanese ladies.  So Alan and I said our goodbyes and respectively headed inside. 

There's a locker room immediately upon entering that you stow your possessions in.  The lockers cost 100 yen but they spit your coin back at you when you put the key back in the locker so you don't really pay anything. As an ex-swimmer, wearing very little clothing and having things hanging out that generally shouldn't was nothing new, so walking around naked didn't perturb me much.  Walking into the bathing area to find all the 60+ year old women was the more troubling part.  It's a quick shock, but the appeal of the baths dissipates it quickly.  You're all there to enjoy the same thing.  

Now, onsen etiquette rule number 1.  You DO NOT go into the baths without scrubbing off first.  You all have to share that water, you'd better be clean getting in.  So there are two rows of little faucet stations with little stools to sit on and buckets to rinse yourself with.  They have body soap, shampoo, and conditioner provided (for the ladies at least.  Alan will have to speak for the men).  After you've scrubbed off, there are various baths and saunas that you can enjoy.  Alan said that inside, there was also a cool bath, but I never found that one on the lady's side. I just went right outside, which was glorious.  It was quiet-just the gentle hum of cicadas and I could see the mountains all around me.  It made me realize that my mind had been nothing but a train engine for the past week.  Loud and constantly chugging.  It felt great to settle down a bit.  

After you've finished with your bathing and you've dressed, there's a waiting area directly outside the locker area that has massage chairs and foot massage machines that can be used for a few hundred yen.  

Upstairs, there's a rest area that you can go to do whatever (nap, read, talk quietly, etc) and a restaurant on the third floor.  The good thing about the restaurant was that it also used vending machine tickets.  The waitresses spoke no English, so we just had to match the picture of what we wanted to the correct ticket to purchase and wallah!  Food!    

Even though the commute was very expensive and time consuming, it was definitely worth it.  Even if visiting an onsen wasn't something on my bucket list, it's still a great experience that I'd recommend for anyone.  Totally worth it. 

So Friday, we got back on the ferry to Busan, Korea and stayed the night there.  We found a great Thai place online that we sought out.  It's kind of nice to know that no matter where you go in the world, Pad Thai is pretty much the same.  :D They also served us plum tea for desert in really decorative cups.  It was delicious.  Sweetest tea I've ever had.  

On our way back past Busan Station to the hotel, there was a water/light show going on.  They had music playing and the water/light was synced to it.  It was really pretty and aesthetically pleasing to those who enjoy synesthetic experiences.

We got back to Ulsan this morning and met with our landlords.  Chung (whose first name is actually Youn-Jo I discovered) helped us with translation and took us to the store to buy a few essentials.  So we're all moved in now.  We have a home.  We have a washer (Koreans don't use dryers), fridge, stove, functioning bathroom, internet, tv, and AC.  We have no furnishings yet though.  So we'll be sleeping on the floor for a bit.  But Korean mattresses are notoriously hard as concrete, so I don't think I'll notice a difference from the beds I've been sleeping on.  XD  It's just good to not be homeless anymore.  

The view from outside our window