Wednesday 9 July 2014

Korea Trip Day 8 (11/06/2014) - Busan

We took a morning Jejuair flight to Busan. We bid goodbye to Forest Hostel and headed towards the airport. After about 1.5 hours of flight, we reached Busan Gimhae Airport. We had to take a subway (they call it Metro in Busan) to Sasang and changed line to go to Haeundae where our Hostel is located. We had lunch first before taking the subway nearby the airport. We could immediately tell that Busan people speaks in a different accent. During our lunch, when we pressed the button to call for the waiter, all the staffs in the restaurant yelled out "ne~ (which means yes)" at once. After our lunch we took the subway towards Sasang and then changed to another line towards Haeundae.

The journey was very far, from one end of Busan to the other. We alighted at Haeundae station to look for HiKorea Hostel but we were not sure of the way. So we asked a local there and she said that we should alight at the previous station Dongbaek. We went back to the train and alighted at Dongbaek we found the hostel. It was located on the fifth floor of a building. Here we could easily spot tall buildings, condos like in Singapore.

Street view at Haeundae
We checked into HiKorea hostel and we were required to keep our shoes outside in the locker and wear their slippers into the premise for cleanliness reasons. All the staffs there were students, very young and were very friendly. The girl staff was pretty too. The room had a passcode lock just Mely's. The room was cozy but without any windows. The bathroom was a surprise to us. There were two shower compartments in the male's room but the compartment was very open. You can actually see the guy next to you clearly. So we decided to lock the door outside when we were showering so that no other guys can share the shower place with us. It will be so awkward I think.

We went to Haeundae beach after we have checked into the rooms. Haeundae beach was just behind our hostel. We walked about 7 minutes to the beach. It was a huge beach. The sand was whitish and the sun was bright that day. But there were not many people there. I guess it could be because the weather was still not very warm. Although there was hot sun, the breeze was still very chilling. Most of the people there were tourists, western people. We took lots of photos there. Quan Yen had multiple attempts on his jump shots. We also saw a couple of Korean girls with bikini tops laying on the beach. After hesitating for quite some time, I've decided to approach them to ask for a photo. Shi Keat became my cameraman. I was so nervous but what the heck. I asked them and they were so happy to accept my invitation for a photo together. I wanted to ask for one of the girl's but in the end I took photos with both of them. I think they were waiting for guys to ask them for a photo. Too bad I wasn't in good shape to show off LOL. We also saw many seagulls. I've never seen so many seagulls at once before.



Serene Haeundae Beach

After Haeundae beach we went to Gwangali beach to see the famous Gwangwon Bridge. It was a double deck bridge with cars traveling from one side to another on two levels. We took a subway there. It was a smaller beach and behind it were full of high rise buildings. We went to have dinner first before we came back to watch the Gwangwon Bridge light show. As the day got darker, the lights started to kick in on the bridge. Then the music begins and the lights fluctuated along with the music, one of which was Crayonpop's BarBarBar. At night, the beach was a beautiful place for couples to have a stroll along the bay. Very romantic.




Evening and Night view of Gwangwon Bridge. Quite a huge difference!

I can't quite remember what we did after visiting Gwangwon bridge. I think we walked around and headed back to the hostel. There were quite a lot of people at night at the hostel lounge. We met one of the staffs who worked there at night. Her name is Taeyoung and she was very friendly. She likes to travel and she can speak Mandarin and a little Cantonese. There was also a German guy who sits there at the lounge. He was on his laptop all the time until we talked to each other. We had a great time chatting and joking around. Taeyoung was talking about a phone called Xiao Mi and that it has a function whereby the phone takes photos with a sound of a clap. Both the German guy and I were puzzled and our first question was, wouldn't all the photos will be people with their hands clapping together since the shutter was triggered by clapping sound? It was really funny. Taeyoung also asked us to review her on Tripadvisor, which I did when I got back to Malaysia because with 500 reviews she will be sponsored to a trip to Japan. Such an awesome deal!

There were also local tourists there but we didn't talk to each other. Later that night, two girls from Hong Kong checked in. Because we could speak Cantonese, we quickly made friends with each other. We chatted a lot. And they taught us how to play Hong Kong card games. We played "Stop The Bus". Another game was about "chat kap ju" (seven level pig). The mission was to rotate card in hands and whenever someone gets a set of cards with he same number, he/she has to use the cards to cover his mouth and the rest have to follow suit and keep quiet. The last person to react will be raised to level one pig and here comes the fun part. If a pig with lower level talks to a pig with higher level, that lower level pig will be raised to the same level as the higher level pig. Only same level pig can communicate with each other. When someone reaches 7 level pig the game ends and the loser will forfeit. It was really fun as the higher level pig will always prompt the lower level pigs to talk to him/her. We really enjoyed the games. We also played a story game where the storyteller has the ending of the story and our mission was to guess the whole story by only asking true or false questions. We had a hard time guessing the helicopter story but with some hints Quan Yen finally got it. We played until 3am that night. We still have one more day left in Busan the next day. It will be a challenge not to oversleep on that night. But the schedule on the next day wasn't very packed so we were not so worried about it. Yup, it's the last day tomorrow. Time really flies.

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