theatre of the absurd: Busan, prelude

Monday morning, and I don't have that strange sense of closure that I usually do after I finish travelling, that feeling of the beginning of a beginning and end of an end that I always long for. Not this time. I'm in the office now, and have been experiencing some technical difficulties with my computer that are a nuisance, though thankfully have been able to resolve one of them by Googling the problem. I feel like ever since I bailed out of that badminton thing, I've been encountering these mild but inconvenient nuisances. Maybe I'm being paranoid but when it comes to work and people I tend to expect the worst. Sometimes I think it rather sucks that I'm already so cynical this early on in my life, but it is what it is.

Busan feels like a dream. I think I may be allergic to that city because I had a mildly irritating sore throat during my entire weekend there, but that completely and utterly cleared up this morning, even though I'd only gotten 5 hours of sleep before getting up again for work. Very puzzling, the way some things happen without any good explanation. I was pretty sick of Busan on Saturday and couldn't wait to return home, but on Sunday felt far more inclined to the city, although was still glad that I was going home. I know myself and my travelling habits rather well, and I know that if I had stayed on in Busan for more than two days I would have been bored stiff. Like I did for Tallinn. Honestly, Tallinn was a real experience - I still like that city and the country, ish, but that visit was a stark reminder of why I can't stay in the same city for too long, not unless I absolutely adore it, like I do St Petersburg, or Riga.

I have a lot of things I feel, and want to say about this trip, but it's hard for me to find the right words to express them. First off, it's been absolutely ages since I last visited another East Asian country - well, one year, so not THAT long, but long enough. (The last country I visited was China). And it's within this narrative that I framed my entire weekend there - I just couldn't get over how jarringly alike Busan was, from the city I'd left, from the city landscape to the culture to the people, especially the people. The entire time I was in Busan I felt like I'd fallen into a parallel universe where I was still in my country, except that the people all spoke Hangul instead. Disconcerting to say the least. It wasn't my first time in SK - I'd previously been to Incheon and Seoul and some of the other northern cities, and had a clear idea of what to expect, but this was my first time there on my own, which is a completely different matter.

One thing that really really irritated me was that my power connector was next to useless in Busan. Apparently they use European sockets, and I thought mine would do the trick, but at my hostel it took about 50 minutes to replenish 1 percent of the battery, and at this rate my phone obviously did not charge the way it should. On Sunday morning, after an entire night of charging, my phone had gone up from 5 percent to 62 percent, which was still an improvement nut not enough. Thankfully my phone didn't give out till late evening, by which time I'd reached the airport. The clear uselessness of my power connector somewhat soured my trip as I had to frequently keep an eye on my battery and worry about my phone dying on me.

Another thing I disliked about this trip and Busan was the inordinate amount of walking I had to do, and the amount of time I had to spend on the metro moving from one place to another. In Busan metro stations they barely have any escalators and everything is done by cold stone stairs, and All That Stair Climbing really tuckered me out, especially in that heat. And the restaurants and places are ridiculously spaced out and you have to sit on the metro for about 15 metro stops on average to get anywhere which is also incredibly tiresome and time consuming, so that bothered me too.

The people in Busan don't seem very happy in general and that was one of the reasons I was glad to get back home to Taipei, where people don't seem as soulless. Also haha the guys in Taipei are better looking than they are in Busan, but Korea has Kim Jaejoong, so I'm torn on this. As for the women, they really all do look as pale as death, and you can tell that they're doing this on purpose because you can tell when people are naturally white, and whilst Koreans are light-skinned Asians in general, they're not pallid by nature. You can tell that they're all wearing about two layers of foundation and BB cream and it looks uncomfortable. The girls like wearing super short daisy dukes and skirts, anything that shows a ridiculous amount of leg, even the fat girls, and this actually really surprised me as well but there are a lot of fatties in Busan as well - young fatties, in their teens and twenties and thirties, as well as matronly, older women. They are well dressed in general, better dressed than the people of Taipei, but there's something very brittle about their looks. I don't necessarily mean this in a skinny context, but they all look incredibly artificial, and you get tired of that look after a while.

The people are actually pretty nice, but they're also pretty reserved, though whether or not that's because of the language barrier I'm not sure. The restaurant and vendor owners are usually pretty nice, although there was that genuinely disgusting incident where the restaurant owner kept dipping her spoon in my soup to taste it, and then dipping and eating some more and then even STIRRING. Honestly, it makes me slightly sick even remembering that. The people in Busan don't strike me as particularly refined or cultured and lots of them don't seem to know the first thing about manners. Taipei is far better in this instance than they are.

My brain's exhausted now but I'll try and finish this. More to come.