Busan, part I - Seomyeon, Dongbaek and Gwangali Beach

Gwangali beach, firmly in my top three

It is positively amazing what 7 hours of solid sleep can do. In other news, it does look like I've gotten a bit brown from the sun and that makes me a bit frustrated, but honestly, I've been sunburnt before. When I was in Romania I practically turned into a block of cinder. Same goes for Barcelone, actually. Ah well, it is what it is. I'll turn back into my usual porcelain skinned self eventually.

Busan. I found my hostel, found a great place to change my money (it is far cheaper to change money here than it is in Taiwan, and you have to convert your money to USD to get the best rate), sat in the hostel a bit, and tried, unsuccessfully, to charge my phone. When it became obvious that I wasn't really getting anywhere, I threw up my hands and conceded defeat, and headed out. At this point it was already about 6pm and I was starving, as I hadn't had anything to eat the entire day aside from black coffee and black soy bean milk at about 8 in the morning.

I walked out to Nampo metro station, which was conveniently located RIGHT next to my hostel - by design, of course. That was basically the entire reason why I picked that hostel. When you're on the road, time is key, and you don't want to do anymore walking than you have to.

Korean street food

A Korean 7-11

I'd made a bucket list of all the restaurants and food I wanted to go to, but what I hadn't accounted for was how hard it was to locate these restaurants. I must have listed about 7 of them, and only managed to find one. I suppose it was good exercise doing all that walking around, and a lot of walking around I did, too.

It's only 10am but already I'm exhausted. I'm fed up with a lot of people at work to be honest. Even a phone call from one of the colleagues I like better isn't enough to recharge my depleted batteries. I probably need to think twice about going on a weekend sprint in the future. Then again this is what you live for, isn't it? What was it that Milton said - 'Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.' To amend his words, it's nice to feel exhausted, to feel that heady sensation of living, to feel the blood and adrenaline coursing through your veins, to bleed when you draw blood, to look into a mirror and see a reflection.

I went to Seomyeon to find Korean hotpot, and after walking around for about half hour and not finding the restaurant, bought some banana milk and decided to grab any old pork rice soup because I was famished. I went into a shop which looked fairly nice, and it started out so well too. A middle aged (I'm tempted to say old, because anyone over the age of 35 is old to me, but people will be offended if I write that, so I'm going to go with middle aged) Korean man sitting at another table was watching me eat, and he gestured wildly whenever I ate, in a bid to tell me how to eat it the correct way. I thought it was pretty nice of him - I guess he was trying to help - but in retrospect, it really wasn't any of his business. Anyway, he shouted for the restaurant owner, another middle aged woman, to come, and she came and grabbed a spoon and tasted my soup without asking, then whisked away the soup and brought it back and tasted it some more, with her spoon which she had already used several times. I then watched, extremely revolted, as she STIRRED MY SOUP WITH HER USED SPOON. Honestly, it grosses me out just thinking about it. I still finished it all, though, because I was so hungry, and this is a lesson I need to remember: don't go travelling on an empty stomach because you'll end up ravenous and desperate and you'll eat anything that comes your way, even pork rice stew with Korean spit.

I've included the restaurant below for future reference, and to warn away weary travellers.

After this I went to Dongbaek, as I'd read on the internet that there was a nice waterfront bar called The Bay 101. Suffice it to say that I was less than impressed: the view was a rather small port inlet, not the main sea; it was teeming with people and I don't like crowds, plus there was a minimum spend cutoff of 70,000 krw. Sorry not sorry but I'm not spending 70k won on a tequila sunrise.

Dongbaek

I walked back to the metro station and went to Gwangali beach, and fell in love - with the beach, I mean. Easily one of my favourite places in Busan. My top three are Gwangali Beach and its waterfront bars, Jagalchi fish market and the Nampo-Jagalchi boardwalk, and Gamcheon, and if I ever revisit Busan this is where you'll find me.

This is what I came for.

As always, a White Russian because that's my go-to drink, which will always, always remind me of that night I sailed from Stockholm to Helsinki, and that perfect measure of hope and despair.

To be continued.

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.

The very bowl that the restaurant owner dipped her saliva-slathered spoon in, and stirred. Urgh. Which was a shame because the food was nice.

The massively overrated Haeundae/Dongbaek. 10/10 would never come back.

Gwangali beach, which was one of my favourite locations in Busan. Definitely top two.

Gwangali Beach again, my love

Gamcheon Cultural Village, definitely top three in my Busan bucket list. 10/10 would visit again.

St. Petersburg, part I - St. Peter's Line, PR Maria (iii)

Today started off auspiciously. I was up till extremely late last night reading a fanfic (don't judge me) on AO3. I'd first found that fanfic ages ago, whilst I was still reading for my master's degree. The author had only written a couple chapters at that point, and that fanfic was ostensibly just another of those 'incredibly well written WIPs' that you never hear from ever again. So imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I found that she'd written some more chapters after I graduated. I promised her a review of her newest chapters but never got round to it, then completely forgot about it. I've been re-immersing myself in ST, however, and found her fanfic listed in a ST directory, and imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I found that she'd expanded her fic into a very substantial series. I was delirious with joy and turned on my 'reading' mode and allowed myself to flee into the warm fuzzy escapism of her world of writing.

It's been a long time since I felt that way. Time was when I used to turn to writing as my last safe haven and anchor of sanity. I haven't written anything, original or otherwise, in simply ages. Granted, I was never much of a fanfic writer, I've always preferred my own characters and own-verse (is that even a word)? I left her some rather badly written, very sleep deprived comments enunciating my appreciation for how she'd followed up and completed her fanfics. As a fellow writer I know all too well the importance of good, meaty feedback from fic readers, and I was once again gratified when I woke up to her ample-sized replies to my comments. At this point this may sound a little creepy, but I even stumbled across her tumblr and found that she'd gushed about me and my comments and her fanfics. It made me pretty happy, knowing that I'd made her day like that. I think this is a very good case for how I am, deep down inside, a big ole softie at heart.

That was pretty non relevant but it is my life and it's my blog, and if anything reading some choice AO3 has shown me that I really need to pick up my writing again. Yesterday an acquaintance from uni asked me for some short fics that I used to write, and I sent her the Dido/Aeneas one, which I posted here ages ago. I showed it to 1b as well, back in the day, and he showed it to his best mate Dan, and he told me that between the two of them they thought that I was good enough to write for a living. Which of course brings me here.

According to my blog stats I have some pretty consistent readers from France. My question now is - who are you!? I am simply dying of curiosity to know who you are.

The biggest difference in this entry from the previous ones is that I actually got to eat some food here. I wandered around the sun deck and decided I was peckish, so went down to one of the restaurant below decks. The menu was in English, Russian and (simp) Mandarin. I didn't know whether to be flattered or irritated by the latter. Perhaps irritated, for reasons which will become obvious after extensive psychoanalysis. I jest, of course.

The chicken Kiev was horrible, there's no way I can arrange flowers around this. It tasted like something I'd gotten for 99p from Iceland. The meat was mysterious and stale and I could practically feel the synthetic melted margarine slide right down my esophagus to form a heavy layer of potential heart attack around my vital organs.

The dessert however was much better, standard Russian fare with cranberries and moussed cream. It was delicious. I paid by card because I didn't have any coins left on me at this point and I did not want loads of spare change from my 100 EUR note.

Menu. I got my coffee next morning from this shop as well. Hello, surly Russian waitresses.

Dire-tasting chicken kiev.

It was virtually impossible for me to get a good shot of this because how the heck do you make this look good!?

Above average dessert, thankfully.

Alors!