Busan! Our first adventure out of Gwangju

This weekend we ventured to Busan! We went with the hope of getting to the fireworks festival, but I will tell you up front, no fireworks were seen. It's ok though! We had an awesome time.

Our friend Chelsea was the one who suggested we go. We aren't getting paid till the second weekend in November, so we are doing our best to be frugal, but with the promise of free camping and cheap bus tickets we signed on. On Friday's the school day ends at 10. We decided that not having a super clear idea of the plan it was best not to try and negotiate Busan in the dark. So Friday night we picked up all the camping gear from Chelsea's place, and she crashed on our extra bed so we could make an obscenely early start on Saturday morning.

The thing we learned from this trip is: book your freaking bus tickets. Apparently for heavily traveled routes like Gwangju to Seoul it is super easy to show up and end up on the next bus. Not so for Busan. We got to the terminal at 6 and couldn't leave till 8:30. But we played card games on the floor while simultaneously providing well dressed Koreans with entertainment. We got on the bus and I passed out for the next four hours and woke up in Busan!

 So Korea is basically all mountains. And Busan is on the coast. The combination of mountains and super blue ocean is really stunning. We took a subway to the main beach to figure out our next move and admire the view. After finding a hotline to get Busan info, we discovered that Songjeon was the only beach we were allowed to camp on. We had actually figured that was the case ahead of time, but wanted to check if we could be any closer. We jumped in a cab and scouted out an excellent beach camping spot. Once we were all set up we waited for Luke, Chelsea's boyfriend who was coming from Seoul. We did a bit of walking around and exploring until he arrived. When he did we went to an AWESOME restaurant. The building was modeled after an old Korean turtle battleship which apparently kicked ass many moons ago. The cuisine was basically the Vietnamese take on shabu shabu. Again you get the hot broth, meat, noodles and rice, but this time there were like 8 piles of fresh veggies and rice paper to wrap all the deliciousness in to eat it!

 After that we grabbed beer to sit with on the beach! We talked, played games, put our toes in the water. We decided we didn't want to spend the money on a cab to and from the inevitably packed beach, and looking on the map figured we'd be able to see the fireworks. We moved to a dock nearby in the hopes that our view would be a little better. But come 8:00 we didn't see or hear anything. We were a little bummed, but pretty happy to be mellowed out with all our camping stuff on a gorgeous beach. 

The next morning we cook a WHOLE LOTTA meat on a little mini stovey thing that Chelsea brought. We got coffee in an awesome shop overlooking the beach, and then headed to the bus station. We got there at two in the afternoon, only to discover the next available bus was at 6:40. Needless to say it was a bummer and a long wait, BUT WE LEARNED OUR LESSON.
It was a great first trip out of Gwangju and we definitely want to go back.