Travel plan idea blog

Maisan & Busan

As we near the end of my sister's visit to Korea, I realize that I've been lagging behind in my reports.

Our second day in Jinju we spent on Maisan (Mai Mountain or Horse-Ear Mountain). Here, there is a very cool temple called Tapsa (pictures coming in a few days). While there we had some lunch - scallion pancake for my sister and her husband while I had sanche bibimbap (rice and mountain veggies) and my wife had barbecue ribs. After driving back to Jinju we had dinner with the family plus an ice cream cake since it was my father-in-law's birthday.

The next day, Saturday, we went to Busan. Younggung Temple was the first stop. This is a nice temple on the water but the water was pretty dirty thanks to litter and whatnot. Then we went to Songjeong Beach which wasn't too crowded for a Saturday. My brother-in-law said it looked like people just wore their normal clothes into the water (which was pretty cold for mid-July). Sure there were a few guys in bathing suits with no shirt and one or two girls in bikini tops but there were tons of people in shorts and t shirts, a kid in blue jeans, etc. The next stop was Shinsegae department store which seems more like a mall than a department store.

But someone calls it a department store and Guinness World Records has certified it as the largest store in the world. We did some shopping and visited the food court a few times. Interestingly for the world's largest department store (but not surprising for people familiar with Korea) they weren't really equipped to deal with vegetarians. It's not that there were no vegetarian options, just that staff wasn't equipped to deal with questions about vegetarian food, even in Korean.

I have to hand it to the staff though - we did meet one extremely friendly guy on our way out. It was raining and we had no umbrellas. My wife asked if anyone would walk us to our car (there were a few security guys at the exit since the store was closing). One guy said he would be happy to, grabbed 2 umbrellas, and walked the 4 of us to our car. We had a nice little chat with him on the way - just a real nice guy. My sister was laughing at the absurdity of the situation since it's hard to imagine something similar in America.

That was a rough day because Busan traffic is pretty bad. We spent 6 hours in the car (3 in each direction) not counting the short drives between each of the three places. They at least were all close together. Had we gotten an earlier start we could have seen Haeundae Beach as well since we drove right past it. Supposedly this beach is more crowded and less conservative (more bathing suits and bikinis I guess).

Posted by James Trotta at July 12, 2010 11:52 PM