Busan Day 3

Okie, I feel bad about procrastinating my blog entries, so shall make use of my free time now to finish blogging everything. We were all supposed to wake up at 4.30am to catch the sunrise at the beach, but no one woke up (as expected). The bulk of us (Long, Yong Hui, Ziyi and me) woke up at 10am and went for a stroll at the beach. As compared to Friday, Sunday was way more crowded. There was some prelude to the upcoming beach festival, and we managed to catch some sand artists making sculptures at the beach.

The beach was still really cold when we were there. Even the sand was cold to the touch. There’s also a mermaid sculpture here, just like in Copenhagen! This was the second mermaid sculpture I have seen in South Korea; the other one was at Nami Island, Chuncheon.

We also managed to visit Nurimaru APEC House, which was a convention hall specially built to welcome heads of every nation during the 13th APEC summit in 2005. Now that it has served it's purpose, it has been converted to a tourist attraction by the government. The place was really beautiful, with wonderful views of the sea! And I managed to find the Singapore seat, where PM Lee sat previously. It must have been really exciting to be one of the participants of the summit! The view enough is worth sitting through hours of conferences!

After we checked out of the hotel, we met up with everyone else for lunch. Something really nice happened that day too. My hosts from Daegu actually travelled all the way from their home to find me at Busan! At first when I invited them to join me at Busan, I did not expect them to agree, but they really came! Although it was supposed to be only a one hour trip, the terrible traffic conditions resulted in them getting caught in the jam for 4 hours!

And the worst thing was, my host, Daedong형, drove here, so he was exhausted by the time he came. And he actually parked his car at the terminal so that he could take the subway and buses with us (there were too many of us; he couldn’t drive us all).

Daedong형 took us to a restaurant that is extremely popular in the area. In fact, many artistes who travel to Busan will come here to have their tteokboki (rice cake in spicy sauce). Besides that, we had cold noodles, dumplings, blood sausages (pig intestines filled with pig’s blood and glutinous rice), tempura vegetables and other pork innards. Damn delicious meal, and costs only $4 per person!

Following that, we went to a famous temple in the outskirts of Busan. At first, I was thinking it’s going to be another temple again, but it’s seriously the most beautiful one I have seen here, because it is situated right beside the sea!

At the entrance of the temple, there were 12 deities corresponding to the 12 different horoscopes of the Chinese calendar. Here I am, posing with the oxen statue. Notice that there are coins left on the statue; people place them there, and if the coins do not drop, their wishes will come true.

Here’s the very last picture I took with my hosts before I left for Seoul. They are seriously the nicest people I have met in Korea! I highly recommend staying over at their place if anyone is going over to Daegu!