Second Busan Trip

So it's been a while since my last post -- I could come up with several different excuses but rather than doing that I'll just write it and you can guess!

The last post was on a Friday morning before falling asleep for the night (really early) about my 1 month anniversairy.   After going to work that day I boarded the KTX train with Aurora for Busan for an awesome beach weekend!

The first couple pictures I have for you guys document an interesting social thing over here -- couples will oftentimes wear matching outfits when they go out!  Now -- it's a pretty tricky thing to catch on camera without your subjects realizing that you're doing it so my strategy was to play "angry birds" on my phone and then switch to the camera when I thought I had a good shot.  The next question is how many pictures people have taken of me while playing angry birds?

We finally caught up with the rest of the crew around 10pm and found out that they had already started the party without us (well dinner anyways...)  The first thing we did was head to Haeundae Beach (you'll remember this from my first week in Korea) and the two of us that were actually willing to put our feet in the water took some pictures:

Hopefully you recognize the dude in the first picture; but the second pictures is my buddy Wallace -- who would later that evening be re-named "Le-mur" by some French tourists.  One of the french guys (picture below) conviced Walls into playing a game with some beer bottles -- it was a bit of a trick getting the bartender to give them the caps; but in the end they suceeded:

 
The goal was to knock the cap off of your opponents bottle with the cap from your own.  Walls played quite skillfully, thus earning the respect of the frenchman.  Of course, after earning said respect; you've gotta do the manly pose:

Next we headed (with the french guys) to a club in the basement of a Hotel.  The ended up not letting us in because some of us were wearing sandals.  But they had a really wicked hallway:

The next morning was pretty rainy but we went to check out the beach anyways.  It was pretty cool because the whole area was blanketed in a dense layer of fog; so visibility was at an all time low.  It also made it super tricky to take good photos:

After that we went to the Busan Aquarium -- which was actually really cool.  Since I'm not a marine biologist I'd be really bad at claiming to know what these different species actually ARE -- but I'll go ahead and post the better of the pictures anyways (the rest will be on the Picasa Web Album, of course.)

This guy had a really big forehead!

Penguins!  This species has a rather interesting name... I wonder where it came from?:

Then there were these tutle guys:

Dude's just chillin'.   There were some other turtles with these incredibly long necks:

This next video is a rather long one from one of the large fish tanks in the Aquarium:

There were a bunch of tanks with eels in them, but I thought this guy was the coolest:

 

And there was this really sick-looking flourescent (unless it was the lights) jellyfish:

And the massive octopus was hiding out in the rocks, so we couldn't really get a good gimpse at him:

This guy was hiding out too, but did a much better job:

SHARKS!!!

After finishing up at the aquarium Jeff and I decided to grab a bite to eat.  It was my first time eating at the Korean Fast-Food chaine "Lotteria"

They actually use a never-before-seen technique to wrap the burger:

Jeff and I, having misplaced our comrades, decided to chill on the rainy (foggy) beach for a while.  The way that the clouds caressed the mountains around the ocean was really neat:

We also got to get a sneak peek of some group practicing for a performance.  It was pretty neat to see them up on the stage in their street clothes -- I still don't know who it was.

Every once and a while some older Korean couple will offer to take your picture:

After that we ventured into the city to try to do a tour up Busan Tower (of course we shouldn't have bothered, it was too rainy/cloudy, but we made it TO the tower anyways.)  One of the things you can see on the way is the massive LOTTE Mall:

After climbing a great deal of stairs (escalators actually; which was weird) in the pouring rain (actually they were covered) we made it to the base of Busan Tower.  Here you can see another dragon:

And this is a pic of my buddy Wang with his umbrella up in the air!

Who then returned the favor:

You can tell how badly I need a haircut!  After the tower (base) experience we wandered around the city for a bit until we came across some awesome street-food:

We tried all sorts of stuff -- above is walls eating some kind of crab-cake cooked into some kind of pancake and smothered with sauces.  Below is a more traditional american visit to Baskin' Robins:

And Kalon REALLY liked his green-tea flavored shake:

This whole time the rain was coming down as if there were firehoses in the sky.  I was wet and freezing but we kept going anyways.  Later we met up with the others, who were at the famous Busan fish-market -- we didn't get a chance to look around too much because we all wanted to get warm and dry but at least here's a picture of the gate:

The rest of the evening was pretty chill.  We went back to our hotel and got dry and then headed out to check out the nightlife.  Ken and I separated from the others when they sat down to dinner (we weren't particularily hungry) and we got to spend some time hanging out with some bartenders at the GEKO bar -- We didn't intentionally sit down at the part of the bar where they do the dish-washing, but it turned out to have been an awesome decision:

Later, I bought one of their T-Shirts -- which actually says STAFF on the back!  This way I could really start fitting in:

And eventually, the rest of the crew caught up with us:

The next day we took a boat tour along the coast, which let us see some really beautiful scenery:

 In this one you can see some guys about to do some Cliff-Jumping!  The cityscape from the water:

Aurora Chillin':
 

Girls with hats, and a nice view of the bridge in the back:

There was a super-small island out in the sea that had a super-modern lighthouse on it that looked more like some kind of research lab.  You couldn't even see the lighthouse from land:

As you can see we lucked out and got a super sunny beautiful day; so the next thing we did was head to the beach to enjoy it.  We revisited the wall murals that I shared with you guys my first week in Korea:

After this we went to get some eat and then headed to the beach.  Some of the crew just were just lounging out on the beach, and some of us went swimming (Kalon, Aurora and I) but after chris showed up we just went for a walk along the water:

And then we saw these crazy guys trying to use an inflatable bed as a floatation device:

We came back to find everyone passed out:

After this we went to back to the train station, just in time to take some more pounce shots on another matchy-matchy couple (double date this time):

Then we got some more food before boarding the train back home:

Once we got back to Seoul we had to take a Taxi back to SNU because the metro's were shut-down.  But all in all it was a great weekend!

More posts are coming but since this one is super long I'll leave it at that for now!