4 June 2022
The other main part
Saturday night in Seomyeon
I say Saturday night, but what I really mean is late afternoon, because I like to be tucked up in bed by 9pm.
Seomyeon is the newer CBD of Busan, not that I really took many photos of banks but they are there. Go a couple of streets back and it is the nightclub area, complete with grimy streets and flyers for nightclubs being thrown onto the ground from speeding scooters.
I stayed nearer to this area last time I was here, but I cannot really remember it well, which I find surprising. It is a mix of nightclubs, beer halls, department stores (not shown tonight), Nike stores (Korean boys love to line up for a week or more for shoes), all the regular things. Quite by accident I found a very interesting vertical store / fun park / movie theatre / art gallery. It had many excellent food choices and lots to see, so it is a good thing I remembered my camera so that I can never look at this again.
Grimy streets, grimier under grey skies. Busan's Kabukicho perhaps.
Photo drink is another one of these selfie photo studio places, only this one also gives you booze.
Probably the main street through the back street area, the streets are closed off to traffic, but scooters find a way, and try to kill me.
Hills in all directions.
Out the front of the 15 level building I described above is a makers market thing, these seem quite popular in all of Korea. If I was paying rent to sell similar stuff in the building behind it I would be annoyed at this.
OK, now I am inside the building I spent most of my time in, this is a rent and build lego place. You do not buy the lego, they have all the big sets, you pay for time to sit and build it. It seems to be a date night activity!
People go crazy for this place in Japan, here is one in Buasn with basically no customers. The lego date spot was much busier.
An entire floor is a cafe / art gallery. There were lots of paintings on display behind me with people wandering around with their bubble tea appreciating.
Another level brings the street stalls indoors. I was making people nervous looking here.
I think this is about level 13, there is a multi level cinema above still, but a nice view, Shot through tinted glass but I messed with the white balance.
I descended back down to one of the 3 levels of food. All nice looking places for the solo diner.
Pork bowl. With ant sauce. No really, the translation said something about how they invented a special ant sauce to give it a spicy zing. It was great, not sure if it was made from ants or not. It is basically a Japanese style don bowl, but a little bit spicy, and under the pork was bean shoots, and the rice under that was crunchy like it had been in a stone bowl. Cheap too, anything pork related is cheap in Korea.
Of course I could have sat in the street to eat at one of these stalls, of which there has to be 500 in this area alone. I do not really enjoy sitting in the traffic to eat though. It is a little less scary in summer, in winter they enclose these things into plastic covid boxes.
I am still waiting for the rain....