Korea for the 4th time - May and June 2022 - Page 6

Before leaving Daegu, I took an early walk around the city. Here is a cafe, with seating, and no staff. You pay and use the machine, clean up after yourself. It is open all night. Can you imagine the homeless people that would destroy this place immediately in Australia? If anyone is offended by what I said, please feel free to join me on a tour of Melbourne one morning.

Korean shoe shop. Kind of looks like what I said above but in the form of shoes.

This rather bad photo is just to show the smoking area. You cannot smoke in the streets in Korean cities, just like Japan, only in the designated smoking shame area. The area here is actually in the middle of the road.

My Daegu hotel was in a street full of shops selling loud karaoke gear. It seems they rented it all out to election trucks. Election over, hundreds of little trucks are being dismantled and their karaoke speakers are being re packaged to be exported in as new condition.

Daegu station. I was early of course.

Inside Daegu station. Thrilling. Actually it is large and quite nice, but not as nice as the store next door.

Basement 3 of the station Shinsegae store. I should probably have come here one night to explore.

If you think the outside of the store is huge from this angle, look at the next pic.

It continues over a series of highways connected by a giant footbridge. Photo is not really doing the scale any favours here.

I went down to the platforms early too, so here is some train tracks.

Inside of the train pic is the same as the last inside of the train pic, only less people.

Busan station interior. My next leg will not depart from here as I am taking a very slow coastal train. So if you want pics of Busan station, this is your only chance.

I presume this will become another enormous Shinsagae store soon.

Busan station from the outside, on this side there is not a lot to see.

However the other side is pretty interesting with buildings going up the hill.

My hotel seems excellent, the bed is western style and actually has a mattress rather than a slab of slate. Deceiving pic as the entrance I am standing in is quite large, and there is more room going around the corner off the left edge of the screen.

And finally, to keep my mother happy, full bathroom picture, with full bath.

My hotel is right over the road from here. I was familiar with this gentrified street from my last visit.

I immediately headed to the hills and up stair cases. A sky road of sorts bends around a corner on stilts. They have installed these rollers to stop cars from scraping along the railing.

This is a street. There are lots of similar stair cases going up the hill.

Excellent clear view.

In the park above it all is this monument. Looks painful.

View from the park is not as impressive as lower down where it is steeper and you can see onto the roofs of houses.

I plan to go up the hill over the other side there and look back this way.

There is also a lift to take you back down if you cant handle stairs, but it does not go all the way. Maybe there are more lifts.

Now that I am back down, time for a view back up the hill from the market street.

Inside the markets was a big grid of covered streets. The stalls here are all selling boxes of cigarettes and children's toys.

Very colourful area.

Lots of beer halls.

For my dinner, Sapporo soup curry. The place was quite rustic, they had a giant old radio and every table and chair was different. The menu, only in Korean, went into great detail about how authentic the soup curry is, although google lens translate was occasionally getting weird, one type of vegetable was translated as Whoopi, as in Goldberg. Anyway, I ordered the 18 kinds of vegetable soup curry maximum spicy, received the warning after I pointed at max spicy from the concerned waiter, and was surprised it came with rice. I had this in Sapporo without rice a couple of times.

If they are giving rice, then I will eat it, but I am not going to daintily spoon out each piece onto the rice. My choices were, add the rice to the curry (wiser choice), construct a heat proof shield out of paper serviettes and empty the curry onto the rice (what I did). Amazingly I did not get burnt or spill it everywhere. 2 pics of dinner, that's rare! Also, it was delicious.

I walked up the same street to the park entrance last time.

Here is the park entrance. There is a cable car, booo! There were a lot of people hanging around at the bottom of the park, lots of temples, gardens, tea houses, a few museums. A great place to waste the day as a retired person.

Here is one of the temples, I am not exaggerating when I say there are at least 50 of them on today's route. Some of them are hermitages, and the one I wanted to see at the end I could not. More on that later.

Here is the sort of path I found. It is different to the path I took up last time. By far the most strenuous part of the day is the first bit, getting up to the ridge roughly following the cable car. There are 20 ways to go, so choose your own adventure!

One of many Buddha's. I enjoy this one because he is perched next to a septic tank.

Good view with a nice tree. Busan is the mountain city of Korea, everywhere is a mountain sticking up looking down on the city. It is a great shame about the pollution though.

Another view spot. Look at all the mountains.

OK, last early view before I go find the wall.

This is not a view, it is a magnificent portrait.

The upper cable car station had no people, but I could see the cable moving. Just like last time, no actual car came while I waited for a photo. I decided to move on.

Behold, the wall! It was built around 1600, but there are some doubts as to who built it, why and exactly when, which seems a bit weird because it is not that long ago.

I remembered this gate from last time, but then today I got lost at this point.

You do cross one road in a valley, and as you can see there is a bus. I do not think this is where I crossed this road last time, because after this point the wall ended for a very long time until I found it again hours later.

Rocks and a tiny glimpse of Gimhae, the city on the far side of this mountain range.

A bit more Gimhae, the airport that serves Busan is down there.

Busan is a very complex city due to the mountains. You can never see all of it at once.

Here is a bit of the wall, almost overgrown by trees. The tall buildings you can see if you squint through the haze near the middle of this pic are a part of Busan nowhere near my hotel. I believe I am staying at a hotel off the right edge of the screen.

Surprise wooden deck. But, it was badly weathered, I did not trust it at all. I was careful to step only on the nails.

There is some more wall. Now I think last time there was no greenery at all when I went up that hill.

By this point I had rejoined the wall, behold, another gate. But I now realise I went a different way to last time as I took photos from a few different watchtowers last time, I think, I do not really know. Alzheimer's I guess.

Mountain school. Training kids what to do once they retire.

I think I went a bit further than my previous visit, up to the next peak, which is the highest of the day. It was a more developed area, probably due to the above mentioned mountain school.

Nearly at the top, there is the wall.

Summit marker. Right on 800m. Long and low today, lower would have been better due to the smog. Having said that, 6 hours, 35,000 steps, 1600m total ascent. And there were more steps than that too, read on.

A couple of other people were on the summit, that is Gimhae again on the other side of the river.

My journey down was that way, but probably it should not have been!

OK, so I followed a path down for a while, lost it, but was on a fairly well trodden but unmarked path that was going roughly in the right direction. I wanted to get to a Hermitage I went to last time that was guarded by a dog that would not let me enter. However, I hit some roped off areas that said I could not go any further as the monks were in retreat. I had come down for over an hour already! So... I crossed over some very huge boulders (not pictured) and after an hour of messing about and checking my map I got back to this section of smaller boulders, which was an official path down that was actually open.
I was very happy with the path I was taking as it was boulder free and went where I wanted to go, but it was not to be.

Eventually I got to the very large Beomeosa temple complex. This is just a tiny part of it. It is a very popular place.

Monk graveyard, these guys are on permanent retreat.

Once at the temple, I stopped my watch that tracks my hike. But it is still over 5000 more steps back to the subway station. There is a bus and I probably should have taken it, but I did not take the bus last time, so I did not take it this time. I actually stopped at the same store and bought an ice cream like last time too.

Final pic for today, now that I had eaten my ice cream, it was just a bit more of a skip down to the station, the final station on the line, and then a 50 minute ride back to the hotel. Since I have 40,000 steps today already, I will not be going too far this evening!

Here is the fish market on the docks. The fish looked a bit old and tired from a day in the sun. Although as mentioned, it was now cold.

The fleet is tied up for the evening. I enquired as to who would provide me safe anonymous passage to Siam. No one answered.

Dock area is now instagram area.

Lots of great views. I need to study the map, are there actual islands or does it all join up.

The local Lotte mall is sufficiently enormous. I am standing on a bridge here, it goes below the bridge then underground, and also around a corner, and they are building new bits of it too.

Future small hill to climb.

Inside the Lotte thing, a shame I was not in the middle, but the make up counter girls were not thrilled I was taking a photo.

The place is a big department store, then a mall with other shops, then restaurants and a cinema and an ice skating rink etc. This is the mall area, last time I was here it had a different display that resulted in me getting wet.

And here is my dinner. Mandu dumplings. Or I thought they were, not sure whats up with the Chinese writing. Actually it is a mix of Chinese and Korean writing. Fusion Jiaozi and Mandu then, not that there is much difference. Regardless, pretty bland, soup was flavourless, dumplings were huge and fell apart. Tomorrow no hiking, might go to the beach.

Apartment building comes with its own waterfall. I wonder what the strata fees are for that?

Last time I was here I walked around all those buildings, which were all labelled Trump something. I wonder if they still are.

Here is the worlds largest department store. No really. The sign suggests it has a zoo.

Proof of the above statement.

The Lotte store next door must feel inferior. People should appreciate the lengths I went to so that I could fit both of these into one photo.

And then over the road, Korean Wal-Mart. Do they sell assault rifles here too?

The local exhibition centre is also quite grand. Apparently Busan is hosting the 2030 world expo! Whatever the hell that is... It is set to be the worlds greatest spectacle since the 1982 Worlds fair in Knoxville Tennessee, but what will Busan do to top the sun sphere?

OK, here is the main drag at Haeundae. It is often featured on youtube. At xmas time there were a thousand fully decorated xmas trees here.

Now there are flowers, and mini versions of the Eiffel tower, statue of liberty, leaning tower of Pisa etc.

How fortunate I am, to be here during the annual sandcastle sculpture festival. Which also features the statue of liberty, Eiffel tower etc.

There is loud music blasting, jet skis, wannabe pop stars, and this meditation session. I am mildly amuse that the chief meditator is sitting in front of a screen with a picture of the ocean on it, blocking out the actual view of the actual ocean.

Tonight's dinner, probably. The one with the knife in it was not dead, yet.

Giant towers have sprung up on the beach front. I do not recall them being here last time I was here. Also they are made of glass instead of white cement, how very un-Korean.

It is actually a nice long, clean beach. Water looked clean too.

Last time I came here I think I missed the main street and immediately went off around those rocks.

Beach, with houses going up the hill and huge towers.

There is a traditional market street, mainly deep fried seafood in batter, but also sock shops for some reason, huge shops selling thousands of socks. And....

Live caterpillars. Maybe these will be my lunch, only $2 a bag. Yes they were wriggling.

Back near my hotel, and the cloud is rolling in. Also, a special police force has been established to monitor my activities!

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....