Busan Part 1

THIS is Korea doing the beach thing.

There's something about people enmasse at the beach. All of a sudden it's not just a dip in the water, it's a journey.That first frightful Summer dash to the water's edge in your bikini fades a little, overshadowed by a new conundrum - finding a bit of headspace in the ocean to actually breathe and to avoid the half a million feet madly kicking beneath rubber tubes.

And how hazardous a rubber tube can be when you're not in one - you're fodder for the masses to bump against as they shriek at every mere ripple of water as though it were an actual wave.

This is Haeundae Beach at Busan, the southern most city on the Korean peninsula.
For anyone who watches 60 Minutes in Australia, Busan featured late last year for its impressive speed at putting together enormous ships. It was some ridiculous amount.

Busan is three hours by fast train from Seoul (getting up to speeds of almost 300km/hr), so it’s not that far at all and very nice for a getaway near the water in the middle of Summer when you have a week off and you're going a bit nutty from spending too much time in The Gu. Oh, and when you're dreadfully pasty.

We just returned from four days in Busan, half of which was spent with my cousin Jodie who was passing through on her way back home to Sydney from a work conference in London.

Busan is famously known for its seafood - it homes the biggest fish market in Korea - and is apparently one of the busiest ports in Asia.
If nothing else, Haeundae Beach provided Jodes with a chance to test out her newly purchased bikinis before the herald of Summer in Australia.
As she rightly pointed out, it was also a chance to take one of those “look at how crazy this is” photos to post on our blog.

Apparently Haeundae is the vacation hot spot for Korean businessmen. Concrete highrises are crammed shoulder to shoulder right up to the beach where thousands of umbrellas shade even more hundreds of thousands of swimmers.

Apart from the obvious over-populated issue, there were a few startling oddities.
Firstly, not a lot of Koreans wear swimmers. An overwhelming majority of people were swimming in full clothes – I’m not talking boardies, I’m talking shorts and t-shirts, even jeans and shirts. Quite bizarre.
Almost everybody – actually, I’m confident enough to say everybody – hired a rubber tube to float on in the water, rather than swimming freely. (Jodie suggested perhaps most people can’t swim, so yes, I think that might be the answer). There were also a few lifejackets, which I had to have a bit of a giggle at. It just didn't seem quite right.

Oh, here’s another. There were no outdoor showers to wash the sand off – you had to pay to shower at a makeshift complex which had an enormous queue. Also, there were no taps to wash your feet. There was simply a small (2m x 2m), shallow wading pool, the logistics of which were ridiculous – loads of people would crowd around to dip their feet in, and there was no system for emptying and re-filling the pool, so every while an old man would have to shovel out the sand and re-fill it with buckets. How strange, we thought.

On the food side of things, it was definitely Korea Goes Beachy. Hawkers weaved their way beneath the umbrella canopy selling fried chicken and cold beer, watermelon, icecreams, iced coffee (black iced coffee is big here) and pat ping su. (The original, I discovered, actually has no icecream at all and is just a mound of shaved ice with a squirt of milk and condensed milk to milky it up, plus toppings.)

And in the backstreets every corner sold pineapple and melon on the stick as well as fruit shakes and dried squid for chewing. Then there were chicken sticks and sticky glutinous doughnuts and little bags of walnut cakes.

Not a bad way to escape the sweltering heat on a week off when the Gu's driving you crazy, albeit with half a million of your closest friends, as the Lonely Planet aptly describes it.

(Tomorrow, in Busan Part 2: the perils of being a Whitie Westerner. How we fared in the face of Korea's best crankies and answers to all of those questions such as, "Do Korean Grandpas enjoy hitting westerners with their walking sticks?")

Pat ping su by the beach: shaved ice, canned cocktail fruit,strawberry syrup, condensed milk, sweet red beans and jubey lollies. "Hey, ours isn't as big as theirs," was usually my only complaint.