The Adventure Begins!: All around the world is Christmas

Saturday, December 1^st, 2012 – Sunday, December 2^nd, 2012

I stayed in most of Saturday and then met up with Casey and her friends to experience more of the nightlife. We went to a bar called Thursday’s party first. This place had a lot of games such as foosball, beer pong and darts. I played a couple rounds of darts. The merchant marines were in town so they were interested in talking to us. I learned a bit about their lifestyle, which includes being at sea half the year and getting the rest of the year off. After there, we went to Blue Monkey, the foreign dance bar. We danced for a while before calling it a night.

The next day, I had plans to meet up with Scott and his girlfriend Terri. We met at Centum City metro stop. That is where the biggest department store in the world is. They took me on a brief tour of the mall including the skating rink, book store, outside of the wax museum, the specialty foods area, the designer area, the main corridor with the Christmas tree and the view of all the floors. You could spend a lot of time exploring this mall; I will need to go back there one day.

We took the metro to another area to eat lunch. We ate at a traditional restaurant where we sat on the ground on a pillow around a table. We were given a broth and it was placed on the heater at our table. We were given a tray with vegetables and a tray with thinly carved beef all rolled and placed perfectly on the plate. Kimchi was also brought to our table like at every Korean restaurant along with a Korean salad. We added the veggies to the broth to cook. Then we added the meat to cook. We poured this soup into our bowls and ate it with chopsticks. In the soup they had the strangest mushrooms with long tentacle looking strands hanging from it. There was also tofu, and lettuce and processed fish in the soup. We added some vegetable dumpling things into the broth to cook and then eat. After we finished those we added fresh noodles to the rest of the broth and ate that. Finally, with the remainder of the broth, rice was added and mixed in to make almost a thicker rice stew which was really good. It had the flavour of all of the other things that had already been added to the broth. For dessert we had a sweet rice drink.

After lunch, we took the metro to our next destination, Nampo, which was on the other side of the city. In the subway station, they had little clothing stores everywhere. The clothes were inexpensive. Outside of the metro, there were markets all around the area selling mostly food and clothes but also some other little things like toys, alcohol, stationary, candies etc. There is also a fish market in the area. All of these markets were in tight alleys and you had to squeeze your way through the crowd. There was also an arcade with markets underneath. You could spend a lot of time exploring the streets and streets of markets and easily get lost.

We thought these were hilarious

On our way out, Scott and Terri told me I should try one of the treats being sold on the street. It was fried dough made from rice with sugar and possibly other things melted inside. We all shared one. It was really good and I told Scott it tasted a bit like a Beavertail. Scott’s reaction was, haha what do you mean a Beavertail? I was shocked to find out he, a fellow Canadian, had never heard of a Beavertail!

We decided to have a coffee break and walked to another big mall in the area and enjoyed a Krispy Cream coffee and doughnut. Mine was called a toblerone doughnut because it had a couple pieces of the chocolate bar on top. The rest of the doughnut was not fresh and had red jelly inside so I didn’t really care for it. Terri and Scott had the original glazed doughnut, which were constantly being freshly made and you can watch them go through the machine, the kind I will opt for next time! We had good conversations while enjoying the coffee.

After our break, Scott suggested we eat at one of his favourite restaurants for dinner. We strolled through the streets on our way to the restaurant. The area outside of this mall was the first touristy I had seen so far in Busan. Wide enough space where people can actually walk with tourist stores along the sides and the Christmas lights set up everywhere. On our way to the restaurant we passed more of the market as it started to get dark.

At the restaurant, we again cooked our food in front of us, this time it was a giant frying pan at our table. We ordered chicken as our main meat. First they sautéed the chicken in a red sauce with onions and vegetables and butter; Next they added a huge portion of rice, a ton of red spice and seaweed. They mix all of that together in the pan and let it cook. Scott ordered extra cheese so they added that at the end and let it melt under the rice in the middle of the pan. We then all scooped our portion in to our bowls to enjoy! It was surprisingly really good! I did find it a bit spicy, my lips were burning and my nose was running but it was worth it! The dessert that came with this meal was a little cup of hot cocoa.

Terri made sure we didn't get any on our clothes!

On our way out, to digest our food, we walked around a bit more. We walked through the main touristy area, now that it was dark, all of the Christmas lights were shinning. It was amazing! They had such nice decorations and so many lights. It was a warm night and the view was picturesque.