Moving to Busan

Bus to Busan

I woke early at 0600 and took breakfast before the official time of 0800.  I left soon after on a 5 min walk to the bus stop where I managed to get a bus to the Express Bus Terminal.  I’m bound for Busan today and it was a lot costlier to go by train and involved a change.  The bus would be direct to Busan’s bus terminal which was about 40 mins north of the port area where I’m staying though.

I had an hour to kill at the bus terminal after buying my ticket at the kiosk, which was a replica of the website.  I couldn’t help noticing that buses here are not as modern as I had expected especially when Korea exports lots of nice new buses.

Technology wise, they had some nice features:

• During boarding, one scans in their boarding pass.  The TV screen at the front of the bus shows in a colour-coded seat map, the seats that have been sold, boarded or are empty.  Really handy for the driver.
• Also, the driver has a compressed air gun by his seat to clear away water droplets on the exterior side window.

The 3h10 ride was comfortable in a 2+1 seating configuration, and included a rest stop half-way.  A lot of the drive was on elevated highways and looking down on rice fields.  As this is a very mountainous country, there were countless tunnels as well.

Upon arriving at Busan’s bus station in the north, I ate lunch before taking the subway to the Toyoko Inn Busan Station No 1.  It was before 1500 when I got to the hotel but being a budget hotel that is fastidious about cleanliness, they don’t seem to give out rooms early.  I could see the staff still madly cleaning the lobby.

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Jagalchi and Chinatown

I left my bag with the hotel and metro’ed to Jagalchi.  The metro station here has an underground mall which stretches to the previous station.  Emerging to ground level at Jagalchi Fish Market, I wandered through the fish stalls outside.  On my last visit, I thought the outside stalls were more interesting than the ones inside!  When I got to the large modern building that was the official fish market, it was closed.

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Instead, I went to Daiso where I bought some stuff, including something to replace a broken travel paraphernalia.

Dinner time came and I wandered around Busan’s Chinatown opposite the main station.  There were some Russian shops and signage in Tagalog.  It’s apparent that this is a port city.  I settled for a Chinese meal tonight.  They found me an old menu with English.  The price for my chicken noodle soup was KRW10000, a little more than the KRW7000 to 9000 that I normally pay.

But at the end of the meal, I gave her KRW10000 but the lady then said it was KRW12000.  I gave her the benefit of the doubt as the English menu looked really old and hadn’t been updated for pricing.  A friend that lives here says that people are super honest but if there was going to be a place for me to get cheated, it would probably be here.

Escaping a fire from my hotel

The Toyoko Inn Busan Station No 1 comes with a novel (to me anyway), fire escape.  A box at the end of the bed contains rope and pulley to be mounted to a hook by the openable window.  Now, I’m 6 storeys up.  I’m not sure if they supply the same for higher levels and whether the rope is longer.  And what if they get the upper-level and lower kits mixed up?

I think they need to stress that this means of escape comes after trying the two fire escapes available.