Weekend in Busan

Last weekend (June 5-6) Jennifer, Matt, and I went to Busan.  Busan is the second largest city in Korea with a population of 3.6 million.  It's the largest port city in Korea and the 5th largest port in the world.  It takes about 3.5 hours by KTX (fast/bullet) train from Seoul to Busan.  Having been up all night long clubbing in Seoul, we took a 7:15am train out from Seoul station and arrived at Busan station at about 10:30am or so.  From there we took the subway for about 45 minutes to the beach, Haeundae.  

It was awesome!  The weather was hot and sunny and we had a wonderful time sleeping (we did a lot of that!), reading, and chatting on the beach.  

On a side note: Jenn and I did an unofficial survey and found that the percentage of foreigners is about 30-40% at the beach.  Although it's not incredibly shocking since Koreans are notorious to hating the sun and getting suntans, we were still surprised.  On any given day, I find that the percentage of foreigners is closer to 5%.  

The beach was very busy! 

 

Some families cracked me up with their beach set-ups.  The family above was huddled under two umbrellas.  I didn't see or hear them talking to each other at all; rather they sat in silence observing the chaos around them. Oh, and me too even though I tried to discretely take their photo.  hah. 

This family [at right] had a picnic table with them and the two ladies are drinking Max beer from a can.  Notice also that the person to the left of the picnic table is hiding under a black umbrella in a hoodie.  Did I mention how hot it was?? 

The weekend we went was coincidentally also the Haeundae Sand Festival.  There were some really amazing ones out there.  I liked this one. 

A now, a word about sandwiches.  An ode, if you will.  I love sandwiches.  Love them.  I could eat them every day.  But sadly, not here in Korea.  I don't like their sandwiches.  They are usually ham (my least favorite deli meat), with a slice of processed orange cheese, and some mayonnaise concoction that I have yet to figure out what exactly it is.  The sandwiches here are thin and gross.  I thought I might never find a good sandwich (and no, I don't count the Quiznos and Subway chains as the sandwich I desire.  Yes, they do have those here) but then we found Breeze Burn's and oh. my. god.  

There was no wait to sit down (since we opted to sit indoors instead of on the patio) but the wait for food was ridiculous.  I think it took about an hour for our 2 sandwiches.  I don't remember how much the price was, but my guess is somewhere around w9,000.  Was it worth the wait?  YES.  Best sandwich I have had in a year.  I got the chicken club which came with a chicken breast, egg, tomato, bacon, and lettuce.  Yumtastic.