Busan: Travelling (Day I)
Hey, I am back with another post! This time, I will be sharing with you about my trip to Busan from Seoul. We spent a total of 3 days and 3 nights there. I would say, it is well-worth the time and money spent since Busan is not another Seoul. You can actually feel the differences in the culture and way of living between these 2 places.
Firstly, let's talk about how to get there. Before we left for Korea, we actually made online reservation for train tickets to Busan. You can easily get your hands on these tickets by visiting the Korail website and purchase your tickets depending on the number of days you are planning to be in Busan. If I am not wrong, this is the website where we booked the tickets: http://www.letskorail.com/ebizbf/EbizBfKrPassReservation.do
Simply print the confirmation document and bring it along with you on the day itself.
So where do you board this train? The nearest subway station is Seoul station. From there, you have to show your credit card and e-ticket document to change for your pass. You would have chosen your seat numbers, so no worries there! But there is a few things which I found surprising:
1. No one is going to check your tickets. This means that no one is going to ask for your tickets before you enter the station nor are there any gantries.
2. You can buy any food you want from the rail station and eat on the train. We bought Macs just because we were already missing non-korean food!
3. No one is going to walk through the train and punch your tickets. That is a great deal of trust.
4. There is free wi-fi on the train. There is this phone application called the KTX Wifi, so download it and you get to have Internet access throughout the whole ride.
In total, it took around 2.5 hours for us to reach Busan. And man, the scenery was just awesome though the weather was warm!
With that, we set off to our hostel. There is another subway system in Busan, just like Seoul but just a tinier version. For us, we took Line 3 to Seomyeon station. We were lost but we found our way after visiting the visitor centre to ask for directions. To get to Uniqstay, we exited through Exit 7 (there is a map below). We booked this hostel through Agoda.
Would I recommend this hostel? Yes, definitely. The owners speak English fluently and they are really friendly!
The room is spacious, everything looks pretty new and the decorations are nice. Ultimately, the friendliness of the owners made up the whole package. They spoke to us and asked us about our travel plans. The weather was not looking good that day, so we opted to explore the area near the hostel instead of visiting the beach.
The owner printed a map for us and recommended us places to eat at. Recommendations from a local could never go wrong.
He pointed out where the grocery store is, as well as 2 eateries - one for kimbab and one for pork soup. We set off to the first stop - the kimbab store!
We felt that these kimbab tasted pretty normal, but they looked photogenic. Don't they? ;) We walked around a bit before going for dinner since the restaurant serving pork soup opened only in the evening.
We ordered one set to share since the proportion was really too big for one person to finish. As recommended, the taste of the pork soup is beyond what I could describe in words. This is a must try! Other than the pork soup, it comes together with some side dishes. I could not stomach the raw vegetables though. I was a little lost about what to do with all the ingredients until the boss came and showed us how to add the ingredients into the soup. Daebak!
After dinner, we visited the nearby shopping centre -Lotte Department Store before going to the grocery store to try some Korean icecream :)
Before the day ends, we played some Korean music from a music channel to... enter our dreamland.
