Saturday began with the pursuit of finding Geumjeong Park to hike the mountain and find Beomeosa Temple. There is a cable car that takes hikers up to the start of the mountain near the South Gate (there are four “gates” near the fortress walls.) We were unable to find the cable car so we decided to hike up to the South Gate instead. A group of hikers watched us begin the climb, probably wondering why the heck we were climbing when we could get a 15-min ride up. The climb up to the “start” took about 45 minutes. We got lost a couple times but found a group of hikers and creepily walked behind them up to the top. We hiked from South Gate, neat East Gate, then walked through a small village on the way to the North Gate (the closest to Beomeosa Temple.) On the way, we ate lunch in a small outdoor restaurant/tent on the mountain. It was delicious and a great atmosphere of hikers taking a relaxing break away from the wind and cold. Upon arrival at Beomeosa Temple, the hikers mixed in with the tourists who drove up from the town to visit the temple.
Saturday evening we stayed in Hauendae and received some help from locals in finding a nice jimjilbang. I highly recommend Vesta Sauna if ever visiting Haeundae. The price was cheap and with a restaurant, small bar, numerous saunas, separate women’s only sleeping room, and computers/TV’s… it was a wonderful experience. And they were very friendly and helpful with us foreigners. The best part of the ladies-only sleeping room was observing the groups of women. On one side of the room, there was a group of younger women all laying down and chatting. On the other side was a group of older women, stretching and doing different yoga-type poses. Almost as if they were showing off to each other and challenging each other. At one point a women who couldn’t have been much younger than 70, was doing a headstand against the wall- it was quite impressive! But all the stretching was bound to work something out and soon, a fairly aggressive gaseous sound was heard through out the room followed by the giggles of the group of older women. Good times had by all!
Our goal on Sunday was to watch the sunrise on Haeundae Beach so we woke at 6am, showered and walked the 15 min to the beach. It was cold but numerous other folks had the same idea, so the beach was quickly scattered with photographers, families and young people still out from the night before. Post-sunrise we quickly headed for coffee then boarded the subway for another Busan adventure.
Our first stop was the United Nationals Memorial Cemetery in Korea (UNMCK) off the Daeyeon subway stop. The cemetery, statues, and memorabilia halls were impressive and the security was very serious about being quiet. (There were signs everywhere about being silent.) On the Memorial Wall, Pennsylvania had four walls of names of fallen soldiers and the United States had almost the entire structure. It was pretty shocking. We arrived shortly before 10am which was just in time for the UN flag raising ceremony. After walking around the UNMCK, we headed back to downtown Busan for coffee at Holly's Coffee and a movie (Avatar!!) The amazing weekend ended with a twist. We found a jimjilbang close to the subway station (our early morning train ticket meant we wanted to find a place somewhat close by). It was called Bally Aqua Land (in English!) so we were pretty confident they were foreigner-friendly. We were wrong. Immediately after entering, the receptionist quickly told us, "only Koreans here!" Back to Vesta we went... old faithful.
Thanks Busan for the memories, see you again soon.
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