Our day began in Nampodong, which is a relatively trendy shopping area. We went to a bakery called Paris Baguette for breakfast. (There are pictures, but I forgot to upload them. Don't worry, we went there the following day, so there will be pictures next time). After that, we did a little bit of shopping.
The weather was still cloudy, windy and cold, but at least it wasn't raining this time!
Both Cinnamon and this guy were very happy about that! But I suspect that guy would've been happy regardless of the weather.
We walked through this market area made up of tons of little shops and street vendors selling everything from clothing and accessories to food and toiletries. It wasn't too busy because we went relatively early in the day when some places were still opening up shop. But while we were walking, we actually saw a few peeks of sunlight, which was pretty welcome after the past few days. During our time there, Ashley bought some sunglasses and a t-shirt, and Cinnamon bought a very sought-after CD of a popular Korean girl group called 2NE1. Their CDs had always been sold out wherever we went--even in Japan! For those of you interested, here's one of their videos:
Once we had made our purchases, we walked over to Busan Tower.
It's pretty high up just walking up to it, so we had to take a good 5 or 6 escalators to get to it. They had a nice little garden area out in front, which probably would have looked prettier in any season but winter.
For some reason, there was this big... gas mask nearby. Not quite sure what the significance of it was, but we took our picture with it nonetheless. Why pass up such a unique opportunity?
Nearby was this huge gong. Ashley tells us they ring it 108 times for the new year. Why 108? None of us have the answer, sorry.
There was also a pretty nifty dragon statue at the bottom of the tower. As usual, we didn't actually go up the tower because we're cheap. How many towers have we passed up now? I think this makes five.
After touring the area around the tower, we made our way back to the center of Nampodong and went to pick up a little snack before doing some more shopping. Ashley thought we should try something called "hoddeok", which she described as a kind of fried pancake filled with cinnamon sugar. It sounded pretty appealing (and the fact that it was hot was pretty appealing, too), so we sought out a vendor and found one with little problem.
We got in line with the seven or so other people who were waiting while they made them. And this lady (who was working with the two other ladies running this whole operation) decided she needed to play "line moderator" and kept pushing me out of the way of... absolutely nothing. She just kept pushing me to move left for no apparent reason. She did this twice! I was pretty ticked off at her. There was no reason for her to be so forceful about it.
Cinnamon was kind enough to take a picture of her so you wouldn't all think I was crazy or something. She looks like a mean lady, doesn't she?
After she stopped shoving me out of the way, I was able to enjoy the "entertainment" coming from the building next to us. I have no idea what this place actually was, but there were two girls standing out on the balcony dancing. One of them didn't look like she was really into it at all, and I can't imagine they weren't cold standing out there in their miniskirts!
But finally, we got our hoddeok!
Ashley tells us they prepared these a different way than what she's used to. Once it was finished frying, they broke it open and sprinkled in a mixture of cinnamon sugar and pumpkin seeds. Normally they don't do anything to it after frying. I thought it was still pretty tasty, but Cinnamon was less than impressed with hers. She didn't get much in the way of cinnamon sugar, so hers just had a somewhat greasy, fried dough taste. That's unfortunate.
We did a little more shopping in the area before we decided to head to Haeundae (Hay-un-day) to see this "Swiss Family Robinson" bridge that Ashley had told us about. It was at Haeundae Beach, which as you may have predicted, was cold and windy. The problem with traveling in the winter is that when I'm doing things outside in 40-something degree weather (with a windchill in the 30s), I'm reluctant to take my camera out to snap pictures because my hands are much happier in my pockets where they're somewhat shielded from the elements. So all the pictures in this post were taken by Cinnamon. Including these last two:
Here we are at the beach! We're on a little boardwalk overlooking the water, and about halfway to this infamous bridge.
And there it is! It was a wooden swinging bridge, which was kind of fun to walk across.
This concludes the post of pictures I swiped from Cinnamon. The next post will be all my pictures, and will include more shots of this beach, which was actually quite pretty. And it will finish up our last full day in Korea. Stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment