Alright, it's been a couple of weeks. Now I have to remember Day 3...ah yes.
Busan.
I'd bought train tickets when I'd come into Seoul station for a train from Pyeongtaek to Busan for Saturday morning, snagging the last seats we could find together and get there by noon-ish. This had us leaving around 8am, so we met up at 7 and took a taxi. Pyeongtaek was foggy/misty, as I've come to know that much of Korea is. At least the country side has this issue.
No wonder it's the land of morning calm. You can't see whatever pissed you off in the morning. There's too much fog.
That's just a joke, and most of the cities have less fog. It was just strange for me.
So we met up early, had Dunkin' Donuts, grabbed some drinks and hit the train.
My brother and I chatted through most of the way there, sleeping occasionally. There was a jerk who stood in the aisle next to my seat with his phone going off in his ass pocket for 5 minutes. I wanted to hurt him.
The train trip lasted 4 hours, but we got to Busan safe and sound and saw a lot of hills and valleys out the window on the way there. I tried to use the bathroom once but it was occupied so I just went back to my seat.
Anyway, so we got to Busan around noon and Bill went about trying to contact his friend from Busan while Mariel and I chatted. I met Mariel through a writing website a few months before this and we've both been living in Asia for 4-5 years. I don't think Bill understood this, but it worked out okay anyway.
We waited there for a little while as Bill tried to contact his friend. Mariel started getting impatient to go, as was I, but I played the middle-ground. Bill finally got his friend on the phone and the guy had just gotten on the train to come out there. What I didn't realize at the time was that Bill's friend wasn't coming to the festival with us--he only wanted to show us around town, which we didn't have a lot of time for after waiting 2 hours. The guy comes back to Busan every weekend to hang with his family, so family stuff comes first. But all of that meant that Bill made his apologies to his friend and we headed to the station.
When we had arrived, we went to have lunch in China town, which was weird but cool. It turns out my friend couldn't read all of the menu on the wall in the tiny place we wound up, but their beef-bowl wasn't bad. She also wouldn't let Bill pay for things, which was a little strange to me. Well I mean of course, he's my brother, I let him pay if he wants to pay and try to pay him back when I can. But in Japan, too, if someone pays for dinner, you cover some later thing. Doling out cash in public just isn't what they do.
But whatever. I guess it was fine. Bill didn't complain much, keeping quiet with tooth pain most of the time. We took the subway, got off, went around, got on another one, got to some strange-sounding station, and went out to get to the bus depot. Once there we had to wait in a long line for bus tickets. Meanwhile, people went through the automated system to get tickets really quickly at computers nearby. Since none of us were really sure about the spelling or pronunciation of Jinju in Korean, we didn't want to risk it.
Nearby, a young woman started scream-whining loudly at some guy, who kept trying to quiet her down. This would never happen in Japan unless the woman was 1) drunk or 2) mentally disabled. It just isn't done in public. It seems like even bleeding to death is done with the utmost concern for disturbing others. Okay, that's a joke. I've never seen someone bleeding to death, and I'm at least going to train my kids to scream their heads off if someone physically assaults them. that's another story, though.
So this woman is screaming and the Korean people are half-looking, half-ignoring her. Of course, none of us knows what she's screaming about. She's just screaming. It wasn't the "He's going to kill me!" screaming from a horror movie; more like the "But I wanted the blue one!" screaming of an infant. that's what the tone said anyway.
Someone needed a spanking.
Anyway, so we got our tickets and got in the big-ass line for Jinju. An old man behind us grabbed Bill's terribly muscular bicep and said something in Korean. We stared for a second, trying to see if this was a happy comment or an angry one. Nothing gave us any info until Mariel said it must me happy--the old guy is proud of his culture and excited for foreigners to come and see something magical. We smiled and thanked him. Nothing happened after that to indicate anything different, so Mariel was probably right.
Not being able to read or speak was driving me nuts. Not so much on this day but throughout the trip.
The great thing about Korean bus travel is when it's busy, they bring in extra buses to take the extra load, so after they filled the first bus, they sent us a bunch of other people to the second one. Then we changed buses to another one. Then we were in business and 2 hours passed while we drove through the countryside and into traffic.
Bill slept a bit and looked pained at other times. Mariel and I talked about a bunch of stuff. then we saw the crowds of people and knew we were in the right place. When the bus stopped at the Jinju bus depot, if was something like 6PM or so. I think. I didn't have a watch. We walked toward the festival and tried to find a hotel. Seeing how much traffic there was, there was no way we were heading back to Busan at 9PM if we actually wanted to see anything. So we wandered near the festival and all the places were booked solid.
A few blocks away, there was a big sign for a love hotel. We walked toward it and through the parking lot, which was enclosed under the building with a dense garland of ropes hanging over the entrances so people couldn't see whose car was where from the street. This is a common thing with Japanese lover hotels, too. The parking lot was packed, though, so we walked onward. A little further down, there were a few smaller hotels. We went into one and asked if there was room for three. They tried really hard to be accomodating, but they weren't sure what we were. Obviously, they couldn't see the family resemblance. Well, whatever they thought, they still brought us an extra bed-roll (Japanese futon style...so the size of one human, roughly) and some sheets.We took it.
Having secured accommodation, we went back out to enjoy the festival.
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