Five Snapshots of Busan, South Korea

When your everyday person thinks of South Korea, what comes to mind is probably Seoul. Or kimchi, or Korean dramas, or Kim Yuna for that matter. But in terms of city names, Seoul would likely be at the top of the list. This is no surprise – Seoul is a major global metropolis, the capital and the biggest city of South Korea.

However, have you heard of Busan? As South Korea’s second largest city and located by the ocean, Busan is an important economic hub with the world’s fifth busiest seaport and the world’s biggest department store (the Shinsegae Centum City). It is especially known for its top-notch seafood and luxurious, sandy beaches.

As a tourist in Busan traveling from Seoul, I found Busan to be delightfully different and exotic in many ways, from the people to the food to the atmosphere. Here are a few moments from my time spent in Busan.

Say hello to Busan’s famous ssiat hotteok (seed-stuffed pancake)

Commonly sold by Busan’s street vendors, hotteok is nothing special in Korean street food cuisine. However, the vendor selling this particular hotteok had a queue of eager customers down the street! Chewy, crunchy, and stuffed with sunflower and pumpkin seeds and sugar, this treat had me wishing I’d bought a second (or a third… or fourth…).

Look at these colorful umbrellas!

At Haeundae Beach, one of the most famous beaches in Korea, one can rent a mat and simply relax under the shade of one of the many umbrellas. During the hot seasons, the shores can be overrun by beachgoers clad in bathing suits, frolicking in the blue waters and soaking up the summer sun. This is the setting of a famous South Korean disaster movie called Haeundae (Tidal Wave in English), where Busan is hit by a huge tsunami.

Something smells fishy around here…

Busan’s reigning symbol, Jagalchi Market is a huge fish market where fresh fish and seafood are sold daily. The products are so fresh, they’re still swimming around in the buckets! It’s an adventure to stroll through aisles of colorful, canopy-covered stalls, exploring the vast variety of seafood offered at this market. Speaking of seafood…

Say hello to my little friend…

Raw octopus. That’s right, the lady selling octopi chopped the tentacled legs of one unlucky, still-squirming fellow up into little pieces, divided the parts into cups, and gave it to us to sample. Just for the record, it’s very salty. Very salty, very chewy, and very… lively.

All aboard! This is Busan Station

This train station is of utmost importance in Korea’s transportation system. It is part of the Gyeongbu line, the most important railway line in the country that connects Seoul, located in the northern part of South Korea, to Busan, which is located in the south, in under 3 hours.

Although I only spent a few days in Busan, I left the city with many unforgettable experiences and blissful memories. The next time I fly to South Korea, stopping by Busan will definitely be on my itinerary.

All photographs in article courtesy of the author

Migrating East: The Growing Expatriate Population in China

Because our breadwinner is an international businessman, my family has moved countries many times. Most people think our migratory patters are odd; when looked alongside global trends, though, they make sense.

Ten years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when Eastern Europe began to welcome Western investment, my family and I moved to the Czech Republic. When the business world started buzzing about the growth of the Brazilian economic power, we’d already been living there for a year. When we arrived in China, though, we were late to the party.

The international community in Shanghai was nothing like what we’d encountered before. We saw Westerners, or waiguoren, almost everywhere we looked. (It was definitely still China, and things like squatty potties reminded us of it.) When we arrived in 2010, we were only five new members in an ex-pat community of more than 1,000; by 2013, the number had reached 173,000 people.

Foreigners living in China, at least according to HSBC, tend to love it. In its 2013 survey of over 7,000 global expatriates, China was found to be the best overall destination. Highlights included that those living in China were the only ones to report to enjoy a more active social life than in their previous country. Almost 75% of respondents with children considered China safer for them than other countries.

However, while these interviewed were glad about the additional benefits to their quality of life, it wasn’t usually a better social life or children’s safety that foreigners sought when they moved to the Middle Kingdom. Many companies send employees to the “Wild East” to open ground on new markets and opportunities. In Shanghai, an arena that seemed to be incredibly important was the car industry: it wasn’t a coincidence if the first three Americans you met who worked in Shanghai were all from Michigan.

In the last twenty-some years, the city has developed at a jaw-dropping speed.

Twenty years in Shanghai

From the omnipresent Starbucks to the newly opened Old Navy to Western-style restaurants like Element Fresh, it’s clear that the West is dominating this trend. There’s even a movie based on it: Shanghai Calling (2012), with its “strangers-in-a-strange-land” premise about an ambitious American attorney assigned to Shanghai. It may not be as funny to some, but I’d recommend watching it to learn a bit about Shanghai, China, and Western investment.

Either that, or hop on a plane and see it for yourself.

Unbelievably Vivid Photos of an Underwater City in China

An ancient city, known as Shi Cheng or Lion City, has been buried beneath the water for 53 years. Like many lost cities of the past, it was “rediscovered” and seem to be well-preserved. Lion City is now located about 85 to 131 feet beneath Qiandao Lake (千島湖), or, literally, A Lake of Thousand Island, a man-made lake located in Chun’an County, Zhejiang, China, formed since the completion of the Xinanjiang hydroelectric station. It could be a great location for your next adventure dive.

A Morning Swim in North Korea

I swim because I love the sense of freedom I feel in the water. This sensation of unboundedness, of unrestrained fluidity, is even more pronounced when at the water’s edge lies a fenced-in land of captivity. The Yalu River separates the hermit kingdom of North Korea from China, and it was in the Yalu that I swam, just upstream of the crane-sprouting Chinese city of Dandong, on a clear October morning.

Yalu River swimmers with North Korea on far shore

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)

As I spat into my goggles a few steps from the water, to my surprise, nine men and one woman walked down the embankment in their swimsuits, put on fins and high-tech hand paddles, and started to slide into the river. A few smiled at this stranger in trunks, and one of them, short and muscular, with a clutter of teeth and circular fire-cupping imprints across his back, signaled for me to get in the water next to him. He later told me his name was Yi Hong Fung.

Most of the swimmers gradually dispersed in the direction of the far shore, about 500 meters away. But Yi and I swam together, alternating between freestyle and breaststroke, occasionally testing each other’s speed. I felt light and fast, and probably could have quickly outdistanced him despite his paddles and fins (much of my youth was spent in competitive swimming), but this was not a race. And I didn’t know if the swimmers were going to pass the river’s midpoint, the official boundary, or veer back toward the Chinese shore.

Answer: We stroked all the way to the far bank and landed a bit downstream because of the current. Yi stood in the North Korean mud and warmed up in the sunlight. I needed the sun, too. You can imagine the water was cold, yes, but it was bearable because of our exertion, and to my surprise, it seemed clean—no litter, suds, turds or taste of diesel. We stood next to a four-meter-high fence of ragged netting held up by poles that looked like scavenged tree branches—North Korea’s protection against invading swimmers and escaping citizens.

North Korean shore of Yalu River at Dandong

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)

The riverbank was a gradual rise of swamp grass; twenty meters from where we’d landed there was a small white shack—a North Korean guard station. There were no visible gun-toting Democratic People’s Republic of Korea soldiers here, as there had been the day before at the upstream trickle of a Yalu branch at Tiger Mountain. There, Chinese minders and the DPRK personnel threatened gunfire at anyone trying to take a picture of the soldiers. Here, no one. Silence.

Yi and I had been the first of the group to reach the far shore; others smiled at me as they arrived. Their skin glowed with the orange color of the early sun. I punched Yi’s shoulder and said, “hun hao” (very good), to praise his strength. He made a similar gesture to acknowledge mine.

After we plodded through the mud for a while, I motioned to Yi for us to swim back to our starting point, now upriver. “Bu shi.” This meant no, and with a sweep of his hand he indicated that the current would be too strong, we’d have to aim for a downstream point. It was all part of his regular circuit, I supposed.

Here we are: Yi and I, planted in the shallows of arguably the least free country in the world, a fenced pen holding in millions through a combination of despotism, punishing violence, and enforced mind-control ideology.

Yi was free, free to do this whenever he wanted, although I guess he didn’t recognize the mockery he made, with every swim, of the hermit tyrant ruling the far shore. But Yi lives in China. The West would say he is not really free either, that he is a citizen of a country controlled by an illegitimate, information-suppressing party; a self-engendered corrupt network of pseudo-communists.

But on this morning, with Yi’s toothy smiles and exuberance, the simple freedom of swimming seemed the only concern of both of us.

As we swam back to the Chinese shore, Yi turned his head now and then to make sure I hadn’t been swept too far by the current. We sprinted the last 100 meters, perhaps racing, perhaps just trying to beat the current to our mark on the other side— a stretch of riverside stone steps where clothes were being washed by a group of women.

Yi and I shook hands on the steps. He seemed as energized as I was, with a robustness bordering on joy. “Xie xie,” I thanked him. He replied the same.

I walked about a kilometer up-river to where I’d left my clothes. I strolled slowly, to give myself more time to think about freedom.

Train crossing Yalu River to North Korea at Dandong

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)

Two Weeks in Kinmen, Taiwan

The summer before college, I traveled to Taiwan to teach English to children in rural areas. While this was partly (okay, mostly) an excuse to return to the amazing country of Taiwan after nearly 6 years, I was also excited to learn that I would be teaching on Kinmen (金門, literally “golden gate”), a small island situated between Taiwan and southern China.

There is no way I can name everything I loved about my experience on Kinmen: the celebrity-esque airstairs we descended after landing amidst heavy tropical winds; our tiny, blessedly air-conditioned sleeping quarters where we hid from the suffocating humid heat that evaded every corner of the island; the famous Taiwanese oyster omelet dish (蚵仔煎) concocted with freshly caught oysters – even the dreaded squat toilets, the occasional frog chilling in the bathrooms, the hairy spiders as big as my hand, and the broken drying machine that forced us to air-dry our laundry and thus wear smelly teaching uniforms.

Rainy, windy, and so wickedly humid my camera fogged up!

However, what was most memorable to me was the quiet history that lurked behind every piece of rubble, every blade of grass, and every drop of summer typhoon rain that landed on Kinmen. In my eyes, Kinmen was like a bubbling cauldron of time, history, and culture. Although initially a relatively tranquil area, Kinmen was transformed into a military base by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 during the Chinese civil war.

Even after the war, it was used largely for military purposes. In fact, my dad was stationed on Kinmen during his military service. Even today, one can see uniformed men roaming the streets, hauntingly silent military brothel-turned-museums, coastal artillery guns on full display, and abandoned houses riddled with gaping bullet holes.

And the streets! Peering down a single dusty, rustic street, I would see the typical Taiwanese convenience stores; modest, family-owned pawn shops filled with miscellanea; a desolate Shiseido boutique, and a classy, renovated Italian restaurant – lined up all in a row, like a strangely mismatched, yet charmingly fitting, Kinmen outfit.

A typical Kinmen street

On these streets, I watched a funeral procession march, belting out festive music and clad in white mourning clothes. To these streets, I snuck out with some friends past curfew to hop over our dorm’s brick wall and satisfy our midnight snack cravings at the 24/7 Family Mart. Through these streets, I biked in the daylight and in the darkness, daringly removing both hands from the handle bars and feeling the cool sea breeze ripple through my hair. From these streets, we drove our rickety, coughing van to the ocean’s rocky shore and gazed into the foggy horizon in amazement as the cityscape of Xiamen, China, loomed right before our eyes.

To me, Kinmen is a timeless and special place, riddled with intricate history and cultural mishmash. Although I only spent two weeks there, I hold dear all those precious memories and experiences, from the comfortably expected to the mind-blowing moments of culture shock. There is no doubt about it – one day, I will return.

All photos courtesy of the author.

Going on a Guide Tour? Think Again!

The Asian Tourists – that trope of visor-wearing, peace-sign-picture-taking, bus riding, leisuring group – are no more charming in Asia than they are anywhere else. Like pigeons, they’re generally passive and nice, until put into a setting where they have to fight for food – or perhaps souvenirs and middle-of-the-road picture spots. Led for seven days through the Kansai region in Japan on a guided tour, I learned about the industry that produces this particular type of irksome consumer, and why I will never go on a guided tour again.

In my trip with SuperValueTours, a professional and well-liked company, I saw the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and Kobe. We traveled by bullet train and bus, spending a substantial fraction of our daytimes in air-conditioned transit to and from tourist locations. As grandiose and historic were the sites of the Daibutsu Buddha statue, Kiyomizu temple, and Nijo Castle, we walked the path of drained, insipid uniformity.

It was the same in each location: our tour guide would lead us to an establish tori gate, sake brewery, or bamboo forest occupied with a host of tourists and middle-school students. We shuffle through the funneled walkway to observe, take pictures, and receive information through a guide or earpiece. At the end of the tour, we were given a small amount of time to “explore and relax” on our own, which meant looking at different souvenir stands selling identical post cards and plastic memorabilia.

Baaaaaaaah

The most shameless episode of my trip took place touring the Golden Pavilion, a temple in Kyoto covered in gold leaf. It was a spectacle to behold, as was the clamor of tourists trying to get a decent picture. On the side of the walkway, a stone pot was surrounded by vague idols and covered with coins. People gathered close to the fence, digging in their purses and pockets to throw money into the bowl. In my earpiece, the tour guide said, “Somebody once put that bowl there. A person started throwing coins, and other people followed. There is no meaning to it.”

For a business that is based on the “consumption of others,” the interchange of culture occurred on mostly superficial levels. There were few opportunities to speak with the people outside of an empowered-guest/disempowered-host dynamic, and our tour guide, though genuinely kind, was primarily concerned with repeating the facts of historic sites than providing her perspective as a Japanese citizen.

The tourist industry markets the commodity of a history already-written and dead. It provides luxury hotels, choice meals, mass produced souvenirs, and the ability to keep an absolute distance from the authenticity of a place. It might not mean anything to you or anyone else, but as long as you throw your money their way, they’ll gladly take it.

While I found the tourist industry problematic, I nonetheless enjoyed my time in Japan. The cherry blossom trees, clean streets, stylish young people, and ramen were all fantastic to be a part of. The bustling urban landscape is one of the most unique in the world. I would simply recommend travelers to take time to plan their own trip, with space to explore and get lost, rather than buying one already commodified and prepackaged.

My Bizarre First Night in Shanghai

“Your flight will leave in the morning. The desk opens back up at 6 a.m. Come back tomorrow,” said the attendant at the check-in counter. He looked back down at his computer, clearly not wanting to talk to me anymore. Someone missing his or her flight to elsewhere must have been a common occurrence for this employee, because he didn’t seem the least bit apologetic or concerned.

Defeated, I found a place to sit down in Pudong International Airport. I was going to Fuzhou for a few weeks before I started my summer study abroad program in Shanghai, but my flight from New York to Shanghai had been delayed, so I missed my 10:05 p.m. flight to Fuzhou. After an older man came to bring me my luggage, it finally hit me: I was alone in a foreign country with only my bags to keep me company.

Shanghai PVG – everything looks calmer at night

I felt miserable about my situation. I could make outgoing calls with my phone, but by the time I’d gone through immigration and customs, cleared things up with my airline, and changed my tickets for the next morning, it was roughly midnight, and no one was picking up my calls. I had no electrical adapter, so I couldn’t charge it, and it was running low on battery power. On top of everything else, I was exhausted from my long flight and couldn’t believe that my first night ever in China would be spent in an airport.

Frustrated and anxious, I pulled out my laptop in hopes of getting on the airport wi-fi, but since I didn’t have a Chinese phone number to receive the passcode, I had no access. At that point, I had no idea what to do with myself. Most of the people in my vicinity, also in transit and waiting their early-morning flights, had already started sleeping on the seats. Unable to do anything, I stared helplessly at my laptop screen.

It was then that a man (I’ll call him Airport Guy) sitting close by turned to me. “Do you have internet access? How did you get it?” he asked, in Chinese.

He was an older, average-looking Chinese man, maybe in his mid-to-late thirties, slightly balding and wearing glasses. In my flawed Mandarin, I told Airport Guy why I couldn’t get internet access. I expected him to go back to whatever he was doing, but his curiosity must’ve been piqued because he proceeded to ask me personal questions. When he found that I wasn’t Chinese but Korean-American, he became excited: he loved speaking English, and he started to tell me about his life in a mixture of Chinese and English. Airport Guy worked for a company that did business in Ghana, so he often traveled back and forth between the two countries. He was on his way back from Africa, but his flight to Xi’an was in the morning.

“Do you want to see my pictures of Ghana?” he eagerly asked. I was unbelievably tired and just wanted to be left alone, but to be polite, I agreed, expecting him to show me a few pictures. Little did I know, he presented his entire photo collection of his travels in Ghana and explain each one in detail to me.

After suffering through the slideshow, I got up and told him that I needed to go find a place to exchange my American cash for Chinese currency. That didn’t deter Airport Guy, though.

When Anna Met Airport Guy

“I’ll help you!” he exclaimed as he jumped up from his seat. Despite my insistence that I was fine, he put all of my things with his bags on a cart and guided me to the currency exchange machines. I was exasperated with this eccentric man, but he was friendly to me, so I didn’t have the heart to be rude and tell him to go away.

Then, the night took a strange turn. When I was done, he bought me food and water, even though I told him it was unnecessary. Continuing to carry my bags, he moved us to a location a bit farther away from the others: I eventually thanked him and started eating my first meal in China, a few tea eggs and a bottle of water.

“You look tired. Do you want to go to a hotel? We could get a room,” Airport Guy asked, while I was drinking.

At this question, I almost choked on my water, but I managed to muster out a “No”.

“Well, then you can sleep on my lap or my shoulder if you want to rest,” he replied, gesturing to his body.

In response, I quickly made up an excuse that I was too nervous to sleep: I wanted to be alert and awake when the ticketing counter opened up. In actuality, I would’ve loved to sleep a few hours, but with this creepy stranger who had my bags hostage beside me, I didn’t dare fall asleep.

Airport Guy began to pull out things from his luggage: he started playing some of the traditional Chinese musical instruments he had, right there in the middle of the airport, much to my shock. Undeterred by the glares aimed at him from the nearby people he woke up with his flute, he smiled as he played a song on each instrument, explaining the intricacies of each one.

Ok for a concert if you know what you’re getting into; not ok at an airport

“Is this guy for real?” I thought to myself, in complete disbelief at how weird he was.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more uncomfortable, Airport Guy proceeded to gift me the very instruments he’d played. I begged him not to do so – my luggage was too heavy, but he refused to take them back. I convinced him to give me two, instead of his whole collection; however, Airport Guy still wasn’t satisfied, so he gave me a wooden wall decoration from Ghana and key chains from an airport in Dubai. I didn’t want to accept his gifts, but he wouldn’t put them away. Unprepared for his generosity, I had absolutely nothing to present in return except for food: he got a bag of Quadratini, a can of tuna, sour cream & onion Pringles, and peach gummy rings, all he gleefully accepted.

“Oh, tonight has been like the song ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton. It’s been such a beautiful night,” Airport Guy beamed to me. Unfamiliar with this song at the time, I gave no response, but I still couldn’t help but feel that this man was in some way delusional: the night had not been wonderful or beautiful in any way.

Later, when Airport Guy and I finally parted ways for our respective flights, he insisted on taking a picture with me with such enthusiasm that a couple of people gathered around and stared at me, trying to figure out if I was someone important or famous. With my blood-shot eyes and dark eye circles behind my glasses, my wrinkled clothes, and greasy, unkempt hair under a baseball cap, I couldn’t have looked less like a celebrity, so their fascination quickly turned into bemusement at the man who was so passionately taking pictures with me.

In excellent disguise? Korean actress Jun Ji-Hyun mobbed at an airport

As soon as I got on my flight to Fuzhou and left Pudong International Airport, I passed out on the plane, finally free of Airport Guy. Though I was thankful to him for his kindness, I had been very uncomfortable (and creeped out) the entire night. Fortunately, later on in the summer, I got to experience far better nights in Shanghai, but I will always remember Airport Guy and the bizarre first night in China I spent with him.