Two quick trips to Busan
Old friends and a family vacation in Korea's second city.
1.
BUSAN, South Korea — In the past month I’ve been to South Korea’s second city twice. The first trip was to see an old friend who is about to become a dad. For that journey, I took the KTX bullet train, which runs up to 200 miles an hour, and cuts from the northwest corner to the southeast edge of the peninsula in less than three hours. A good way to travel — quiet and clean and the scenery passes by in that peaceful, rolling way special to trains.
B. lives a short walk from Haeundae Beach, Korea’s busiest and most-famous stretch of sand. I met him and another old friend, S., posted up on the far end away from the flocks of parasols and the buoy-marked section of water that they were calling the Pee Zone. We spent the day swimming far from that zone — but only with a flotation device or we got whistled at — throwing the football, catching up, and sipping on canned highballs from the nearby convenience store.
It’s hard to overstate how good it is to have old pals in a foreign country. We’ve all known each other a long time and living in Asia has knitted us together. The brotherhood of life as foreigners. The conversation easily picked up familiar rhythms.
At the end of the afternoon, we walked the 10 minutes or so back to B.’s place to get cleaned up and I gave him his Dad present — a bottle of Wild Turkey that came in a boxed set with two nice glasses. Chuseok — Korean Thanksgiving — is coming up in September and the stores are full of gift sets like these. And for some reason E-Mart Traders has been stocking a bunch of American whiskey brands for good prices. That’s new from the last time I lived here. The point with the gift, and this visit, was to reassure him that he was going to be a great dad, that I’d survived these three past years as a father in my 40s and if I could do it, so could he.
We went back out and ate Korean barbecue and kept the drinks flowing at Thursday Party until it got late enough. I don’t have any truly useful advice to give about how to do a good job as a father. I’m sure I’ll hear what Jia thinks about how I did when I’m too old to do much about it. I mentioned that I was skeptical when a few people threw out the line that their relationship with their child was the greatest love of their life. I was especially dubious in those early, sleep-deprived months, when there was a lot of crying and we were on our own in the middle of a pandemic. Now I know they were right, but it took some time to get there.
In the morning, to change the oil, as B. has always put it, we hiked a forest path that ran parallel to the coast until we came to what we called the Mountain Gym. Set off from the path in a small clearing were bars for pullups and pushups, the bodyweight squat and press machines you see everywhere, a few plastic dumbbells, a share towel that we dared each other to smell, and a crude bench with some rusting weights on a barbell. These gyms are common, but you really only see older folks using them. One day we might no longer be doing pullups on the bars, but instead swinging our hips on the side-to-side machine and spinning the captain’s wheel like the other gray hairs around here. We tried to enjoy it.
The path we exercised next to led to a tourist train that skirted the ocean. The family who stumbled upon three, shirtless, sweating white guys were even more surprised when they asked for directions to the train and were answered in Korean. Between my two friends they have well over 30 years in-country and speak much better Korean than I do.
They’ve both found well-earning careers and seem to feel that living in Korea has been a good move. It’s not without its drawbacks, though. For one, we all deal with a general sense of guilt for not being closer to our aging parents, which is one of the true costs of living internationally. Even if we’re only a day’s journey away from anywhere and there are families on both sides to consider now.
We admired the views from the several lookouts on the way back to the place. Ever since I lived in California as a young man looking out the big water has been edifying. That’s probably because I grew up in a place that couldn’t be more landlocked. The closest ocean is about 1,000 miles from my hometown. I didn’t see the sea until I was 14. The water was calm and unusually clear that day. Like I always do when I’m moved by a view, I started wondering if we could live here.
I love to visit a country’s second city. You get a feel for the country that’s deeper than what the largest, most well-known city offers. Take Barcelona, or Los Angeles, or Beijing as examples. Busan has a character of its own that’s distinctly Korean but feels much different than Seoul. Less urban. Less self-serious. More coastal and laid-back.
On the main strip running perpendicular to the boardwalk, we found a place that served pizza, Texas barbecue, and Mexican food. The general rule is if a restaurant is doing all the things they are probably doing none of them well. But the barbacoa, pollo, and birria with consommé tacos tasted even better because of the setting. Add good street tacos to the list of things I never thought I’d be eating in Korea when I first came here in 2006, when there were so few Western food options you were lucky if you had a Subway sandwich shop in your town.
We spent another afternoon at the beach, the huge apartment towers giving everything a feel of opulence. They weren’t there the first time I came to this city on a visa run to Japan in 2007. On that trip, I had taken the overnight bus from Jeonju and I stayed up all night wandering around until the ferry left for Fukuoka in the morning then rode the Shinkansen — Japan’s version of the KTX — to Osaka. At the time, Haeundae was busy but not built up with shining glass skyscrapers. Now these 100-story LCT buildings gleam in the sun and are large even by Korean standards. Now you can get tacos and craft beer and shots of mescal and the area feels more like Korea’s Waikiki all the time.
This trip ended with a subpar meal of shellfish barbecue — why put shredded cheese on grilled clams? — and more old friends joining us. I knew B. couldn’t really know what it would be like when he saw his daughter for the first time. But I was happy that he was going through this new phase of life. We’re the type of people who like to experience life. We’ve traveled. We’ve lived in foreign countries. Why not have the ultimate experience of raising a child?
I left at noon the next day and about six hours later I was back in Ilsan, already missing the ocean.
2.
Two weeks later, Nammin, Jia, halmoni (Jia’s grandmother), and I loaded the Mohave with our beach gear and braved the roads at 6 a.m. to visit Nammin’s sister and her family, who moved to Busan three months ago. Our route mercifully took us around the east side of Seoul, avoiding the worst of the megalopolis’s traffic. We drove along the north bank of the Han River for a distance, a stretch with a dramatic vista — wide water and green mountains — before turning south.
Rest stops are a highlight of any car or bus trip here. The small malls often have a food court, coffee shops, a convenience store, a gas station and street-stall-style vendors selling roasted potatoes, tater tot corn dogs, and a bunch of other food that isn’t good for you but is great for a road trip. We hit one about halfway, near Chungju, picking up milk tea and red bean pastries, then cruised down the rest of the way to the coastal district of Ilgwang, arriving in less than five hours.
The remnants of a typhoon left the sky unsettled. Clouds drifted through and collided. The rain meant no beach that day. We instead went to a seafood kalguksu restaurant made famous for serving the noodle soup in 31-centimeter diameter bowls. The broth was clear and the shellfish tasted of clean ocean brine.
Nammin’s brother-in-law and nephew wanted to take surf lessons, so the next day we went one beach down to Songjeong, deemed the “birthplace of Korean surfing.” A hardcore international surfer might scoff at this: the conventional wisdom has long been there are no waves in Korea. I used to think that, too.
I’ve been proven wrong before. See also: The Rockaways. No one told me that you can take the A Train from Brooklyn to a decent, fun surf break before I lived in New York City. But you can, and I did, to my surprise.
So I figured I’d try. At Songjeong, the beach is separated into two areas, one for swimming and one for surfing that rapidly filled with groups taking lessons. But there were waves. Knee-high at a beach break. Don’t know where they came from. Japan to the east blocks any real swell. Nothing great, but still rideable.
I went to one of several surf shops — this one was called Surfholic (someone should count how many businesses and brands in Korea have “holic” as a suffix) — to rent a board, leash, and wetsuit for 30,000 Korean won ($22) for the day. The guys behind the counter, who had already perfected the chilled-out vibe of surfshop workers that’s universal across the globe, said I could just find the stack of boards down on the beach with the Surfholic logo on them and grab one. I suited up and picked up a 9-foot foamie on the honor system. The kind of thing that you can do in a society where people don’t commit petty theft.
I paddled out into the most crowded lineup I’ve ever experienced. A solid bunker of softtop boards and wetsuited Koreans. Most of the crowd was just floating in the whitewater. Many of them were so close to shore that they were standing next to their boards, bobbing in the shallow water as they waited for their surf instructor to give them a push. Only a few were actually competing for the waves.
The scene carried a high potential for a bad accident — people who not only weren’t familiar with the breakers, but weren’t sure how to get out of the way. I went out farther, and with each wave I went for I looked up and had nowhere to go.
Cutting that session short, I went back to the group and found B. had joined us, this time with his wife, who was carrying her pregnancy with strength and grace. She looked healthy, strong, and I felt good about what was happening with them. We went up the street for lunch at Ssup Burger. Korea has gotten adept at making scratch hamburgers and there are excellent examples all over the country. This was no exception, and with a great view of the ocean.
I hoped that the herd in the surf corral would thin out as the day went on, but nothing doing. B. and I threw the football again — this time with an onlooker who seemed to have never seen the pigskin fly. I tried to keep my spiral tight. We had baby gifts for the couple — little Tom’s shoes and Uniqlo onesies and it seemed like a lifetime ago that Jia was that small.
We had her at the peak of the pandemic in Lakewood, Colorado, in 2021, then moved to another town and another house and I started a new job and Nammin went back to work. Now Jia’s 3 and speaking Korean and we’re in South Korea and I have another new job. “It goes fast” is a platitude that everyone says about parenting and we had heard so many times, and there we were, saying it, too.
The afternoon wore on and I had all but given up on the crowd dispersing. Then, right at 6 p.m., the men in orange shirts started blowing their whistles at the people swimming, waving them into shore, and the guys at the surf shops ran down with their boards. The entire break, not just the pen, opened up to surfing and paddleboarders.
I know a golden-hour-free-for-all when I see one, so I paddled out again, this time far from the surf schoolers. In that moment I could have been anywhere. California on a poor wave day, the Rockaways on a slightly less bad day — anywhere with small waves and only a few surfers to share them with. My understanding is that the rules about who can do what and where end when the summer vacation period is over, kids go back to school, and the tourists go elsewhere. I can’t wait to find out if that’s true. I caught a couple of rides that failed to knock the long-accumulated rust all the way off.
The next day we went up to Jinha Beach in Ulsan, another area that’s trying to develop as a surf spot. That day we might as well have been at a lake. Once the fog burned off, Jia’s favorite part was playing in her uncle’s inflatable canoe on the calm water. Revelers roared past on jet skis and banana boats as a slight breeze pushed wind and kite surfers around. We walked down to the end of the swimming beach and found another bay where there were dozens of people laying on soft top surf boards, taking lessons even though the swell had disappeared. We started talking about the next time we could come back.
