Busan / Pusan Part Deux

A wonderful friend of mine (Jamie) suggested that instead of detailing every single incident that happened, I chronicle the meaningful things instead. I suppose that sounds easy enough, except that I find a lot of things meaningful and often have difficulty deciphering what is the MOST meaningful incident that has happened to me. At any rate, I need to continue my blog because I'm falling depressingly behind and I HAVE to catch up. Hopefully, by the end of this week, I'll be all caught up with my adventures. It's so cold outside that I want to lie in bed all day anyway, so I might as well be doing something productive other than watching my shows. On a side note, I just spent the last 10 minutes googling which word I should use: lie, lay, lain, or laid. Why? Because I care.
Day Two in Busan was just as amazing as Day One except that we were more rushed. We both agreed that staying another night in Busan would be ridiculous because we didn't have a room booked and we didn't want to spend any more money. So we bought a train ticket for 7:00 pm which meant we had about five hours to sight see. There were a lot of things on our list that we simply didn't have time for, so we narrowed it down to three places: Beomeosa Temple, the fish market (Busan has the largest fish market in all of Korea) and the art museum. Of course, the three places were on opposite ends of the Busan Subway, so we chose to go to the temple first and then would go wherever after that.
Temples are always peaceful, but are generally the same sort of thing. You ride some form of transportation up a mountain, get off said transportation, gasp at the beauty surrounding you, then hike up a bunch of stairs, go through a bunch of stereotypical "Asian" buildings and BAM. That's a temple for you. Needless to say, yes, the temple was beautiful and yes, I enjoyed myself. Case closed.

Beomeosa Temple

Posing

Jamie and I had toyed around with doing a temple stay but because it was so last minute, we weren't able to book any stays. I was extremely apprehensive about doing a temple stay because you wake up at 3:30 in the morning, do a bunch of chores, do 108 prostrations while putting beads on a piece of string, do some more various chores, eat "like a monk" and then go to bed around 10:00 pm at night, only to wake back up at 3:30 the next morning. The idea of a temple stay sounds awesome, but it consists of three of the things I hate most in this world: getting up early in the morning, doing chores and eating tiny, vegetarian portions. Perhaps some day I'll work up the courage to do a temple stay.

Prostrating

After visiting the temple, Jamie was intent on getting post cards for her friends and family back home. We figured that an art museum would have post cards, because, well, it's a museum and museums have gift shops. We took another expensive taxi to the art museum because it would have taken too long to take the subway. We got to the museum, looked around the gift shop (but didn't buy anything. Well, except for a muffin) and left. Going to an art museum, but not looking around goes against everything I stand for, but we simply didn't have enough time. After the museum, we went to Home Plus (or was it E-Mart?) and bought a couple things like stickers, a converter (that didn't work) and a little set of drawers for my makeup. We hopped back on the subway so we could catch our train on time.
We really almost missed our train. It was literally one of those movie moments where the characters are running through the station to catch their train. We ran through the train station and made it to our train seats, albeit slightly sweaty and very out of breath.
And that concludes Busan!
To sum up:

1. I love Busan.
2. I love Jamie.
3. I want to go back to Busan.

And that's about as introspective as I can get right now. Seoraksan wore me out.
More to come later! Next: Seoul!