on Busan

It is something of a guidebook cliche to use a phrase like "in order to understand ________ (insert country), you must visit ___________." Usually this sentence refers to some sort of ancient cultural site that is supposed to offer some insight into something resembling "national character". If you embark on such a visit, you usually see some old things, and... lots of tourists. So here is my risky preamble- if you want to understand Korea, you must visit Busan.

Busan is Korea's second city, a phrase that for me conjures up London-Birmingham/Manchester or Paris-Lyon/Marseille. In other words, leaving the rather glamourous capital for a pleasant provincial city that makes for a very pleasant weekend break. This is what I thought about Busan, and what I would guess many foreigners think as they board the KTX in Seoul station (more on this later). To imagine Busan this way is madly incorrect. Busan is a city of 3.5 million people- the city itself, not the suburbs and exurbs and whatever burbs have been created in America recently. 3.5 million- that is around the population of Berlin. Not exactly a place you can get to know in a weekend.

So Busan is bigger than I think most people expect. Why does it hold the key to understanding Korea? You'll note I said you must visit Busan to understand Korea. I mean to ponderously include several aspects of the visit, including the departure from Seoul, in order to reflect on Korea. It starts with the aforementioned train journey. Bear with me. Leaving my home in Seoul, which is relatively central and home to such multinational corporations as Yahoo! and AIG, it takes just under an hour by subway to get to Seoul station. One hour! This is not due to poor connectivity or a lousy subway system; the subway is modern and efficient, and most crucially, frequent and on time. It is due solely to the scale of Seoul. Koreans built this megacity from ruins 50 years ago, and now depending on which statistics you use, it is perhaps the 4th largest urban area in the world. And Seoul connects to Busan by the aforementioned KTX, the 300 k.p.h. train that puts you in the far corner of the peninsula in just 3 hours. Seoul has a rather cheesy slogan you can find in many parts of the city- Hi Seoul! Soul of Asia. I think a better slogan would be Korea: ruthlessly modernizing. But perhaps not everyone would find that so whimsical and positive.

Jenny and I arrived in Busan and I was informed our resort was about 40 minutes away by bus. This was my first wake up call that I would need to reassess what "Korea's second city" meant. We arrived at a 32 story gorgeous resort that had sweeping views of Busan's famous bridge, and... the other high rise apartments in the area, even newer than our resort and some positively dwarfing our building. Jenny (who is from Busan, for those few who didn't know) casually mentioned that the entire resort/apartment community didn't exist when she was young, that it had sprung up more or less in the last 10 years or so.

Imagine, all this was flat 20 years ago! Korea's ability to construct, and construct quickly, is astonishing. People who live in just a few places on earth- Shanghai for one, can fully grasp what it means that your city/country has COMPLETELY changed in the past 30-40 years.

Here is some trivia for all New York loving Yanks (my hand is in the air!). Where is the world's largest department store? You must have sensibly guessed Busan, which is the right answer. Macy's, an entire CITY BLOCK, has been eclipsed by a department store that I would say few outside of Korea have even heard of.

Busan is of course a port city, and in fact its shipbuilding was one of the early engines of Korean economic growth. I have visited some big ports like Barcelona and San Francisco, but the scale of activity in Busan was shocking. Dozens of boats moved through the near harbour. However, the harbour also proved the impetus for the realization that Korea is not all modern, modern, modern! There were a huge number of moderately sized, what I would assume were local, fishing boats. Giant container boats and smaller local moving through the same (relatively) small area made for a stark contrast.

The local fishing boats make a good jumping off point to consider some other reasons why understanding Busan is so essential to understanding Korea. For all its sweeping modernity, Korea has another side. We went to the wild Busan fish market, where perhaps every living thing found in the ocean is for sale to eat. I saw a woman wrestling with an octopus latching onto everything possible, including her, to avoid being gutted while still living (the woman one, as anyone who has come across an ajumma knew already). We passed by this meat:

Some may have guessed- that is shark meat. The bloody severed shark heads, far from being discreetly discarded, are about 6 inches in front of my feet as I take this picture. I'll spare you the "Jaws" esque photograph this time. Traditional markets have become so in vogue, and in many places like New York and London, so upscale that people flock to them to gape and sample as much as do any real purchasing. Not so in Busan, where this market has probably always been famous and will continue to be for simply offering what people expect: a huge variety of seafood freshly caught.

Not only that, but you can find restaurants in Busan that allow you to pick your (living) catch, and they slice it up for you to eat, sashimi style. I think some sort of health and safety regulations would scupper an idea like that in America or Britain, but it has no doubt been done very well for years here and they will continue in this way. So Busan, and indeed Seoul, provide some glimpses of traditional Korea that perhaps cities like London and New York no longer offer when thinking about England and America.

And all of this restless modernity I mentioned earlier is not exactly a finished product, either. Busan has only three subway lines, shocking for a city of that size in Europe or Japan/Korea, although geography plays a part in that, as Busan sprawls along a meandering coastline. And (slightly off topic) Seoul is without a direct rail link between the main international airport and the city center- normal for us yanks, but very poor form pretty much anywhere else on the planet, especially considering Incheon (Seoul) airport was recently named the world's best. So a weekend excursion between Seoul and Busan offers the best and worst of modern Korea- efficient subway snarled by an inhumanely large scale city, ultramodern rail travel, modern high rise apartments, traditional markets, an "anything goes" food culture that would certainly make many westerners squirm... and much more I'm sure.