So, for those of you who aren't already in the know, this past weekend Dylan and I took a non-optional trip to Korea in order to be able to stay in Japan. Apparently, you can only get a tourist visa that lasts 90 days, but you can leave the country for a day and get a new one when you come back (you can only do this once though, since you can only be in Japan on a tourist visa for 180 days of a year).

Anyway, I decided that I'd update you all on our trip while Dylan and a friend get started on an all night run-through of Mario Galaxy. That's right. But it's in Japanese, so they can justify it as studying. The friend just bought a Nintendo Wii today. It's black and pretty and Dylan is quite jealous.

Anywho, back to Korea. Friday night, we bordered a ship from the bottom of Honshu. We were quite panicky about making it to the boat on time, since Dylan was on the last day of his visa, but we got there plenty early. The boat itself was pretty cool, since it was an overnight trip and you slept in a room that you were assigned with slightly sketchy, really small futons with between 5-31 other people (I'm sure that the 1st and deluxe class accommodations were nicer). There were also various restaurants, a small shop with the essentials and a large sized common lounge. We met a group of three Japanese guys, two of whom were VERY good at english, and one who understood it well, but refused to speak it. We ended up staying up late with them chatting it up, including asking them for ideas of what we should do in Busan, Korea.

First thing in the morning, we got up and got off the boat. At the suggestion of our friends, we headed towards Busan tower, but wandered around a shopping district on the way. Here, we realized that Korea is much more American than Japan. There was Guess, Calvin Klein, American Apparel, Krispy Kream Donuts, Baskin Robins, as well as a thousand other American shops that I'm forgetting. Pretty much every store was American in this five block area. Seriously. After we had satisfied our amazement at this fact, we made our way to the tower. There isn't too much to say about it, other than it was a tower. It was tall and on a hill (of course), so it had a pretty rocking view. There were the typical tourist things, like a shrine, a dragon statue, and pretty, pretty flowers. One cool thing about it was that there was a museum of world instruments, which we hung around in for quite a while and played with all sorts of cool instruments. On our way down the hill, we noticed a handy escalator going up it. Or it would have been handy if we had noticed it on the way up, instead of walking up a butt-load of stairs.

After our tower fun, we decided to check out Dave's Fish & Chips restaurant. Dylan had read about online the day before while doing a brief search of things to do and it sounded interesting to go to an authentic English fish and chips place while in Korea (Dave was from Manchester). So, we had an adventure with the subway (seriously, who names the station at one end of the line Jangsan and the one at the other end Yangsan?) and went in search of Dave. Turns out, Dave abandoned us. We followed the two sets of directions we had, but Dave and his restaurant were nowhere to be found. By this point, we were quite hungry, so we decided to eat at the first place that looked kinda appealing. We found decent looking Korean restaurant and went for it; we walked in, sat down, and figured out that we were supposed to x-off what we wanted on an order form. A densely packed order form written completely in Korean. Ok. The lady working very helpfully came up to us and motioned that we were, in fact, supposed to x-off what we wanted and left. Hey, interesting fact about Dylan and I: we don't speak or read Korean. Luckily, a man roughly our age walked in and sat down beside us. We had been considering just x-ing things off at random, but decided that might not be a good idea and asked him, rather hopefully, if he spoke English. He made the universal sign of "a little" and off we went (the Korean "a little" english is A LOT more than the Japanese "a little")! We ended up with very delicious Kimchi and equally delicious Bibim (?). Once we were all fed, we headed for the beach to hang out for the remaining hour we had before we had to head back to the boat. Again, not much to say (I sometimes get the impression that I use brackets to often or in the completely wrong way; I'm going to try to not use them for the rest of this entry). It was a beach. Took the subway back no problem, and got onto the boat no problem.

Two of the guys from the trip over were also on our boat back, so we spent a few hours with them and their roommate for the night, Joshua the Australian. He actually made us feel better about ourselves, since he had spent the last three months couch surfing and was headed back to Japan with $20 that he was planning on stretching to last him until his flight home sometime in December. Anyway, morning came, we left the boat and safely made it back home-sweet-Japan no prob.

We decided to take a longer way home that took us through the walking tunnel that connected Honshu and Kyushu, but it turns out that it was closed for cleaning. This made me very, very sad. But on our way to the tunnel, we were walking along the route of a marathon, so we were entertained watching them run their little hearts out. Classical Japanese moment: one of the runners saw us, smiled real big, and said, "Good morning!" Seriously, he was more interested in the two foreigners walking by than the marathon he was in the middle of running. And, since we are in Japan, there was a free bus to take people from one side of the tunnel to the other, via the bridge. We hung around the water after we got off the bus, had some sketchy food, and made our way home.

General impressions from our trip:
-Korea is much better with the whole English thing, as already mentioned.
-A LOT more white people. Seriously, we saw at least 50 or so. This is probably correlated with the last point.
-Again, much more influenced by North America, all the way down to driving on the right side of the road and their sense of fashion.
-Busan is a crazy big city - about 10 times the size Victoria.

If you made it all the way to here, congratulations and I'm impressed and thankful that you care this much! I think I may tend to ramble or give more detail than necessary, but I figure this might be nice for those who are feeling especially Dylan and Tammy deprived.