Busan, Korea

Monday

When we stepped into the hotel in Gwangali, Grandma was waiting for us at the entrance. She didn’t expect to find us entering through the back door, so we caught her a bit by surprise. The last time I met with grandma in person was 20 years ago. Grandma was very excited. Apparently, she nagged the hotel employees to show them our hotel room. (You can do that?? That’s.. concerning…) She realized that it was a small city-facing room, and got them to upgrade us to a large ocean-facing room. 

While planning our trip to Korea, I had asked parents for help with arranging a visit to an ENT doctor in Korea, to get my sleep apnea and sinus looked at. As soon as we checked in and left our luggage with the front desk, she told us that we should hurry to the hospital and try to secure a walk-in visit with the ENT doctor.

On the way there, it started raining. We started feeling hungry for lunch, and looked for a galbitang restaurant. We couldn’t find any. Our taxi driver didn’t know either. So we went to a doeji gukbap place instead. There, I learned that grandma had never heard of doeji gukbap before. That’s stunning. Doeji gukbap is a Busan specialty, and Grandma has lived here for most of her life. But I guess she never tried “folk food”.  She seemed to have health concers by the pork meat in the stew. She fished them out all and left them on the table.

It was a very old restaurant, in a crumbling building where part of the ceiling is on a slope (like an alcove). Christine went to the bathroom and found that it was a squat toilet. Not terribly clean. But it’s okay, she can handle it. Until she closed the bathroom door. The bathroom had no working electricity. It was not possible to aim well in complete darkness. Then also she realized that it had run out of toilet paper.

We made it to the hospital and waited about an  hour but eventually they informed us that they couldn’t see walk-in patients. Grandma arranged to visit another day.

We returned to the hotel, and took off at 6:00pm to a Haeundae crab restaurant. Christine had shared that she was looking forward to eating lots of crab in Korea, so grandma got us the best place in town. Uncle came up with the idea of driving along the scenic drive of Dalmaji while we were on the way there. But it was too dark to see anything. And we were very sleepy at this point. We had been up since 3am local time, and it was 6pm now. We just begged to get to the restaurant. The restaurant was amazing and Christine enjoyed the crab. Then we went to sleep at 9pm.

On Tuesday, we walked around the beach, had lunch at Grandma’s, and took a nap. I tried to convey her that we didn’t need to travel like Koreans usually travel, jumping from landmark to landmark in a rush all the time. We prefer to take it slow and if we are going to miss something, we missed something and that’s fine. Grandma had a “infrared sleep chamber” type device that we tried out.