Last weekend, I was finally able to travel to Busan. There were four of us, three of whom are from Kazakhstan so three of them spoke Russian amongst themselves while I was left confused half the time. Also among the three of us, I am an early riser, and I like to make plans and stick them, while my friends liked to say yes to my plans but they had trouble waking up in the morning to actually follow through on our plans.
On the first day, we reached Busan around 11:30 but our check-in time in our hotel was 4pm. So after getting lunch in Chinatown, which is conveniently located across the road from Busan Station, we went to see Busan Tower, which was closed because of Covid, and there were multiple temples where we took way too many pictures. Then we went to this really amazing café called Ground127 where I had one of the greatest croissant desserts to ever exist. Around 4 we finally went to our hotel and the plan was to rest for about an hour then we would head out and go to Gamcheon Cultural Village. We ended up not leaving until around 6:30 and we reached the village around 7:30 and by that time the village was closed. We had a solid list of places that we wanted to visit and knew that if we wanted to make it to all of them, so we ended staying in the village for around and taking some pictures before heading for dinner. Over dinner we planned on waking up around 8:30, getting breakfast in the hotel, and then we would break off into pairs where two of us will head towards Museum DAH while the others planned to go to the Running Man Activity center. But despite having like 6 alarms going off my friends didn’t get up until 11 and we weren’t able to leave our room until 12. We ended heading straight to the Museum instead of breaking off into two groups. There are definitely challenges to travelling in groups, whether it’s agreeing on places to eat or cooperating with timing, so on Saturday, we ended up breaking into two groups and eating in two different restaurants and meeting up again an hour later.
It was a great three-day trip and we were able to hit almost all of the places on our list, although I am still bitter about not being able to visit the Shinsegae Centum City Department Store which is registered in the Guinness World Records as the largest shopping complex in the world. I think the best advice would be to have a list of places you want to go to, because unlike Seoul Busan doesn’t really have that many tourist places. So if you know what you want to do and time it well enough you most likely be able to visit them all.
Here are the places we visited:
- Busan tower
- Gamcheon Cultural Village
- Mesuem DAH
- Haeundae Beach
- Blue Line park (located in Haeundae Beach)
- Songdo Beach (theres many thing in the beach like the suspension bridge, Air Cruise)
- Fish Market on Songdo beach
- Running Man

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