Weekend With Sohee

One of our first exploratory excursions we embarked on when we arrived in Korea was a trip to Busan. We booked a cheap hotel, our first love motel, and had an eventfully long ride down to the port city. For our last excursion we thought it would be fun to go full circle and head down to the same area and see how our experiences and the connections we had made here had changed us from the newbie expats we were two years ago.

This time we met our friend and co-worker Sohee and had her show us around since Busan is her town.

Busan is such a blast because it doesn't have just one city center like Daegu, instead it has many centers all with their own unique twist.  For this visit we were in the Nampo area.

We met Sohee at the Nampo subway stop Saturday early afternoon and started our adventure with shopping. We stopped by a few stores and then stopped for a snack for the best hoddeok in all of Busan.

 Shopping....

 Sohee and I

We waited in line for about ten minutes before we could have our own hoddeok.

Here they are being cooked in  A LOT of butter. It is fried dough with cinnamon and sugar on the inside. When it is finished they cut it open and shove a variety of seeds inside. 

Worth the wait

Here is a close up picture. You can see the seeds and cinnamon and sugar. DELICIOUS! 

After the tasty treat we walked around some more. Nick bought this awesome hat.  He'd been talking about trying to get a hat with Hangol on it for a while now, but oddly enough, those are difficult to find in the regular shopping areas. What's not difficult to find are hats with the F word on them, go figure.

It says handsome man, or flower guy. LOL

He also tried on this coat!  He actually tried on many others but this one was the only one that fit him. He's not a skinny Korean man. I loved it and thought it was worth the money. Nick's first comment was that Lon (his dad) would kill him if he wore it to church. We didn't get it but we had a great time shopping.

Next stop was bottomless sushi and sashimi! Nick has never tried sashimi until today. He always thought it would taste fishy, which is an abominable flavor for him, but it doesn't. He tried Fatty Tuna first and liked it so he had another.  They had another kind of sashimi that was right up his ally that was topped with beef, a little onion, and some sort of steak sauce. Not something I was familiar with but it was delicious!

Nick had just put the sashimi in his mouth!

Group photo!

Our next stop was dessert which happened to be macaroon ice cream. You get to pick the color of your macaroon and then the flavor Ice cream you want. I chose red with cookies and cream and Nick chose blue with mint.  His was better.

 Before

After

Dessert was delicious but wasn't as exciting as the activity that followed. We went to the fish market and checked out the many kinds of everything!

 There was so much water on the floor that my socks got wet!

 Huge crabs!

 Different kinds of clams.

 This lady picked up an Octopus for us! SO COOL!!!

A clam decided to escape from his tank. We tried to pick him up but we were stopped by the ajumma because the clams were super expensive and she didn't want anything to happen to it.

Later, Sohee took us down to Songdo beach right as the sun was going down. It was beautiful. In the water they had fake whales and dolphins that looked like they were jumping.

 You can see the dolphins back there

Sohee and I at the beach

 A cool picture of me and the lights

The bridge with color changing lights

The bridge takes you to a small island (called turtle island because it looks like a turtle) with statues of turtles and this man trying to reach the mermaid. 

 mermaid killing Nick

 Sohee riding a turtle

We had a great time at the beach and in Busan. We are so grateful that Sohee took us to some of her favorite shops and restaurants and that we didn't have a repeat of the snomit incident.  I guess the only sad thing is that they removed the caped frog that used to greet us upon our arrival.  Capped Frog, you will be missed. On the other hand, we had a blast and made some memories we will never forget.