Accidently Climbed a Mountain

20112023

Missing the opportunity to nap on the train, and with Laura feeling under the weather, we slept in till 10am!!!

I updated the blog, and slowly got ready to get a coffee and see if Laura thought she could make it through a day of touring, she was not. So we went back to the hotel and I went out to check out some castles and other various piles of rocks. I went to take the train to the Busan Castle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busanjinseong), but I went into the train station on the wrong side, and could not change directions without swiping out and subsequently having to pay to get back in, so I rode the train to the next station. This next station also did not let you change directions without paying, so I waited for the next train and went along to the next one, which did work. I eventually made my way there.

The fortress was built up during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, it was mostly dismantled in during the Japanese occupation of the early 20th century to build the city around it. Currently it is a park in the neighborhood with all kinds of public exercise equipment. In the middle there is a picture of the light pole, all of the lightpoles had speakers in them, piping smooth jazz all throughout the park. I did make emergency use of the public toilet here, and while it was sub-optimal, it was far from the worst public toilet I have ever had an unwelcome shit at.

I then decided to head to the Jeungsan Japanese Castle, which I believe was a part of the same fortress that the previously mentioned castle was, the placards here were only in Korean so I am unsure what it was all about.

We have been primarily using Googlemaps to get around, as it has the transit system, and addresses/names in English. We also have Kakaomap, which is a korean mapping app, that we can copy+paste the googlemaps address in Korean into, to get accurate walking directions to get there. And Kakaomaps knows every road around here. Kakaomap described the walk from one to the other as only being 1.4km and one set of stairs, and this was my route to get up there...

And here is the view from the top

My fitbit had it clocked at close to 3 miles (4.8km) and 65 floors of stairs. Which means up the hill was equivelant to the Little Si hike in Washington. I then also used Kakaomaps to get me home, which included a walk through a very hilly neighborhood, where public roadways (which were really walkways) were well labeled, but very intimidating from a Westerners perspective. These routes appear to be the only access for many of the residences up here, I cannot imagine how they get appliances into these homes.

I did make my way to a bus stop, and luckily had exact change, because I am sure they would not have made change for me, if I stuffed a 10,000KRW note in there, that would have gotten me just as far as the 1550KRW that the ride actually cost.

Laura was ready to go get food, and we decided on a grilled skewer place.

Those first pics are a fried mozzarella stick, which came with sweet and sour sauce, or an approximation of ranch, and then the plate of other skewers from left to right; pork skin, apricots, chicken thigh with leeks, chicken gizzard, chicken breast with leeks, and chicken thigh with ttoekboki. The grilled apricots stole the show, they were surprisingly meaty, so they were either incredible well seasoned, or google translate misnamed them and they were some pork part, but they were bomb.

After this meal I was again stil hungry so we went to a Korean style Chinese spot and got

Basically Jajangmyeon, which is the slightly darker and sweeter Korean take on Zhajiangmian. I wanted something more filling that straight meat, or light soups (I do love my carbs) so this fit the bill nicely.

On the 3 block walk home we snagged some fried pastries

The long knot was the least chewy, the small ball was very gummy, and the big ball was basically the small ball, but filled with the smalls balls volume worth of red bean paste. All of them are subtly sweet (which after the sweeter noodles meant they didnt taste all that sweet at all) and texturely interesting. We also got a different kind of sweet pastry, but those are set aside for the morning, so they will be in tomorrows write up.