A while back Kuniko asked me about my work schedule – she had found a concert that she’d love to see with quite a few K-Pop artists. The tricky part was that the concert was in Korea, and it was on a Sunday.
The timing was not perfect but thanks to a slightly flexible schedule at my company I was able to take Monday off, making it easier to return to Japan in time for work on Tuesday. Kuniko bought the tickets and booked a hotel, and we were set!
So Sunday morning we got up early, caught a train to Sannomiya, and then the airport bus from there. It was a very rainy day, and there were reports of a typhoon approaching. It seemed like we’d be able to fly out before the typhoon hit, but whether we’d be able to make the return flight was still quite unclear. Exciting!
This time we flew on a new airline for us, a Korean LCC called Jeju Air. It was a bit of a bumpy flight but since we were only airborne for an hour or so, no big deal. The lady sitting on my right slept through the whole flight, while Kuniko on my left held my hand tight during the turbulence.
Back in Busan, we had no trouble getting around, since we had visited here just last spring. This was a big advantage, and we moved pretty smoothly through the transportation system, with only a few wrong turns.
Since we arrived in Busan in the late morning we had plenty of time to eat and explore before the evening concert. We started with a place serving mandu (Korean gyoza) and noodles. The restaurant was decorated (and felt like) someone’s home. We loved the mandu, and we had two kinds of noodles – one with soup and one without, both cold. Since the weather in Busan was clear and sunny the cold noodles were great.
After filling our stomachs we decided to go find our hotel. Called the Angel Hotel, it was not where our maps said it was, and we were ready to give up and call them before we finally found it a block away from where the address said it was. Maybe they had moved? The neighborhood around the hotel (in Seomyeon) was really lively, full of young people and eating places, and later we found the nightlife was going long after things shut down in our neighborhood back in Japan.
We checked in, and the clerk preferred using Japanese to English which was a little unusual but we were happy that we didn’t have to try to get through things in Korean. The hotel room itself was small with an interesting bathroom – the shower drained across the room, so you had to accept a river of water when you used the toilet. This was apparently by design, but it seemed a little strange.
I realized that I was starting to develop a small headache. Since we’d be rocking all night I figured I should nip it in the bud and went across the street to a convenience store to get some painkillers. Unfortunately I didn’t find any, so I asked the hotel clerk on the way back. She said that since it was Sunday most drugstores would be closed, but she offered me three Advil from her personal stash – that was very nice of her.
We dropped off our stuff and then headed to the concert. I wasn’t sure about taking the camera, and since we couldn’t read the tickets to see the ground rules, I left it behind. We still had our phones to take pictures. The concert was held at the Busan Sports Complex, in an interesting partially covered stadium. As we arrived we noticed how windy it was, probably due to the typhoon hitting Japan at about that time, and we started to realize we had no idea about where to go to enter. There were lots of different entrances, and you chose the entrance based on your ticket. The lines outside the venue were huge, with pretty much everyone having a big linguistic advantage over us.
We had some fried fish cake on a stick as a snack (a bit greasy but it did the trick), and then Kuniko navigated us to the correct entrance by asking staff while I held our place in various lines.
Despite paying a pretty reasonable price for our tickets, our seats were near the field level of the stadium. The stage was positioned in the center of the field, with long walkways in various directions so the artists could get closer to the fans. Still, we were pretty far from the action. But I learned later that the distance from the artists hardly mattered.
As usual I was a minority at the event, in two ways. First I was western, which I am pretty much used to living in Japan surrounded by Japanese people. But second, I was one of the few men at the concert. 95% of the fans were young women ready to scream at the sight of their K-Pop idols. But honestly once you get used to being the first kind of minority it usually isn’t that different being one of the second kind.
We walked around the stadium to kill some time (and stay warm) and we spotted some K-Pop stars doing an interview which made lots of people happy. We couldn’t find any open food stands inside the stadium so we would just have to wait until after the show to have dinner.
Our tickets had some things we could read and understand, and one of them was the time of 6:00 written in simple numerals. So we sat down in our seats to wait. At about 5:30 a band played one song, and then they were joined by a singer, and then they wrapped it up. At 6:00 they did the exact same thing – the same band came up and played the same song, and then the same singer joined them again. From 6:00 to 6:30 they showed a K-Pop awards show interview program on the big screen, and every time a familiar face showed up the crowd of 15,000+ would scream. We sat and shivered in the cold wind and waited patiently. At 6:30 again the band came up and played the same song and was joined by the same singer. I was starting to think that I could sing the song myself I had heard it so many times.
At about 6:45 something interesting happened. There was a mass of security staff in yellow jackets, and they swarmed one area of the stage. They turned on some field lights and there were some announcements (that of course we couldn’t understand). There was some chaos and confusion, and then the show started promptly at 7:00 pm.
Later Kuniko read online that there was a bomb threat called in and apparently that was why the security showed up. We sat up in the stands completely oblivious to the possibility of a bomb going off. Oh, well – sometimes ignorance is bliss.
The concert was really enjoyable. They used two giant circular screens in the center of the stage that served as both curtains and also video screens to highlight the performances. Since we were in a huge stadium they also used the stadium lights, flames and fireworks to dramatic effect. Near the beginning of the show they fired off some big fireworks that stayed within the stadium without burning our cold little faces and Kuniko cheered so hard that I thought that if the concert stopped right then she would still be completely satisfied.
People around us occasionally screamed frantically and scanned the staging area between screaming fits. Some famous boy idol would walk by 100 yards away and fans around us would jump from their seats with binoculars screaming lustily. Some fans had bought mini-posters of their favorite idols and they would wave them frantically and perhaps hope that the idol would look up and see their sign and their face amongst the thousands of other fans doing the same thing and there would be some kind of connection and who knows what could happen?
I certainly had a good time.
With new groups rotating in every few songs we could experience a wide spectrum of K-Pop acts. Kuniko knew most of them, I knew several of them, and the fans knew all of them. We saw Wanna One, Blackpink, Ikon, and some others, and after a while Kuniko had her fill. We were cold out there and the winds blowing around the stadium made us even colder. We left before any of the superfans around us, and headed back to the neighborhood around our hotel.
Back in Seomyeon, we easily found a place to eat. First we hit a grilled pork place, and sat down to a nice warm dinner. We ordered lots of beer, and a combo dinner with three different cuts of pork and lots of side dishes. There was spicy greens, kimchi, cheese, garlic frying in oil, macaroni salad(?), steamed egg, and spicy miso paste to mix into anything that wasn’t spicy enough for your personal taste. The waitress cooked for us, and it was a bit odd to share a nice dinner with my wife and a total stranger who we couldn’t communicate with. The meat was quite good, and cooked to perfection by a professional while we watched, and we were just getting started.
Next we left the restaurant and headed out in search of two things: makkori and chijimi. We found both at a large restaurant tucked in behind a garden on the street. The sign outside clearly showed several kinds of chijimi (Korean savory pancakes) together with makkori (milky rice wine) and so we knew they’d be serving it inside. We got a table in a nicely decorated traditional atmosphere. Our waitress spoke English and answered our questions, and soon we had a big bucket of makkori (with ladle) to serve ourselves. The drink is not so strong but it goes really well with spicy food and we were pretty tipsy by the time we hit the bottom of the bucket. The chijimi we ordered was a half and half of kimchi flavor and traditional onion, but both sides were good. We’ve had so many different kinds of chijimi over the years that it is hard for me to figure out what is the traditional style. We were tempted to go for another bucket of makkori but made the smart move and left. Kuniko tried to pay the bill while thinking about the total in yen instead of won. Some confusion occurred but luckily we figured things out and hit the road.
Our last stop for the night was a convenience store for some drunken shopping, and we brought back more makkori (banana flavor) and Korean snacks to munch on in our room and wrap up our day.
Since we had almost the whole next day to ourselves with no solid plans, we once again focused on food. It started with a subway ride to a neighborhood that had a mandu place that opened at 9 am for service. Korean dumplings for breakfast, oh yeah!
First, we couldn’t find the place using our maps, and we almost gave up to go back into town. Every sign was in Hangul so it took a long time to scan each board to find the place. We asked an old fisherman guy who gestured in the distant direction but I read from his body language that it wasn’t a “The restaurant is over there” but instead “Go that way for all I care”.
Luckily, as we walked around we passed a delivery driver making rounds, and he was right next to me so I showed him the Korean name of the restaurant on my phone. He thought a bit and then pointed us in the correct directions using gestures. We were close by, and after a right and a left we found the place. It was a restaurant with a stand out front, and it was selling mandu to go, but they also had two tables inside. Run by an older husband and wife, they had printouts of a TV show that had featured the shop sometime in the past, and we sat down under the proudly displayed printouts and checked the menu. Kuniko had already translated the menu for us so we knew what to order.
We had 12 grilled mandu, 10 steamed mandu, and 10 steamed kimchi mandu. The lady seemed a little unsure whether we could eat it all but we were up to the task. Good dumplings, and plenty of them! It was a great start to our day.
The meal was all the better because of the hidden away atmosphere, no English in sight, and the odd time in the morning. We were really satisfied to seek out and find this place without using GPS or English.
The rest of the day we walked around the areas of Busan that had the best foods, covering some of the same territory that we did on our previous visit. We went up into the huge Lotte Department Store to track down some character goods shop that Kuniko wanted to visit, bought souvenirs at a convenience store and witnessed two Americans going through an ugly fight (and possible divorce?) loudly in English among the startled Korean customers.
We ate on the street – oden served on sticks in a chili pepper broth (we didn’t eat the insects on sale there, however), tempura fried kimpa (Korean nori roll), and dokku, a fried sweet pancake/donut sprinkled liberally with nuts and honey.
There was a stop for coffee and contemplation, at the oddly named Angel-in-us Cafe.
From there it was back to the airport to kill a little time there and relax. We checked in, and then had a mango shaved ice with salted cream cheese and ice cream (something we really liked from last trip) and then after security we drank beers from the convenience store and snacked on fried nori bites, and waited for our slightly delayed return flight. It turns out we completely avoided the typhoon.
The return flight was smooth, and we even sat next to the same woman we sat with on the way to Korea. She said she was visiting friends, and I thought it was an interesting coincidence.
The airport was busy when we got back to Kansai, with long bus lines going back into town. I guess tourism is really increasing in our area these days. Later we found the typhoon was quite strong and made a direct hit – there were damaged trees and buildings around my workplace the next day. Glad we missed it!
It was a busy couple of days but we really enjoyed the trip. Once in a while it is good to do something out of the ordinary and spontaneous.
