The Jones' Korean Adventure

This past week we had three days off for summer vacation. Just to let you know - we have the best directors in the world!! They gave each teacher at our school $100 to spend on our vacation. So, with $200 in our pockets, and a smile on our faces, we decided to head down to Busan (a beach town on the south-east tip of Korea) for some fun in the sun. We took a 5 hour train ride, and went from rainy, over-cast weather to beautiful sunshine.

Here's Sam enjoying the view on Gwangalli Beach. The motel room that we found was one street over from the beach - awesome location!! The bridge in the background made us think of the Golden Gate bridge (wrong colour, but we felt like we were in Cali!).
This is one of the many little motels we looked at before settling on ours. This one smelled like smoke and beer, and was pretty sketchy. Needless to say, I convinced Sam we should keep looking! And we're so glad we did! Ours was a couple bucks more, but we had our own bathroom, a real bed, and air-conditioning in our room.
Here we are exploring the streets around Busan. This was our first night in town, and we were looking for dinner. We really wanted to find a dakgalbi place (really spicy chicken stir fry), and knew that the first Korean symbol in the word looked like a C+ with the number 27 under it. We wandered for an hour, and couldn't find a dakgalbi restaurant, so we finally settled on a Korean barbq joint, similar to a restaurant we enjoy at home in Osan. We went in, sat down, and the waitress came over to take our order. We pointed at "beef" in our book, and she pointed at a picture of beef on the wall and we nodded. Then she said some words and we thought we heard "sauce", so we nodded that yes, we would like sauce on our meat. Little did we know that she was actually saying something like, "Hi foreigners, would you like the most expensive meat we have in this restaurant?".

Our meal came, and we were both pretty disappointed with our cut of meat. I'd say it was 25% meat, and 75% fat...disgusting! We figured we had ordered the cheapest cut, so we just ate what we wanted, and finished off our "so-so" meal pretty quick. We headed for the door to pay our bill...figuring it would be about $12 to $20...the normal price at home. We were pretty shocked when we were charged $36 for fatty meat (we didn't even get rice with it!!). But, what could we do? We had already eaten, and didn't know the words for "you're ripping us off!". So we paid, and left, feeling completely scammed. (I know $36 doesn't sound that expensive when compared to North American prices, but you have to remember that we're used to paying $2 for a good lunch!). We did what any normal person would do, and drowned our sorrows in some Baskin Robbins icecream :0) But, don't worry - all of our meals at Busan were not complete gong-shows...the next day we ate at a chain that we eat at here in Osan. They had an English translation of their entire menu, so we were able to copy out a bunch of meals that looked awesome. Now, we have more then 2 options at that restaurant!
Here Sam and I are displaying our train tickets to Busan...the first we purchased on our own...we were proud! Here's the view on Gwagalli Beach...beautiful, eh! There was about 1.5 km of sand to walk on, so that was fun...we walked the whole thing a couple of times.