After a 3 and an half hour
flight that I spent sleeping, finally WELCOME TO BUSAN!
The Busan Gimhae airport was very
crowded on that Wednesday morning, with hundreds or even thousands of tourists
from many parts of the world coming. If it was allowed, I wish I could took the
picture of the immigration situation just to let you know how crowded it was. After we done with the immigration process, we quickly collect our
baggage and decided to grab some coffee and doughnut to escape the ocean of
people.
I showed the driver our
hotel name with the address and he nodded excitedly showing his understanding.
He let us get on the taxi first then helped us to put all the luggages and
wheelchair into the compartment. Throughout the journey to the hotel, the
ahjussi driver was super nice! He was very friendly despite of the language
barrier between us. He even tried hard to communicate with me by using LINE
translator! I really appreciate his effort, it indicates that he is trying to
improve his service, especially with foreigner.
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| The friendly jumbo taxi ahjussi's namecard :) |
Even though the fare is
more expensive, I think when we travel to South Korea with more people or more
luggages, Jumbo taxi is a good choice. It has the pilot seats that give you
extra comfort (it felt like we were riding our own private car :)) and in my
opinion from several jumbo taxis service that we use during the trip, the
driver was friendlier and helpful than the general taxi's driver (no offense!).
We arrived at Crown Harbor
Hotel around 30-45 minutes later and it was still 9 AM. Tired grandparents
insisted to enter the hotel room by that hour which was impossible as it was
too early and no empty room available. If I was only travelling with my mom, we will
definitely leave our baggage in the receptionist and start our city
exploration. However, as the mission is to accompany grandparents, we buried
our desire and wait patiently in the hotel’s lobby haha. After 1.5 hours
waiting in the lobby, finally we got one room available. We went to the room
and took a rest for a while.
Approaching lunch hour,
everyone’s tummy was growling, but refused to eat out. So this nice grandchild
willingly go out around the hotel area to find something to eat. I just walked
around the hotel once and found a little shop called Hansot. They sell the food
in bento style: rice, dishes and side dish. With a considerably cheap price,
the taste was really good! It became my picky grandma’s favourite and she kept
on asking for Hansot’s dishes the days after.
We finally went out in the
afternoon to Yongdusan Park, a ₩3,500 5-minutes drive tourist destination from
our hotel. Just right after we got off from the taxi and started to walk
towards the entrance, gosh… it was raining! Started with a small rain and
gradually became quite hard rain. We quickly opened the umbrella, used the
raincoat, and rushed to find a shelter. I felt so sorry for grandpa and grandma
as they were freezing, but there was nothing I could do as we didn’t even cross over the
entrance... It was so pity I couldn't explore the inside part of Yongdusan park.
Once the rain started to slow down, we rushed to find taxi to back
to the hotel with the help of a super helpful shopkeeper. The first day in
Busan totally didn’t welcome us :’) I was only consoled by a beautiful cherry
blossom tree that I see there hahaha. Super pretty! My very first picture with cherry blossom tree :)
In the night, the sky was
crystal grey with no signal of rain. So my mom and I went for a night stroll and found
our self ended up in Lotte Department store. The department store was HUGE with 3 buildings and 13 stories, with connecting floors from one building to other 2 buildings. You
can indulge yourself with the variety of clothes, accessories, cosmetics and
stuff sold inside the dept store, but make sure to spare time to go to the 13th
floor, the observatory deck! We can see Busan scenery from top and it's FREE! :)
The observatory dock also got a coffee shop called Angelin-Us
Coffee. I bet it will be super nice to chill out in that coffee shop and enjoy
the sunset with the view of Busan. With a cup of hot coffee. Ugh. What a perfect scene. But this time I will just took endless pictures haha. Finished with taking pics on the deck and finished with the extra strong and cold wind, we decided to went back into inside the building and found some cute places to pose.
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| Mandatory LINE store pics in Korea |
Before we went out from
Lotte, something red was drawing my attention. What was that? It was… STRAWBERRY!
In a blink of an eye I queued in the cashier and put the first strawberry in my mouth. I quickly realized that it was not the same with strawberry in my country. It was a huge sweet Korean strawberry! I’ve been wanting to try Japanese or Korean
strawberry that was famous for the huge size and delightful taste, and finally
I could tick one of my to-do-list eheheh! Make sure to have one when you are in
Korea! The original price was ₩11,000, but I bought it during the closing time
sale (around 8:30 PM up) so I got the discounted price of ₩8,000.
The sweetness of strawberry
really made my day after the rainy gloomy first day in Busan. Perhaps it was a sign that the next
day would be a better day? Figure it out in the next post, day two of Busan! We'll be heading to a cherry blossom festival! See you xx
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