Last weekend we decided to go to Busan for a couple of days and go to the beach. We found a room in a hotel, listed as a standard double but with, we could see in the pictures online, a huge bed and some kind of couch thing that probably Mom would have liked because it looked like it took up a lot of space and no one would ever want to sit on it. The maximum occupancy for the room was two people. At that point four were planning on going, and we thought a) it looked like plenty of room for everyone and b) we would be able to get sneaky. The number of attendees would eventually swell to eight.

Busan is a port city in the southeast, of five beaches and around five million people. It’s built mostly of unadorned cement in a way that has a certain utilitarian charm, but my feelings about the city weren’t established until we got to Haeundae, one of the eastern beaches. The ocean always surprises me a little, like I knew I missed it but couldn’t quite put a memory together that captured it properly. The sky was a stony grey, wind stripped spray from the crests of waves, a gull wheeled and cried and made us, like humans before us for millennia, yearn for the winds of the endless open sea. Also it found and ate half a bag of chips and pooped a little. My Korean is not great, so I’m not exactly sure how the surf was classified, but I believe a reasonable translation would be “You will die if you swim here,” and there were lifeguards all along the beach that wouldn’t let us in the water.

We came to the hotel to drop off our bags. Diana, one of the relative strangers (to me) in the group at this point, and I went to try to check in, me because my name was on the reservation and Diana because she speaks Korean. We met a woman inside behind the reception desk, and a man standing in the lobby with a small towel around his neck. I found it hard to imagine the woman leaving the room that the reception desk was actually a small window into, somewhat below eye level so that you had to bend over to look straight into it. The combination of the odd window placement with the woman’s shrinking personality gave me a strong feeling of dealing with a very large snail. Towel man was very helpful and put our bags away for us even though it was before check-out time. We noticed that there was a sideish door into the lobby that would allow a quiet person to sneak to the stairs out of visual range of reception, and especially easily if the woman were to retreat a few feet into her proto-shell, which she was in the habit of doing. We felt optimistic. It was 1:00.

We found a BBQ restaurant across the street that also featured 1,000 won bibimbap on the menu, which is preposterously cheap and I was very curious about it. I meant to get it for breakfast, but things got complicated. We went to the Emart not far away and bought supplies for the weekend, mainly soju and snack cakes. Bellies full and larders stocked, our spirits continued to rise, even as rain began to spatter on the walk back. This was our first introduction to another important character that weekend, Typhoon Nakri.

We got back to the hotel around 5:30, hoping that the day shift might be over and there would be not many people around. Towel man was still there. We told him that our (Diana’s and my) friends needed to keep their stuff in the room as they were staying at a jjimjilbang, kind of a bathhouse thing. He would, we figured, at least be gone by the time we were getting back, which would be quite late because we were going clubbing. This seemed to go over smoothly, and up we went. A lot happened after that, the main thing I remember being the construction of an elaborate blanket fort. We went to a nightclub where I got two free drinks for agreeing to be in a promotional video wherein I claimed, “I love Wurzel Peter,” Wurzel Peter being a German liquor of some sort that is really just okay if we’re being honest. We danced and sang and fanned ourselves because it was hot as all heck in there. We went to the beach for a while and saw some fireworks. We headed back to the hotel, utterly pleased with ourselves and our evening.

Towel man was still there. Our buoyant happiness had its air let out and flew around a bit with a loud farting noise before slapping onto the wet pavement. I’m not sure whether I just imagined it that way or if Erik actually farted and someone fell down. Towel man, who we named Jun at this point after the name of the hotel, had at this point been working for at least 15 hours, and likely much more. It also turned out there were cameras all over the place and inside the snail shell was an array of televisions on which our six extra people were plainly visible, “hiding” outside. He was wise to our game. We would not be sneaking eight people into this room. Jun had set the new tone for our relationship, less helpful bag handler and more Sherlock to our eightfold Moriarty. His dogged determination to see us sleep on the street or in the dirt or something, I don’t know, earned our seething rage and grudging respect.

An aside: he had also had the towel on his neck for those same 15 hours at least. We thought at first it might have been for sunburn, but he kept it on even at night. Why? What was he hiding? I believe he may have been a cyborg.

There was at this point an unforeseen benefit to my having used my credit card to make this booking, which was that we decided some two people should stay here if we were paying for it anyway, and one of them was legally required to be me. The other was Gianna, who was sick and got privileges. The peasants, aka my friends and companions, slept on the beach. Literally they slept in the dirt are you happy now Jun? I know you’re reading. Actually they mostly didn’t sleep at all. The next day, the typhoon hit.

A lot more things happened then and I don’t have the energy to write about all of them, so maybe this will be a story about a single day. Overall I would rate Busan quite highly.