Busan International Film Festival and Spaland

Lately, people have been calling me "the camel." Each weekend, I don my bulging red backpack, which causes me to hunch over at the waist, and I double-fist water bottles like it's happy hour in Gainesville before a home game.

I was particularly bulky on this past weekend's excursion because I was loaded down with bedding (2 blankets and my overstuffed, fuchsia pillow), backpack, a pendulous bag of food, my purse and my camera. As if being a foreigner doesn't draw enough attention, try getting stuck in a subway turnstile entrance because your enormous pink pillow snagged. Ug...

Since everyone was short on money from our blowout Chuseok weekend, we decided to take up the offer from a friend to stay at his apartment. However, with one double-sized bed and 7 people to put up for the night, most of us were sleeping on the floor. It was cramped, but at least the price was right. At around 9 on Saturday morning, I sat up with a crick in my neck and had to laugh at the 6 other bodies splayed out all across the floor. the bare floor. People were sleeping with their jackets rolled up for pillows, still dressed in their clothes from the night before. I am perpetually the early riser, so I had to wait another hour and half before the rest of the group was coherent enough to even form words. Moods brightened once we took a chilly walk to a Starbucks and loaded up on Venti coffees. An item on the Korean Starbuck's menu that I think is worth mentioning is the jelly coffee. Imagine your typical iced coffee loaded down with sugar and cream and big, blobby lumps of grape or strawberry jelly wallowing around in the bottom of the cup. Sound disgusting? I can assure you it's quite delicious. If you just get past the image of bloated red and purple slugs sloshing around the bottom of your drink, it's a great flavor combination, especially when you mix the jelly bits throughout. I wonder if it will ever catch on in America?
Across form our table, a Korean girl was creating these intricate roses out of Starbucks napkins. I have no such skill, so I made a straw wrapper into a cheesy mustache instead.
The idea for the day was to get in line for the 14th International Busan Film Festival for tickets to one of the rave review, independent films. However, by the time we arrived (around 3pm) all of the tickets were sold out except for two movies: "The Enlightenment Film" and "PilgrIMAGE". The "Enlightenment" film analyzed political views in a post modern world. Yuck. So we chose PilgrIMAGE, which was a movie made by a father-daughter duo, which revolved around visiting the homes and filming locations of famous directors. The movie was at 8:30pm on the other side of town, so we decided to go and grab a bite while we were wasting time. Max, the guy whose apartment we were staying at, suggested a place called "The Fuzzy Navel," which is possibly the only Mexican restaurant in the entire country.

The city of Busan is the second largest in Korea, and is very industrial, with factories and sky-rise buildings crammed right up to the beach. In Korea, THE quintessential beach to visit is called Hyundae Beach, which was where "The Fuzzy Navel" was conveniently located. A Mexican restaurant on the beach sounds like a promising combination, right? Well, I was not dissapointed upon first walking up. The restaurant was blasting 90s alternative and rock music (Think Red Hot Chili Peppers, Audioslave, The GooGoo Dolls, etc.) and I could see tortillas on people's plates, not to mention that the place appeared to be a foreigner magnet. We ran into several people from orientation who were there for the film festival, too.

I ordered a taco salad, excited at the prospect of eating guacamole since avocados are so difficult to find in Korea. 20 minutes passed, then 40...then we were up to an hour waiting for our various orders of tacos, burritos and nachos. Now Mexican food is by no means a delicacy or that difficult to throw together, so I'm not sure what on earth took so long. When the server finally started dropping off our food, we were all sorely dissapointed at the limp, tasteless tortillas, the guacamole without a trace of salt or garlic and the salsa that (swear to God) must have been concocted out of ketchup. So much for Mexican food in Korea. And to add insult to injury, it was one of the most expensive meals I have eaten so far in Korea. Lesson learned: Mexican food does not exist in Korea.
The Spanish is soooo wrong on this menu. Word of advice if you have never traveled internationally before: be suspicious of translated menus. English on a menu means the prices are considerably jacked up because the restaurant is catering to foreigners.


After eating, we headed out to Hyundae Beach. From the various descriptions I've heard of the beach, I was expecting a white shoreline that extended as far as I could see, dotted with families spreading out beach blankets and picnicking and playing frisbee in the waves. Basically, I was thinking of Florida. Something you must grasp about South Korea though: it is a tiny country. North America is a vast and varied continent with a kaleidoscope of geographies ranging from beaches, to mountains, to prairie land, desert, etc. Korea is only as big as some of our larger states, so I was shocked to see that this famous tourist beach was only maybe 3 or 4 miles long. People were packed like sardines along the dunes and no one was in the water because it was just so damn cold. My Korean friends tell me that in the summer it's so crowded that it's risky to leave your beach chair for even a moment at the risk of losing it to some pushy foreigners or desperate Korean family looking for a patch of sand to call their own. With mid 60 degree weather though, the beach crowd was thinning, so we staked out an empty patch of damp sand and watched the moviegoers intermingling with the few Koreans who had picked the wrong day to go beach-combing.
This was a self-portrait of the artist.

We watched the sun dip beneath the horizon and huddled closer and closer as the rays began to fade. Getting to crunch some sand between my toes was a pleasant reminder of beach days back home, and I saw a few die-hard Korean kids rolling around in the tide with purple lips and chattering teeth, building sand castles only to stomp them down moments later, laughing maniacally. Once again, children are the same wherever you go on this planet.

Juxtapose me next to these typical young Korean women and the stark contrast in fashion is laughable. Korean women are always dressed to the nines while I look like an bohemian bum the majority of the time. It was hard not to laugh though as their stilettos aerated the sand, winding tracks of dime-sized heel holes all over the place.
Relaxing and people-watching.
Weird Korea: This is the Korean Squat. From toddlers to 90-year-old ajummas, all Koreans practice the squat. Maybe it's out of habit from the squat toilets that are common all across the country (even in a McDonalds you have the choice between a squat toilet or a "Western" toilet. It's funny to see how long the line is to the Western toilet and all the foreigners and young, trendy Korean ladies waiting eons to go while the squat toilets are always open, always being used by older Koreans.) You see the squat wherever you go. Waiting for the bus in the heart of metropolitan Seoul? Drop a squat. In a fancy department store waiting for the salesperson to bring out your size 245 Manolo Blahnik shoes? Drop a squat. While it's more common for the older Koreans to squat whenever and wherever, the younger generations can't seem to fight the habit. When it's 6 in the morning and the clubs are winding down, when people are exhausted from drinking and dancing and are waiting for a cab to pull up, it's quite a scene to see all these drooping, squatting 20-something Koreans, hunkered up against the buildings, squatting just like their grandmas selling produce on the street corners. I love it!
Eventually, we had to scoop ourselves up form the sand and take a bus to the movie theater where the film festival was being hosted. The theater was only half-filled (like I said, we had to chose from the remaining dregs as far as our film selection went) and the director was actually standing down by the screen, shuffling from foot to foot as the technicians bumbled around with the roll of film up in the projection booth. This guy was memorable too. I'd venture a guess that he weighed in at nearly 400 pounds and was sporting 2 lazy eyes and 3 chins. The film itself was poorly acted, but mildly entertaining because many of the locations they filmed, I have visited (Rome, Lucerne in Switzerland, Alaska...). The father and daughter are from Canada, and set out to visit the home of Charles Chaplin, the filming locale for "The Sound of Music" and even stopped by Kansas to put in a word about "The Wizard of Oz". It was cheesy, but we were all weary from travel and scarfing down shrimp rice chips (the snack food of choice in Korea) and were too tired to care.

On Sunday, I awoke before everyone else again, but decided to let them sleep in until at least 10. The initial plan was to visit a fish market and have a big sashimi lunch before heading back home to Daegu, but we were sidetracked when we decided to head to the Shinsegae department store. Shinsegae is the largest department store in the world. It is directly on a subway stop, so you can actually get on the subway, travel to the 1st floor (which is underground) of Shinsegae, spend all day exploring the stores and attractions and never see the light of day. Shinsegae is a world onto itself with lux food courts (we are talking gourmet food, made to order), restaurants, a Whole Foods grocery store, clothing stores, pet stores, a movie theater, driving range, sky park, ice rink, spa and arcade (to name a FEW things)... We stopped to get coffee, but ended up lingering for 6 hours.

By then, our group had been reduced to just Max, Shaina, Eunice and I. Shaina and Max wanted to go ice skating, but I thought it was a ripoff because you had to rent skates, buy gloves and then pay for two hours of mindless circling around a slushy ice rink inundated with little kids being filmed and hollered at by their parents. Eunice and I decided to go to Spaland: the public bath on the first floor of Shinsegae. Obviously, I could not take photos in a public bath, so I will largely have to depend on my powers of description to express how amazing I find the bathing culture in Korea.

The public bath is one of the few remaining unchanged traditions in Korea. Most Koreans, women and men, go at least once every week to clean, visit with friends and family and just enjoy being together. The public bath is the old time porch-sitting days of America. Just naked...

The Korean word for these bath houses is "JimJil Bang," and is usually recognizable by a picture of a semi-circle bowl with steam wisps curling upward from the rim. These places are very cheap (ranging from 4,000 to 12,000 won depending on the services you buy) and include saunas of varying temperatures, hot and cold bathing pools and body scrub and massage services.

When you first enter a jim jil bang, you take of your shoes and put them in an assigned locker (standard- you never wear shoes indoors in Korea). Then you are sent to your assigned locker in either the men or women's portion of the Jim Jil Bang. The moment you cross through that curtain, it's like being flung into a nudist colony. The spa provides some loose-fitting clothes for the sauna (think what you would wear to get an x-ray), but you are butt-naked when you head to the bathing pools to scrub and wash. The saunas were relaxing. With about 12 different rooms in all, Spaland had sweltering charcoal-heated rooms, rooms with tanks full of jellyfish bobbing around, "magnetized" rooms, sound-therapy rooms which had deep, reverberating bass playing underneath the floorboards and even cold rooms, which were meant to cool you off after the baking hot sauna rooms. Once you have sweated sufficiently, it's time to bathe. You strip down, carrying only a hand towel and whatever necessities (conditioner, lotion, razers) you need and head into one massive room filled with naked girls and women of every age and body type, dipping in and out of various heated-pools before plopping down on a footstool to scrub the dead skin off eachother. As I write this, I can imagine your shock at something like this, but I must press a point here: this is one of the best experiences you can have in Korea if you really want to see how this culture operates. I saw entire family trees from great-grandmothers all the way down to the youngest little girls splashing around in the pools, combing each other's hair and just relaxing. In korea, there is a special rough-tectured towel known as the "Italy" towel that every single Korean uses to bath with. When you soak for long enough in the pools, it makes your skin soggy and pliable. The Italy towel is meant to be used all over, and the harder you scrub, the more skin you will see pilling off your body like an old skin sweater. And it's BLACK. I was so grossed out that I scrubbed until my whole body stung just because I wanted to get as much off as possible. Since it's nearly impossible to scrub your own back, that's why it is good to go with friends and family. I saw many endearing moments between grandmother's and their daughter's, giving each other a scrub down and just chatting away.

After removing a whole layer of skin, we went to the shower stalls and washed and then went into the "powder" rooms to blow dry our hair and toss on our sauna clothes to go get massages. The whole day was simply divine, and I walked out feeling as limber as a wet noodle. unfortunately, Shaina and Max did not have an equally enjoyable day. About 15 minutes into their ice-skating experience, Max crashed to the floor, splitting his chin open on the ice. He was rushed to the emergency room where he had to get multiple stitches and a prescription for penicillin. The bill was about 160,000 won, which was the last of his money for the month. Needless to say, it was like walking into Hell's gaping maw when Eunice and I fluttered out of the spa in a wave of shampoo-smell and smiles. The rest of the evening was a quiet one, and I felt a little guilty for sitting so relaxed and content the whole train ride home while Shaina was sending silent death glares our way.

All in all though, a very enjoyable weekend for me. In fact, I believe I will be returning to Spaland this weekend when I visit Busan again for a different festival. All I know for sure is I am not going anywhere near the ice rink.