Adventures in Asia: Busan, South Korea

Our final port of call aboard Sapphire Princess was Busan (or Pusan), South Korea.  Busan is one of the largest ports in the world, which is easy to believe upon seeing it.

Although there is a new cruise terminal more or less in the middle of the city, we docked way out at the commercial port in a very temporary setting.  I remain confused as to why we had to dock there; thankfully, there was a free shuttle bus running that took us from the ship to the BIFF or PIFF (B/Pusan International Film Festival) Square.

In Busan we encountered what was really our first bad weather of the trip.  It was below 20 degrees for the first time, and real rain caught up to us, as well.  Luckily for us, our plans in Busan were almost entirely indoors, so the weather was not too much of a damper.

From BIFF Square we caught the metro to take us across Busan to a place called Centum City, the retail centre of the city.  Andrea had planned our day in Busan (which was our shortest port day, by the way, just 8:00-17:00) around time in Spaland, one of the world's largest spas, located in the world's largest department store.  Obviously she had not known it was going to rain, but since it was, this turned out to be fortunate planning.  South Korea is famous for its spas, which are especially popular as places to fight off hangovers, apparently. 

There are two large department stores at Centum City, Sensegae (the world's largest) and Lotte.  

I have seen Lotte other places we have been, but I think it was the first time I had seen Sensegae.  We spent almost the first hour looking around.

Since Taipei I had been wanting to find an Asian baseball teamm ball cap, so I was looking for that.  But unfortunately three Lotte employees all shook their heads when I showed them a picture of what I was looking for on my phone.  

Anyway, having failed to find my hat, we located Spaland and went inside.

It costs 15,000 won each (about $18 Canadian) for four hours.  Since we were operating under time constraints, we had less than 90 minutes, so we had to hurry through most of it, because I was determined to see almost everything we could.

The first step was to lock up our shoes and retrieve a key from the shoe box, which let us through a gate.  Once through the gate, we handed over our receipt and were given clothes to change into.  Our suits of clothes were slightly different in colour to indicate male and female.  Here we split up into separate change rooms, in which our key opened a nice locker for our clothes and other belongings.  The change room was large, with hundreds of lockers; despite its size, it had class, and was among the nicest change rooms I have ever been in.  Off of the change room was a bath room, containing all sorts of hot tubs and baths and saunas and steam rooms and showers.  I used a sampling of these.  The clothes were needed for when Andrea and I met up.  The common areas included an outdoor foot bath, which was quite nice, even in the rain.  

There were also 13 different types of heat rooms, and a relaxation area with lounge chairs in pairs, each having a personal TV and head surround speakers.  Like I said we rushed more than relaxed through all of these rooms, because I wanted to see each one, but it was not as if we were not relaxed anyway!

Some of the rooms had little appeal for me, but others seemed very lovely, and it would have been nice to stay in them much longer.  Phones were allowed/even encouraged in many of them, and there was free WiFi.  Many people were taking the chance to nap or talk quietly with each other.  Overall it was a very nice atmosphere, and certainly an incredible experience.

After the spa we took the elevator to the ninth floor of the Sensgae department store to eat lunch.  There are numerous restaurants up here, and I had read about one serving puffer fish that I was especially interested in.  It was easy to find, because it had an aquarium out front full of the fish.

Sadly, it was popular and we were going to have to wait.  If we had had more time I would have wanted to wait for it, but instead we went to a different restaurant that served Korean hot pot.  This ended up being a nice place, because we got a table with a good window, and the food was great and the experience awesome.  We ordered marinated beef, and it came with literally over half a dozen little dishes of different sorts of vegetables, most pickled, such as kimchi.

After lunch we took the metro back to BIFF Square.  We got there with half an hour to spare.  We split up to do some shopping, and lo and behold I stumbled upon exactly the type of hat shop I was looking for.  Sure enough, there was a lovely Busan Giants cap!

We took the second last shuttle back to the port, and were back on board before 16:00.  I am not sure why they ran the last shuttles at 15:00, when all aboard was not until 16:30, but it was deal with that or else taxi. 

Although we felt much more rushed in Busan than we have elsewhere, and the weather was the worst we have had all trip, we had a really good time there.  The only frustrating thing was that, partly because of the plans we made and partly because of the docking situation, we spent close to half of our time in port in some sort of transit--whether getting on/off the ship, on the shuttle to/from port, or on the metro to/from Sensegae.