- Annyeong-haseyo. Good morning.
It is day number three, Wednesday.
Today, we are taking the KTX,
the bullet train, down to Busan.
So, right now, we are here in Seoul Station.
We got some breakfast drinks here at Dunkin Donuts in Seoul.
Right here, there's Dunkin Donuts booth
where they've got all sorts
interesting, Korean inspired donuts.
And, in a little case back there,
Dunkin Donuts even sells hot dogs.
I'll see you on the train and then down in Busan,
where we're gonna do a temple stay tonight!
So, I'm looking forward to that.
This vlog is probably gonna be a little delayed in uploading
because I'm guessing the temple
where we are staying probably doesn't have
the world's fastest Internet.
The nine o'clock train to Busan, first class.
Let's take a look at what it looks like inside.
Doesn't leave for eight minutes
but he wants to get someplace, I think.
So, we're seated in our seats,
a nice red color in the car, first class.
It's a two by one configuration, so, one window, one aisle,
the other side is just window seats.
So, plenty of room in here.
Big tables where you can put your stuff,
we've got our drinks that we got from Dunkin Donuts,
green tea latte.
So, we didn't go for donuts, we went for egg tarts.
Have you seen these at Dunkin Donuts in the US?
Not so much.
The seats also have power in them, they recline,
nice and comfy, room for luggage up on the top,
and there's bathrooms on the train.
So, overall, looks like it will be a nice experience.
So about 15 minutes into the ride, 9:15,
train started at nine.
They passed out some first class amenities.
By the way, Topher's really enjoying this ride, as well.
Lots of room for both him and I and the seat.
People often ask me, do I get a separate seat for Topher?
I guess I'm cheap, so he's just sharing this seat.
Though he takes a lot of money on bamboo.
So what do we got in here?
We got two,
three little bags.
This one is a oatmeal welcome cookie
from Paris Croissant, not Paris Baguette.
We've got a little wet nap that we could open
to wipe our hands.
And then we have some welcome nuts by Green Nut,
Fruit 'n Nuts.
After a fast two-hour-and-fifteen-minute ride on the train,
we arrived into Busan Station, another big modern station,
nice glass roofs, light and bright, and lots of food to buy
for the train here, including Paris Baguette,
which if you like French pastries and desserts,
check out Paris Baguuette.
It's a Korean chain for French pastries.
So now we're on the tour bus to go to lunch
and I have to say,
I thought there was a lot of room on that train.
There's more room on this bus.
I'm usually kind of an anti-bus kind of person,
but these Korean tour buses, they're really nice.
They've also got like, curtains, and look at this up here!
So fancy.
We also saw a Texas Street as we were driving.
I wonder if there's a lot of Texans here in Busan.
Which, it happens to be right next to Busan's Chinatown.
For lunch, we stopped at a buffet restaurant called VIPS.
Why? We're all VIPs. Let me show what's on the buffet.
So it's a buffet and a steakhouse, and I kinda consider it
like the Korean equivalent of Sizzler.
You can order steaks plus you can get the buffet.
It's mostly Western items, they've got pizza over there,
corn on the cob.
They've got potatoes, french fries.
But if you're looking for Korean things, down here
they've got tteokbokki, which is a spicy rice cake
in a spicy sauce and I will say,
the first time I ate tteokbokki,
I didn't know what I was eating,
but now, it's actually quite tasty,
and I've got it on my plate back in my seat.
And if you're wondering, yes, there's kimchi here too,
they've got down this aisle.
But there's also a pretty impressive,
like coffee machines, a dessert spread over here,
with macarons, and cheese cake,
and then back over there on the other side,
I have to show you what's on this other side
because I've never actually seen something like this
in a buffet before.
Right here,
this is the well-being snow machine.
It is,
I'm gonna say it looks like cotton candy,
but that might actually be shaved ice.
So you can have bing-soo, Korean shaved ice.
So after lunch we stopped by the Gamcheon Culture Village
Stamp Map,
we didn't stop by the Stamp Map, but we stopped
by this village, this village back here.
This village in Busan, this is where the refugees
after the Korean War basically established
little tiny houses.
The rules, when they built these houses
in the 1950s and 60s,
was that no one could block the other one's view,
so they're graded up this hill,
and the houses are all really small.
Many of them, just one room.
Some of them don't even have windows.
This is one of the most popular places to visit in Busan.
You can tell there's a street that runs through it
that has lots of souvenir shops and foods,
we're gonna explore those in a minute.
But related to the Stamp Map,
you should definitely pick up this map.
There's a Tourist Information
right as you come in the main street.
This will cost you like a couple dollars
but it's a pretty impressive map, and frankly this is like
one of the biggest tourist maps I've ever gotten.
By the way, it's a stamp map, too, so you can explore
the town and put little stamps on it to collect them all.
And it also tells you a little bit more about the town
than what I've actually told you.
So let's go ahead and explore
the village.
This village reminds me of the Korean version of
some of those Italian villages by the sea.
Like you see those villages, those fishing villages
in Italy, that everything's carved up on the mountain.
That's what this town looks like.
A popular pastime here is to rent hanbok,
a Korean-style dress.
You'll see lots of girls walking around the street
in this traditional hanbok.
More about this in my Friday vlog.
But I actually have a whole video about how to rent hanbok
so if you're interested, it's online right now,
link in the description below.
This town is built on a hill,
and so there's a lot of staircases, but the main street,
it's kind of this, like, curving street.
But there's a lot of cute things over here.
There's like this, it's not the Grand Budapest Hotel,
but it's the Grand Budapest Doll Hotel.
It's got all sorts of dolls, it's very cutesy themed.
I find this whole street, as compared to Seoul,
like Seoul's modern, everything here, it's really cute.
Like it's got this little guy and some deer antlers.
So just a really interesting hotel.
So you can see, these streets and alleyways in here,
they're really narrow.
And the houses, they had to be connected,
the walls and the roof,
so that way there was no hiding places for North Koreans.
But you can look and you can see how small
these houses were.
Gamcheon means a beautiful, clean water
and actually there were some wells that they would use
to get water, to bring it back to the house,
'cause there was no running water.
If you wanna see how small these really are,
here's one that's kinda demolished a little bit,
people don't live in this one, but people do still live
in a lot of these other ones here.
By the way, did I mention? There are a lot of stairs,
there are a lot of stairs.
If you like climbing stairs, you will love this city.
You can climb some stairs, and then you can get
some of the junk food up there.
Let me show you one of the coolest ones
up on that main street.
This place sells cotton candy,
but not any type of cotton candy.
It sells cotton candy in the shapes of characters.
So cute. I've never seen anything like this before.
So kinda like in Japan,
they've got fortunes a lot of places.
Here, they do it a little different way.
To get a fortune, it's 1000 won,
we put some money in here and we get
a special coin.
So come closer, I wanna show you what we got.
We got these different things right here for fortunes.
Right here we got three types of fortunes we can pick from.
One for men, one for couples, or one for single women.
So I'm gonna go ahead and pick the one for couples.
We'll put our coin in here.
How this goes in, it goes in that way.
Turn it.
And we have a ball.
Let's open up the ball. What's it got inside.
This is a difficult ball to open.
It's almost like I need a special tool to open this ball.
All right, here we go. I'm gonna set this down right here.
And open this up.
And this fortune
is a very long fortune.
It says it's a good luck fortune when I have a mate
and I'm wandering someplace I don't know,
I'll have them to ask directions
so they'll always help me know where to go.
Which totally makes sense for this travel guide.
OC Girl, thank you very much.
By the way, she's behind the camera right now.
The art in this village is extra cute.
Right here he's a wolf, what is he looking at.
Well come down here, he's looking at these ducks
that didn't even know the wolf was there.
There's one duck, there's another duck.
Actually there's a whole path of ducks that go back here.
Even the signs that welcome you to the village
are cute and artistic.
On the main street one of the most popular artworks
is this really big fish up here.
And also on the house up above there's this neat tree
growing on the side of it.
Actually, it looks like a tree made out of tile.
For some of the best views of the village,
check out some of the coffee and tea shops.
You'll have to buy a drink, but
the view
is epic.
All right so we just got off the bus.
We are here at the temple.
We're gonna begin our temple stay with a walk up the hill.
Not sure how far it is, but
see you up there at the temple.
All right so we just turned the corner.
There's a road that goes up but the bus
dropped us off down there.
It's this interesting kinda wooden platform,
and looking down we can already see
there's some streams down here.
You can hear the babbling brooks.
Our tour guide told us that when we come here,
'cause it's monks, we don't talk very loud.
We have to be very quiet. We talk to the wind.
We talk to the trees. And we talk to nature.
But speaking of wind, I'm feeling winded already.
So if you are coming here for temple stay,
pack light, so you're not pulling a suitcase up this road.
That'd be very tiring.
And apparently I'm walking much faster
than everybody else who's down there.
Take a look. Slowpoke YouTubers. See you at the top.
Okay. So after about fifteen minutes, we're getting closer.
I still don't think we're completely here.
And I'm not sure,
Well, I think the reason why they make you walk like this
is that at temple stay, they want you to be relaxed
and I'm getting relaxed, as in tired.
Just past that gate and up another set of stairs,
we have arrived,
to be greeted
by the monks.
So the first step in going into the temple
as you approach the first staircase
is to take off your shoes.
Size 14 Nikes staying right here.
I don't think anybody else is gonna mistake my
pink shoes for theirs.
So I've got my uniform, and now I go into this small room
as a changing room
to change in to my uniform.
All right, I've got my temple clothes issued,
nice shirt and nice pants,
they're some pretty comfy pajamas.
360, and they've even got pockets right here.
What do you think of my new look?
Should this be a new look for Yellow Productions?
I just need to get some, I think in yellow.
So if you wanna know more about the temple stay visit,
I'm actually gonna break that out
into a whole separate video.
'Cause there's a lot to see as part of this temple.
So that completes day number three,
if you wanna see day number two and you missed it,
of my Korea travel vlog,
you can click right here to watch it.
It's a visit to the DMZ.
Day number four, when it's up, is gonna be right here.
Well I won't say goodbye because I'll see you
in one of these videos.