#5: Haeundae Sand Festival
Every year during the first week of June, Haeundae Beach (the Rio of Korea, except not at all like Rio) is transformed into an outdoor gallery of sand sculptures so technically advanced and superfluously ornate that they could only be engineered by Koreans. Sand artisans--or as their known in the arts community: douche bags--travel from all over the world to build their one of a kind masterpieces for all to admire endlessly or until high tide rolls in, whichever comes first.
Among this year's notable sand-sations were:
The Taj Mahal
The Batmobile
Whatever the hell this is supposed to be
And the worst portrait of the Obamas ever
Sand sculptors work with ninja-like focus, even when faced with admirers shouting, "Give her tig ol' bitties!"
#4: Beomeosa Temple
Korean temples are sort of like vaginas (bear with me on this one). Some are bigger than others, some are more colorful, but once you see three or four the mystery wears off a little, and they all start to blend together. Still, you always have fond memories of the first one you visited, and for me that first one was a special lady by the name of Beomeosa Temple. I was also fortunate enough to come during the right time of the month--the guys know what I'm talking about--that's right, Buddha's Birthday, when the entire complex was decorated with festive lanterns and prayer cards. It more than made up for the fact that an overnight rainstorm, coupled with the temple's proximity to the ocean, brought about a distinct fishy smell throughout the area, the kind that you can taste and can't completely get rid of, even after you use mouthwash.
#3 Night Beaches
Darkness provides many overlooked advantages over light: it allows Batman to fight crime unobstructedly, my grandpa once told me that he could see stars back in his day, and overall stuff is pretty much black all around. This last one is especially handy when you're in a city, or a country for that matter, that apparently sent all of their architects and civil engineers to the front lines during the last great war, leaving only technical college drop-outs and cement truck drivers to design and build their nation's skylines. The results were beachfronts that look like this:
Luckily at some point over the past fifty years someone came up with a plan: Rather than rebuild these structures to make them look more aesthetically pleasing and less like futuristic low-income housing, let's just attach a bunch of lights to them so they glow all pretty at night.
I didn't say it was a good plan.
#2 This Shirt
What I love most about this shirt is not the fact that it looks like it was made in the early 90s (tubular man!), nor that it's a crude Korean attempt at a casual piece of Americana attire; nor even that the ethnic stereotype taco appears to have sour cream coming out of his ass. No, what I love most about this shirt is that even though Korea is approximately 6,000 miles and an ocean away from America, they still somehow know that all Mexicans, every last one on the planet, has a dirty, dirty mustache.
#1 It's Not Pohang
Even a bucket of shit can look at a bucket of bloody diarrhea and say, "Glad I'm not that guy!" This is very much the case with the relationship of Busan and Pohang, two industrialized coastal cities that pride themselves on their "world-class" beaches and seafood. Which is technically true, in that the two cities are in fact part of this "world," the Earth, and that a "class" can refer to any level of a social hierarchy, like medieval feudal serf or crack whore.
In Busan I can at least pretend that I'm not swimming in gallons of industrial waste. Kind of hard to do when you can actually see the industrial waste being pumped into the beaches in Pohang.
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