When I worked in Jeonju and Kwangju, I had ample opportunities to vist Busan, which was a bus ride away. This trip, like the parallel one to Kaohsiung in Taipei, I took in two stages. First, I found I needed to take a ferry from Busan to get my visa. Then, I decided to go just to see the city, having only had a night's sightseeing the first time.
Busan, like Kaoshiung, was something of a Japanese creation. The Japanese from before Hideyoshi Toyotomi's time maintained a foothold in Korea through the Kaya states. They used this foothold for the invasion of tne entire peninsula and then onward into the north. You'll surely notice one patriotic shrine blow which was dedicated to the heroic defense which drove them out. Unfortunately not all of the lessons of that invasion sunk in as deeply as they might.
When the Japanese came back to stay in 1910, having defeated first the Chinese and then the Russians, they brought modernization and modern economics to Korea. They needed a deep water port, and they chose Busan, whose sleepy status as a port is best depicted by the black and white photo below. Notice the lone ship and the beached whale (just kidding) in that photo. A far cry from today's modern container port. The Japanese, and especially Japanese companies and banks, made Busan into Korea's second city.
I toured here mostly in the winter as well, which you can tell. Halfway through my trip, the stock market crashed (again), and won hit 1700 to the dollar, which made this a stressful trip, not only to those who put their money in the Wooribank.
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------------------------------------------------- other images ------------------------------------------------- Some of these pictures I did not label correctly. Sorry.
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Related South Korean Tours:
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