Well another year is over, I met up with Ken yesterday and we had a good little new years. We decided to check out the festival on Haeundae Beach, which I guess is a little like hitting Nathan Philips Square for New Year's in Toronto. Sure its something you do when you don't really have any plans, but its better than just hitting a bar and getting stupid drunk.
In typical new years eve fashion we entertained some vices before midnight, with a small bottle of Scotch we bought from the grocery store, a really good pizza and a couple of cans of beer we brought to the beach. Drinking in public seems to be one of those things where as long as you try to be a little discreet its considered okay.
Ken led us to the beach from his place in typical Blair Witch fashion, with various reappearing landmarks. Its a little tough to navigate in Busan as right angled streets are considered bad luck, as it is to defy the gods to strive for a simple path in life. I just imagineered that little bit of colourful culture history, and I hope that one day Korea thanks me for adding to their mosaic.
I commented to him that the Emart we passed looked like the same one we were at before, to which he replied that yeah everything looked the same around there. I drove my point home a little further by noting that the subway station by the Emart had the same name as the one before too.
"Yeah those, krazy Koreans!" Ken said with a smile.
Well we got to the beach soon enough and there were already a fair number of people there. it was my first time seeing the famous haeundae beach, but I'll really have to check it out in the summer to get the full effect. It was a nice enough place though.
One of the first things that happened was a couple of korean teenage girls giggled and walked up to us. Most of the time they just want to say a hello, but this time they also wanted to sell us firecrackers. They proffered a tube to me and said that it was 30. To which I shook my head, thirty bucks is a lot to pay for one firework. Turns out she meant 3 bucks, which I found more reasonable. So I bought one, to which they thanked ken profusely and told him how beautiful and handsome he was.
We found someone with a lighter and then took turns holding the stick and firing colorful balls of sparks into the sea. This was what everyone else was doing and it looked for the life of me that they were trying to fight off the approaching new year with magic. Either that or they were just trying to light the Japan Sea on fire (they don't like the Japanese too much here).
We sat for a bit and drank a can of beer as a couple was setting off bottle rockets nearby. We noted that koreans don't seem to have the same fear of fireworks that most beings human and otherwise do. Perhaps its since they've been around in this part of the world for so long is why they are so comfortable in handing a roman candle to a three year old and trusting that they'll discover the proper way to handle it through trial and error.
We didn't see anyone get hit, but there were a few close calls, Ken also noted that the couple kept on moving their bottle rockets closer and closer to us. i proposed that was probably to cleanse the area of our evil influence. A short time later the guy timidly gave us four bottle rockets to fire off ourselves, which is a sign that they were just trying to be friendly and were a little too shy.
We walked around the neighbourhood a bit but came back to the beach for midnight where there were many more fireworks, both big ones the city did and volleys of fireworks fired into the sea by the public. There was also a cruise boat a few hundred feet out that was firing out fireworks in reply. I couldn't figure out what that was symbolic of in Korean culture so I'll have to assume that people just like cool fireworks.
Now we had heard that the big cultural thing was to stay up and greet the sunrise, but honestly the idea of staying up another 6 hours wasn't too appealing. We had the big midnight countdown already in any case. So we headed back to Ken's place (after I made him try to win me a hello kitty doll at a nearby dart game- all he won was an astroboy so I let him keep it). We split a small bottle of champagne we had bought earlier at ken's place and i crashed there for the night.
Its kind of strange that last new year's I could never have really seen myself in South Korea a year from then. New year's resolutions have never been a big thing for me, as I think its silly to wait until a specific day to try to make good changes. but as silly as it is the symbolism of it does seem to help and i am aware that I am on the path to making some good changes in my life. No idea where it'll lead, but so far its a fun ride.
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