Ginseng chicken soup has been a popular Korean cuisine. The whole spring chicken stuffed with rice, a ginseng, a chestnut and Chinese dates in hot soup is a great comfort food, particularly in the winter when it’s freezing outside. It warms you up. How about when it’s 35 degrees celsius outside? Well, the restaurants are air-conditioned and there are ingredients that meant to be good for health in the summer, too.
Walking around the Kyung Sung University & Pukyong National University areas, it is interesting to explore the alleyways where many small cafes, bars and restaurants are.
A busy commercial and shopping area, and an interchange for two major subway lines, Seomyeon is considered the heart of Busan where you see more locals than tourists. The bars and restaurant area near the subway station exit 6 and 4 is the place to be at night. If you just walk through the alleys, there are a lot of choices of food and drink venues.
In Busan, there’s never short of seafood restaurant choices wherever you are. There’s an interesting alleyway in near the Seomyeon subway station exit 4, 6 where you can find all kinds of bars and restaurants that open till late.
Artbox is one of my favorite shops every time I visit Seoul. As I travel beyond the city center of Seoul, I noticed that there are shops in areas where young people hangout. It’s a great shop with interesting local designs small items such as T-shirts, caps, stationeries, personal accessories, mugs, umbrellas, and many other small items. It is easy to find some “Made in Korea” products as souvenirs.
The challenge of flying to Busan, South Korea direct from Hong Kong is the red-eye flight. All flights take off at around 2am Hong Kong time. Then some airlines serve meal (really) on board. Nice, but really who wants to eat at 3am? Finally the lights are off and you may be lucky to get an hour sleep. Then the captain calls for landing announcement… Busan isn’t that big so it doesn’t take that long to get to your hotel which won’t let you check in until 3pm. Not much is open that early. So every time I would find a nice coffee shop, enjoy a nice breakfast (coffee, of course) until my body is ready to go out for some activities.
