August 21: Busan Day 3

A typhoon blew past on Tuesday night so Wednesday started out a little rainy. With rain in the forecast and no friends to meet until lunch, we started our day at an art exhibit showcasing 400 years of western paintings at the Busan Cultural Center. We couldn't take photos of the paintings, so here is the view outside the exhibit. Our hotel gave us the fire umbrella Gibson is carrying. Koreans of all ages carry umbrellas, even teenage boys. 

Cute photo spot outside the cultural center. Besides the exhibit space we saw, the center has three theaters for symphony, opera and drama performances.

We met another senior couple Abe served with, President Gil and Sister Lim, along with Abe's stake president and wife, President Jo and Sister Kim for lunch. Yes, we met a lot of Sister Kim's on our trip, all of them delightful. Also, in South Korea, women do not change their last names when they get married. This time we ate shabu shabu, which is from Japan. Each table has a pot of hot broth that the diners use to cook meat and vegetables. This was an all-you-can-eat buffet and we relied on Abe and Gibson to eat a worthy amount of meat. This restaurant served the best kimchi we ate all week. Sadly, we do not have a photo of our hosts right now, but we will add one to the blog when Abe gets one from his friends.

We told Abe's friends that we were planning on going shopping after lunch. One of the items we were looking for was fabric. A lot of fabric sold in the US is printed in South Korea so Becky thought it would be fun to get some fabric while we were at the source. The friends organized a trip to an enormous fabric market, located in a building that seemed to span a city block. President Lim and Sister Kim dropped us off and Sister Lim was our guide. The building was full of stalls. Each stall operated as a separate business and each stall was crammed with fabric. While every imaginable kind of fabric was available for sale, we focused on woven cotton prints and the selection was still overwhelming.

Besides navigating, Sister Lim was invaluable for helping us find Korean fabric. A lot of the fabric was imported from other Asian countries. Brandan bought some of this gorgeous cotton canvas as a gift for one of his coworkers who likes to sew. Instead of yards, the market sold fabric in units of 90 centimeters, which is essentially 1 yard (1 yard = 0.9144 m)

This is a photo with Sister Lim after our successful shopping trip. Every day we were blessed by Abe's generous friends. Hopefully they will inspire us to increase our generosity and hospitality.

We encountered a few wrinkles as foreigners traveling in South Korea. One quirk was we couldn't buy train or bus tickets online unless we had a domestic credit card. We which don't. Instead, we had to buy our tickets in person at the station we departed from. We stopped at a bus station to buy tickets to Mokpo for the next day. Abe was friendly and spoke Korean to everyone we met, which most Koreans responded to, but no one responded quite like this woman. She told Abe she loved America and that she had prayed that morning to meet an American so Abe was an answer to her prayers. Then she launched into an exuberant prayer that was half chant and half dance. She ended by singing the alphabet in English. Such an adorable woman!

How could it possibly be time to eat again? Koreans love food, and especially love their Korean cuisine. It's more common to eat at a restaurant than in a friend's home. Abe had a lot of friends to meet up with and most of the time that meant another delicious Korean meal. This time we met at a Korean barbecue (gogigib). We loved how descriptive the restaurant logo was. We can't read Korean, but we can tell some pigs are getting flamed here. This time we met a man named Bek Jun Sok who is about the same age as Abe. Abe and his companion started teaching him and later he was baptized. 

Abe and Jun Sok grilled the meat themselves on charcoal grills set in the tables. It's not safe to breathe charcoal fumes (carbon monoxide) so there is a chimney directly over the grill. They cooked two kinds of pork: samgyeupsal (pork belly) and dwejigarbi (marinated pork ribs). They were perfectionists at getting the meat cooked exactly right.

Besides the meat, they grilled garlic, rice cakes called ddeok and slices of kimchi. Grilled kimchi tastes better than raw kimchi.

Since we were hosting this meal, Becky and Brandan did not feel the same amount of pressure to eat meat. We ordered nengmyeon (buckwheat noodles). Becky liked the side dishes the best and would happily have eaten side dishes for dinner, but that doesn't fit the business model for the restaurants who provide the sides for free. Koreans serve noodles with scissors so diners can cut them into manageable lengths.

After dinner we walked along the ocean. Jun Sok recently returned from a study abroad experience in Russia. He plans on working in international business, focusing on trade with Russia. He said his Russian is better than his English and his English is quite good.

Jun Sok attended a YSA branch while he was living in Russia. He's back studying at a university in Busan and will graduate in a year. It was so great to see the he was still attending church and growing in the gospel.