Summertime

This past week, the weather in Busan has been both parts wonderful (beautiful clear skies) and hell (hot hot temperatures). 

And the coming week will be no different.

With this good weather the Great Migration of Busan has commenced!  

In flocks we travel to the beaches: to the water, to the sand, but not the sun!  Or at least not for the Koreans.*

I'd been trying to think of how to describe it.  How to put to words this plight of telling you about the beaches in Korea.  But none were coming.  It is so different, it is so confusing; so unlike the beach behavior that is regarded as normal in the West.

And then today as I was the only Western body laying out on the beach - letting the sun soak into every inch of me - it hit me.  I wasn't at the beach.  It's not the beach I've been going to every chance I get this summer.

It's a water park!  

There may not be rides or long twisting slides, but the beaches of Busan, are without a doubt, a water park.  Tubes are rented to families by the dozens, the shallow and deep ends are separated by a buoyed rope, and shaded areas of the preferred locations for families to gather.  

The sand is almost impossible to see due to the dense collection of parasols that blanket the shore.  The sun is an enemy that is avoid with great care.  Long pants and sleeves are worn in and out of the water.  

And chicken and beer are the dish of the day!  Beer I get and happily drink.  But chicken?  Fried chicken?

A stream of vendors pass by every five minutes to ask if you'd like fried chicken.  Never in the many, many, many endless years, that my family has been bumming it on the beaches of the East Coast have I ever once seen a chicken hawker.

Chicken?  On the beach?  

But at a water park, where picnic areas are available, chicken makes sense.  And so it does in Busan.

I haven't had the chicken yet, but I've gotten a great tan and a little reprive from the relentless heat.  

Maybe this coming week I'll try the chicken.

*Not all Koreans avoid the sun, but a great number of them do.  It's an Asian thing - paleness is better. 

** Pictures taken at Sondgo Beach