The early to mid 2010s were well-known for pop culture’s obsession with zombies. Spurred by The Walking Dead, which was appointment television when new episodes premiered, society when through a rash of apocalyptic TV shows and movies. It wasn’t just Hollywood, either. In 2016, a movie premiered in Korea called Train to Busan. Typical of the genre, it features a bunch of people on a train desperately trying to escape the zombie apocalypse as they get picked off and turned into zombies one by one.
I bring this movie up because the train in the movie was en route to Busan from Seoul. Elizabeth and I tried to watch it on May 11 as our train made its way to Busan from Seoul, but were unfortunately unsuccessful in getting Netflix to work in another country. So instead I kept a sharp eye peeled on the train just to make sure nobody who was walking by had a “interested in eating your brains” vibe.
Our “train to Busan” moment on May 11 culminated in a day featuring some good eats, some good sights, and some great times with friends. Let’s get into 10 things to remember from the day.
- Smooth going in the train station
Yeah, I kind of had to include it after a semi-traumatic experience at the Naples train station back in 2025. Getting all of us to a location on-time for something like a train departure is no guaranteed task and everyone deserves props for making it happen. Mostly, the props go to our Seoul guide, Katie, for navigating us through the train station and to the correct platform well in time to board. Winston loaded up five people’s worth of luggage with commendable aplomb. This is even more impressive when you consider that Pam was traveling with several items of import for the wedding. This included a set of wooden wedding ducks that became a sort of symbol of the silliness of rapid international travel. “WHERE ARE THE DUCKS?” “WHO HAS THE DUCKS?” could be hard at almost every stage of our adventure. The answer was usually that Moira had them just like always.
As easy as it was for us to board the train, James and Moriah (also on their way to Busan with us. If you’re going to travel internationally at the same time as your friends, you become an appendage of the overall adventure) seemingly had an even easier morning. Tickets were sold out for the train we were on, but they locked into the same route 30 minutes later. No jet lag, no language barrier, no problem. Their train was blasting southeast to Busan somewhere on the tracks behind. Speaking of…
- High speed rail is in fact fast
Seoul and Busan are over 200 miles apart. You could drive between the two cities, but it would probably take 4+ hours with traffic. Fortunately, Korea is one of those places that has heard of any approves of high-speed rail. You can make the trip in less than 3 hours without having to put in any effort of your own.
The train didn’t go all that fast through the city, but south of Incheon we started to pick up speed. And kept picking up speed. The countryside raced by. Korea’s interior is this beautiful combination of rugged mountains, lush forests, and big, tumbling rivers. All of that swept by in a blur outside the window, interspersed with periods of total darkness when the train plunged into tunnels through the hills. There were a lot of tunnels, and each one seemed longer than the last. There were even signs that declared how long each tunnel was. In fact… that gave me an idea as we approached a 10.0 km long tunnel. If you pulled out your stopwatch app and timed out those 10 km at 2 minutes, 30 seconds, then you were going… 240 km/hr, or roughly 150 mph.
Yeah. Fast train.
- Nolan has a moment in Busan
Let me just say it: I’m not really an urbanist and usually feel something between indifference and mild distaste when it comes to cities. But from the very moment we got off of the train, I loved Busan. The sky was bright blue and a fresh breeze blew in off of the sea. In mid-May, I was already dreading another Oklahoma summer and would take sunshine and 70 degrees anywhere I could. It felt like a day where anything was possible.
And the city felt like one where anything was possible, too. Even more than Seoul, Busan felt like a vibrant representation of the high-tech, forward-looking reputation that South Korea has developed. Everywhere there were skyscrapers. Where there weren’t skyscrapers, there were bustling ports, bridges, and mountains leading all the way down to the water. I could see myself as a man of the world jetting around Busan.
- The XO Kitty Street Market
It’s actually impressive that I made it this far into the South Korea series without mentioning XO, Kitty. I had never heard of the show before late April when Elizabeth said we should watch some Korean-themed shows to get in the mood for the trip. If you know Elizabeth, you know she gets stressed before big trips, so anything to get her excited was good with me. And it turned out that the show (based on a Korean-American girl who goes to boarding school in Seoul and gets into all sorts of teen drama hijinks) was so bad, I instantly became hooked. We binged the whole thing in about 10 days right before leaving for Korea. As I am prone to do (sometimes ironically, sometimes not), I decided to make XO, Kitty my whole personality for the trip.
Fast forward to Busan on May 11. Our town guide, Kim, met Elizabeth’s family and myself at the train station. We waited for James and Moriah to arrive a half hour later and then immediately got into another one of those giant Mercedes vans to begin touring around town. Our first stop was at the Gukje street market near the city center. Unlike Myeongdong, Gukje felt a little bit more like an actual market. Not everything was a street food vendor; you could buy peppers, protein powders, or fish skulls for making broth. It was a complex maze of covered alleyways that looked familiar…
I poked Moriah. “Moriah! This is the street market from Season 2, Episode 6 of Xo, Kitty!” If you can count on anything, you can count on Moriah to know about anything even tangentially related to Korean culture. She scrutinized her environment. “The one where Min Ho met Kitty and her great-aunt?” It was the very same!
Two giddy XO, Kitty fans and their embarrassed friends explored the area.
- Boogi and Hechi
Another thing that I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned until now. Along with the Choi Joo-Hwon song, one of the oft-repeated themes of our vacation were the Korean city mascots. What is a city mascot, you ask? Well, it started when I noticed that everywhere we went in Seoul, there was a pink monster dude on advertisements, billboards, etc. Look way in the distance at the Skydome and you’ll see the ad for Hechi and Soul Friends:
Here’s Hechi at the Seoul City Hall, presumably telling you to be a good steward of traffic:
Finally my curiosity was piqued enough that I looked it up. Turns out a haechi is a member of the Korean mythological pantheon, somewhere between a gargoyle and a lion and a dragon. People put haechi statues in their yards to protect their homes. So of course in the 21st century, Seoul has adopted Hechi as a cartoon mascot for the entire city. Opinions in our group were mixed about him. Elizabeth loved Hechi; Winston said he wanted to “taste his flesh”.
Opinions were not mixed when Kim took us to the coastal section of Busan in search of some hiking. Unfortunately, the shuttle bus down to the hike was closed, so we weren’t able to do that. However, at the visitor’s center was a bench that was occupied by Busan’s own mascot, Boogi. Behold:
Look at him! Is he a pigeon or a seagull? How does he get those shoes on the webbed feet? Why does he always have glasses on top of his head, but he’s never wearing them? Needless to say, our group bought a lot of Boogi souvenirs during our time in Busan. James still has a stuffed Boogi on his backpack.
- The weirdest coffee shop I’ve ever been to
You hear the word “hipster” often, usually from people who have never seen anything actually hipster in their lives. They use it to describe anything associated with the younger generation that they don’t understand. I certainly hadn’t seen anything before that really matched the stereotype of “hipster”.
Then we went to Momo’s Coffee. It was a located in an old warehouse alongside a wharf. Everything inside was painted a brilliant white with Ikea-ass furniture everywhere. You could see a coffee assembly line like some sort of Krispy Kreme of coffee behind the register. Every single table and booth was filled with young Korean people wearing a level of fashion I’d never attempted to attain in my everyday life. The only word in my mind was “hipster”.
But the coffee was indeed tasty. I bought a bag to bring home.
- The “Machu Picchu/Santorini of Korea”
That’s a direct quote off of the sign on a rooftop at Gamcheon Cultural Village, a neighborhood tucked into a mountain valley with a gleaming bay at the mouth of it. Unlike the traditional-minded Seoul hanok village, Gamcheon was a collection of brightly colored buildings splayed into the hillsides with roads jutting up at impossible angles.
Forget Santorini (because I’ve never been there) – this reminded me of Elizabeth and my trip to Cabo San Lucas more than anything else.
Kim took us around Gamcheon as the sun began to set behind the hills. There were cute little shops and restaurants and whatnot. There were some tourists (obviously, given the group of seven white people walking down the streets), but it was nowhere near as annoying as the hordes wandering around Bukchon. Plus, I was charmed by the local’s obsession with K-Pop groups, particularly international sensation BTS (James and Moriah just threw up reading that description):
I don’t have much to say about Gamcheon other than that it was cool, very pretty, and an underrated highlight of the trip.
- What even was this hotel, man
I’ve stayed at my share of wildly ostentatious hotels in the last year. The Excelsior Vittoria in Italy was the most classically posh; the Goldener Berg in Austria had the most insane views; the Victoria-Jungfrau had the craziest amenities; hell, the Four Seasons in Seoul had something to say when it came to nuttiest restaurants.
But when we talk about over-the-top, in-your-face, laugh-out-loud displays of wealth and power, you should stay at the Park Hyatt Busan. I have my doubts that every room is like this, but Pam convinced them that we needed an adjoining suite of three rooms for herself, Winston/Moira, and Elizabeth/myself (Moriah and James were staying a couple of blocks away near Haeundae Beach in a surprisingly affordable high-rise hotel of their own). Each of the rooms in the suite was pretty wild, but somehow Elizabeth and I ended up in one that was much closer to a giant apartment than a hotel room. There was a full kitchen, two toilets (with bidets!), a full living room, three beds in the master bedroom, and this kind of view if you stopped to take a bath:
I’m very serious when I say that it felt like the suite that a famous KPop band (BTS? Is that you?) would stay at.
- Tornado steaks abroad
It’s a time-honored tradition: have a good storm chase ending in a tornado, eat a steak. It had been a good long time since my last tornado steak (almost 5 years, going back to May 26, 2021 I believe). But then my three-year tornado-less drought was broken on April 23, 2026 with James. The Braman tornado was one of the best catches of my life, and James declared it the very best in his. It deserved steak. The only problem is that once I dropped him off at his car, he drove back up to Wichita and we were three hours apart from each other, unable to easily meet up for some celebratory ribeyes.
So I decided: why not have the Korean version while in Busan? The Internet gave me the location (but not necessarily the name; restaurant names don’t seem to translate smoothly between Korean and English. I don’t think Koreans place as high a value on business names for small businesses, perhaps?) of a highly-rated Korean beef restaurant just a few minutes from the hotel near Haeundae Beach. It did take a little while after leaving the Uber to figure out the exact location, and then flag down James and Moriah, but before long the seven of us were checked in for our reservation.
It quickly became clear that nobody who worked at that restaurant knew a lick of English. Like, none whatsoever. At most, we could gesture and say one-word sentences to one another. And it only took me a few minutes to realize that it didn’t matter. When the food is good, and it’s being cooked and served right in front of you, who needs the spoken language? Nothing communicates appreciation more like gobbling down a buffet in front of you. Our group shut the restaurant down that night, drinking rice wine and somaek (thanks, Katie!), eating insanely good Korean beef and all of the sides (hello, kimchi!), and listening to James and me recount the war story of the easiest tornado the two of us ever chased.
- A walk on the beach
Haeundae Beach is one of the more famous spots in Busan. It overlooks the bay with a cool view of the Gwangjan Bridge (which our hotel also overlooked). We’d ubered to the restaurant for dinner, but Pam and I thought it would be fun to walk back. We headed out toward the beach (“Oh my god, Moriah. This is where Min Ho kissed Kitty at the end of Season 3, Episode 1!!!”) to say good night to our friends and make the mile walk back. It turned out to be a great decision. Somebody was having an absolutely nutty sandcastle competition on the beach.
That was just my favorite sandcastle amount a couple dozen entries. They were so large that people had built or placed ladders into the sides of the sand piles so that they could traverse them more easily. That wasn’t the only thing along the beach even at this time of night. Haeundae Beach is a famous busking spot for performers dreaming of being the next K-Pop idol. Walking by one of the performers was basically a serenade on the way back to the hotel.
Just as I could tell Elizabeth was getting sick of the walk back, we came around the final bend toward the Park Hyatt. Busan at night was potentially even prettier than Busan during the day.
I’d love to say that “I couldn’t wait to explore some more”, but the truth is, that could wait. First, I needed like 8 hours of deep sleep in a preposterous hotel room.
