Think of your ideal vacation. In all likelihood, it contains some combination of three elements: cool views, cultural significance, and relaxation. Everybody has their preference of which of those three elements to emphasize. For national-park-goers like Elizabeth and me, cool views take precedence. For James and Moriah, visiting Korea was mostly an opportunity to soak in cultural experiences. And everyone has that aunt and uncle who love nothing more than to go to their beach or their trailer up north and do nothing for four days.
On May 12, 2026, our little Korea group took a tour around the city of Busan. We came about as close to hammering all three elements as you’ll ever get in a single day. Read on to learn about the views, the educational opportunities, and something called Spa Land.
- Cog railway weirdness
Our guide Kim was up bright and early trying to rally James and Moriah from their hotel, and the Fairchild Group from the other. She was more than up to the task; as we would all learn over the following 24 hours, Kim is an unstoppable force of nature. Thanks to her, our whole group was over to Mipo Station at the start of Haeundae Blueline Park.
I’m not really sure how to describe the Haeundae Blueline Park. The main attraction is a famous sky capsule track that follows the waterline. Each capsule fits four people, which meant that Elizabeth and I shared one with James and Moriah while Pam and Kim shared one with Winston and Moira. They were lucky – their capsule had Boogi painted on it. Ours was just a stupid boring old sky capsule.
The views from the walking-pace-speed trolleys were pretty neat. There were segments with a great look back toward the city center:
And then there were segments with views of the beach and waves below, or of big piney dune forests, or even of yards with little vegetable gardens in them. I’m not sure I understand the hype behind the Blue Line, but it was fun.
Plus there was some pretty good gift shopping to be done at the trolley stops. Busan pins, Korean food items, postcards, Boogi plushies – what you needed, they had.
- The glass deck
Cheongsapo Daritdol Sky Deck is located right along the water and conveniently near the Blue Line Park. You can pretty much imagine what it is just by hearing the name – it’s a bridge with a glass floor that travels out about 100 feet above the ocean.
There’s a neat view of volcanic rock, jagged coastline, distant cities, and the waves crashing into pilings well below. As for the glass deck itself, some people found a little scarier than others. I think Moriah thought my stomping was a lot more silly and amusing than Elizabeth did, which probably reflects which of them was a bit more perturbed by the thought of the glass cracking, then shattering, then sending some or all of us screaming into the surf below. But that’s just a guess.
- The female divers
Admittedly this is normally more of a Jeju thing than a Busan thing, but I’m sharing the story from the spot that we actually saw them. Far below the sky deck on the rocks and pilings, women were scattered about. They were surrounded by piles of… well, stuff – whatever they could find in the shallow waters off of Busan. These are the famed female divers of South Korea. They get up each morning and plunge into the sea to collect seaweed, mollusks, urchins, basically anything of marginal nutritional value and above. In certain places like Jeju, there are restaurants where you can essentially have their catch of the day served fresh that afternoon. Not in this case though; no doubt their harvests were bound for the nearest market.
- Nolan gets suspicious about a temple
I am not necessarily proud that I was suspicious about a temple. And before we go any further, let me clarify that the Haedong Yunggung Temple in Busan is an absolutely beautiful monument to Buddhism. It’s located right on the water and boasts some intricately painted structures within the compound. Kim was an awesome tour guide for this section of our sight-seeing as a practicing Buddhist. She made a pretty strong pitch for her religion, too.
I don’t necessarily blame Haedong for being overrun by tourists, either. Like I said in the intro, vacation is oftentimes about learning about cultures we wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise. I am not one to judge the little piggies for their ways and behaviors; on this vacation we were the most ultimate of piggies (getting driven around in large Mercedes vans, followed by local guides, and never just taking things in on our own) anyway.
But still… I found it pretty suspicious how many gift shops and opportunities to turn a dollar existed. Right inside the temple space! I guess a gift shop kind of makes sense. The Vatican almost certainly has one too. Is there a gift shop in a holy temple in Mecca? There’s probably one somewhere. But when Pam paid a couple thousand Korean won (not as much as it sounds, since 1,000 Korean won was roughly work 67 cents USD while we were there) for “wish lanterns”… alright, that’s enough for me. I’m out on your temple.
(I would like to make an addendum to say: LOVE the golden pigs, Buddhists. No idea what the lucky golden pigs do, but I felt lucky to have seen them.)
- But sure, let’s make a wish
Hey, we were little piggies! (Not golden ones.) You can’t blame us for doing what the little piggies would do and making a wish. Pam wished for imminent healing for Elizabeth’s Uncle Charlie after a recent surgery. Elizabeth made a wish for health throughout her whole family. James wished for something worthwhile, probably.
And I wished for the good health and fortune of the 2026 Detroit Tigers. A wasted wish if there ever was one.
- Chicken soup with a side of fear
You know what sounds really good on a cloudy, cool day? Chicken soup. Especially when it’s ginseng chicken soup, which just sounds tangy and delicious and Kim promised would change our lives. There’s a samgyetang place reasonably close to the temple in Busan that she took us to.
So here are the things we didn’t know about samyetang. First of all, it is in fact a chicken broth with ginseng. But rather than being a delicious shredded chicken soup like us Americans would expect, there was a whole-ass bird inside each of our bowls. This is not an exaggeration.
Another very relevant piece of the discussion: Kim sternly informed us all that leaving food on the table is extremely rude in Korea. Well that certainly won’t increase the anxiety of anyone like Elizabeth. All of a sudden, our fun lunch experience started to feel like a race to see who was going to be the least-rude among us, with everyone methodically ladling out chunks of chicken to eat off of their plates (why does everyone in that country use metal chopsticks? They’re so much less user-friendly than wooden chopsticks!). I am pleased to say that my calorie-consuming performance met with Kim’s approbation and that I was free to eat my ginseng root for dessert. Others did not handle the challenge so well (Moira and Elizabeth both requested to stick food into my bowl when no one was looking).
- Spa Land.
Now let’s get to a full trip highlight, one of the top 3 stories that I share with people when I talk about Korea, and location of James’s nightmares – Spa Land.
In Austria last fall, Elizabeth/Pam/Winston/myself all had an incredible spa day after multiple days on the run. It started what I like to think will be a new, great tradition of a day of spa relaxation in the middle of vacation. Fortunately for us, in Korea everyone does things a little bigger and grander. Enter Spa Land, located inside the world’s largest Shinsegae department store. For just 20,000 won (like $13), all 8 of us (including Kim!) got up to 4 hours inside the giant spa areas. That’s a great deal.
Winston, James, and I fumbled around with where to leave our stuff – we put a bunch in the outer lockers when we should have just shoved everything into the inner locker room – and separated off from the women in the group to change into our robes. You see, there are two main areas in the interior of Spa Land. We met back up with our friends/family in the co-ed portion of the sauna. There were various sauna/relaxation rooms to explore. Winston and I found Pam and Kim before too long in one of the rooms with the temperature proudly displayed in Celsius in front of it. The saunas were a little different than I was used to; instead of being steam rooms, these were all pretty dry (though hot), which makes sense since everyone had their Spa Land clothes on. We looked a little bit like POWs, to be honest.
There were a dozen or so rooms like this one (the charcoal wood room is pictured above). They have exotic names like the Roman Room, the Pyramid Room, the Body Sound Room. Our whole group did a little bit of spa room sampling once we found Elizabeth, Moriah, and Moira, who had been busy getting their feet nibbled by the fish that are supposed to eat the dead skin. I’m proud of them for being brave enough to stick their feet in with flesh-eating fish, but I did not join them.
Back to the dry sauna rooms. Not all of them were hot – some were near body temperature, and instead focused on releasing interesting light energy into your inner essence or some fake mumbo-jumbo like that. As a heat hunter myself, I enjoyed the one that was in the mid-70s Celsius. What was its name – the Dessication Room, or something like that? (Fomentation Room. That’s what it was.) Either way, Moriah and I sat right by the radiator like real adults, while James and Elizabeth had to bail early because it did admittedly hurt to breathe.
But all of this was really just a warm-up for the main event at Spa Land – the baths. According to their official website, Spa Land pumps thermal water from 1,000 meters underground into 22 different baths across two huge rooms. Why are there two huge rooms, you ask? It’s because they’re gender-separated. Why are they gender-separated, you ask? It’s because these baths are fully nude. Mandatory. No choice.
James politely but firmly opted out of the nude baths, but Winston and I steeled ourselves, removed our POW outfits, and marched into the baths with as much dignity as one can muster while they are trying to maintain their eyes on a plane where they don’t see anything from anyone. We used that strictly self-conscious dignity to slide into the calcium baths (right around 38 degrees Celsius) for a few minutes. Then it was time for what us Real Men were looking for: the Finnish saunas.
Let me tell you: at 70C and humid as hell, the Finnish saunas were a reasonable approximation of entering a boiling soup pot. My breath was instantly knocked out. Only one other guy was in there, sitting silently in the far corner. Like all Finnish saunas, this one had three levels of benches, and the top shelf was where all of the heat congregated. Since the two of us were this deep into toxic masculinity, both of us wordlessly stepped up to the top bench and sat down. And I immediately fried my poor family jewels on the wooden bench, which sure was an interesting experience that I could have done without. The other guy left, and it was just the two of us, the sweat rapidly forming on our bodies, and a TV screen playing highlights of the South Korean men’s national team ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
We hung in there for about 8 minutes, and then it was time to take on the equally cruel second half of the Finnish sauna: the cold plunge. There was that red scoreboard again, mocking us with the knowledge that the water in this empty pool was 11C. I stepped gingerly in to my knees and immediately cringed. Every man knows the feeling of getting deeper and deeper into cold water until they are submerged. This ratcheted up that feeling to a sweet manmade horror beyond all comprehension. Winston and I were staggering slowly into the water like drunk people, groaning in equal parts horror and relief as the cold pool finally engulfed all of that caked-on sweat. It was exquisite.
After that first run, the two of us took on a couple of slightly tamer saunas (but also, saunas with a much higher occupancy) with cold plunges at the end. By mutual assent, we decided to end things off in one more hot-tub temperature mineral bath. Originally, it was just us in the shallow pool, but within a minute or two another guy with a glorious tattoo on his back stepped in. We all sat in silence for a few seconds before he grabbed the bull by the horns (metaphorically!!! I didn’t mean it as a literalism!!!).
“Where are you guys from?” he asked, studiously avoiding looking at our junk.
“The United States. How about you?” I asked, making eye contact with him and no lower like my life depended on it.
Turned out the guy was from Taiwan. This was his first time in any sort of setup like Spa Land, and he wasn’t all that familiar with Korea in the first place. Still, he was enjoying his time in the country and in the spa – though, and I quote, he did acknowledge “There are a lot of penises”.
Winston and I felt triumphant as we walked out of the pools to go accidentally use the wrong showers. We had conquered the situation. Not even bungling the “leave the spa area” situation (you have to settle up all charges BEFORE reaching your outer locker, a real problem if you left your wallet out there) could make us feel less like men of the world. We sat outside the spa with James and Moriah, both of whom had decided not to go into the baths, and waited for Pam, Elizabeth, and Moira to emerge (and you want to talk about bravery? How about going into no-clothing-allowed baths with your boyfriend’s sister and mother? Moira, you are braver than I could be). While sitting out there, I had an epiphany: this was the real secret to how the Romans conquered the classical world. It wasn’t the policy of clemency and political inclusion to a defeated enemy. It wasn’t superior military tactics. It surely wasn’t the so-called “engineering” of their roads and buildings and aqueducts.
No, the real reason the Romans conquered the world is because they made free public baths wherever they want. Much like us and the Taiwanese guy, you can’t help but foster a better community when you’re all sitting naked in water and your own sweat.
- The mall we couldn’t afford
Stepping back a little bit from Spa Land to the mall it was housed in: let’s talk about Shinsegae Centum City. It is billed as the world’s largest department store, and apparently the Guinness Book of World Records agrees:
At over 3 million square feet, there’s a hell of a lot of department store here. There is in fact 14 whole aboveground floors worth of department store. That’s enough to include Spa Land without even noticing it. Not just Spa Land, either: how about a skating rink on the 6th floor? If that doesn’t impress you, what about a whole-ass driving range on the top several floors? Plus a rooftop garden of some sort that James got some beautiful pictures from when he wandered away from the group and followed the male instinct to just keep climbing until you can’t anymore. We told Kim that we could get ourselves home from here so that there was time to do a little *shopping*.
Here’s the rub: Shinsegae was a beautiful department store, and it didn’t matter one lick to any of us because it was way too expensive to afford. Maybe our first hint should have been when Spa Land was wedged in between a Prada and a Louis Vuitton. There was a Chanel and a Gucci. And here we were, some sad American shoppers, not able to afford a lick of it. At first we figured that surely the more escalators we took up, the more affordable things would become. But even near the top floor, there was an entire wing devoted to golf outfitters. And it was unfortunate how expensive that even “cheap” brands like Tiger Woods or Nike were. This was a humbling experience for a group of Americans.
- The sub-basement that we could (kind of) afford
It turns out that if you want to have a good time shopping at a Korean department store, just go straight underground. That’s not a joke: the Lotte department store in downtown Seoul (I’ll share that story in an upcoming post) was the exact same way. The basement level of Shinsegae was this enormous food market, but unlike the outdoor food markets we’d been to, this one felt a lot more like an American food court. Or maybe an Ikea or something. I don’t know, there was a sensory overload going on. Either way, Elizabeth and I both got pistachio gelato which relieved a lot of the stress and tension of a weird shopping scenario.
And then, something even weirder: there was a basement below the basement. A sub-basement! How much consumerism can one city hold? In Busan, it is apparently limitless, because this subbasement was sprawling and full of actually cheap pop-up shops. To my sorrow, I never found the blazer that I had decided to buy on a whim. But to my satisfaction, I did get a nice-looking shirt for like 10,000 won. Check it out (from later in the trip):
There’s fashion, and then there’s Korea-style fashion.
- Seven-Eleven for dinner? In this economy?
Of all of the interesting things Elizabeth pulled off of the Internet regarding Korea, the one that stuck with her the most was their love of convenience stores. We saw that all over the place on Seoul. But it isn’t just stopping in for a cup of ice or a banana milk – people actually go to 7/11 to eat dinner. Most of them will have a little microwave or toaster oven or something and you can just heat up whatever you want right there and sit down and have a convenient meal. It’s strange to contemplate but makes some sense in a country that loves its ramen.
After Shinsegae, we said a temporary goodbye to James and Moriah. Tomorrow they would take the train back to Seoul while the remainder of us headed on to Jeju. For those of us in the Meister-Fairchild group, it was the perfect night for a convenience store dinner simply because we were all too exhausted to contemplate another sitdown restaurant. In fact, Pam fell asleep before Elizabeth and I could even run around the corner to the Seven-Eleven.
I let Elizabeth have the run of the Seven-Eleven. Even by the standards of cheap Korean consumer goods, the amount she was able to purchase ridiculously cheap boggled the mind. Ramens, Cheetos, Oreos, and whatever treats had the most garish labelling on them – by the time was done, the table in our hotel room looked like a Halloween candy trading post.
My spicy ramen sucked, by the way. Very spicy like I wanted, but absolutely no flavor. Just empty spice for no purpose.
On that slightly bitter (I wish. If the ramen had been bitter, at least it would have had some flavor) note, our one and only full day in Busan was done. It had been a rapid-fire, take-the-bull-by-the-horns day. It was enough to convince me that Busan is one of my favorite cities I’ve ever visited.
