This post consists of my scattered recollections of Busan, Seoul's dirtier, more decentralised port city cousin. While it has a few solid spots of enjoyment and while I did snag some decent photos, the sullen truth is that I was in a darkly depressed mood during the terminal leg of my South Korean holiday. A blackened, joylessness coursed through me. I was devitalised and disconcerted, in part, because I was still recuperating from a bad cold I'd picked up in Seoul. But the sickness also prised open cages around my heart. It forced me to brood on the fact things were not well at that point in my life, despite my opportunity to travel. I recall glumly strolling the Busan Christmas Tree Festival, a crowded annual winter event with vividly festive lights, live music, and street performances, feeling awkward and miserable. I was in a fugue state, casting the occasional glances at the scenery, but mostly inside myself, navel-gazing rather than sightseeing. Surrounded, yet apart. One idea that especially bothered me was how I'd arranged this trip to coincide with Christmas Day and (despite consciously, if unmindfully, committing to it) was nevertheless emotionally unprepared to be alone on the 25th. I ended up spending Christmas Day itself at Busan's famed Spa Land Centum City, an ultra-modern Korean bathhouse located within what is supposedly the largest department store in the world, Shinsegae Centum City. I appreciated the novelty. For a while. It kept my most festering feelings at bay, but there was too much heaviness in my being to completely wash the gloom away. I felt like a failure. My career, a promising position at a prestigious economics consultancy, had fallen apart. My personal life was muted and loveless. There was no passion in my flesh. I was burnt out. I was lost. Unhappy. I was on a knife's edge concerning solitude and loneliness. I craved solitude, but if the stars weren't carefully aligned in my skull, that lovely, tender solitude would skip and tumble into its evil double: a ditch of despairing loneliness, self-loathing, and misanthropy. I was not pleased to be alive and no amount of rumination could push me out of this equilibrium. Balance... where was my sacred and wretched balance? Haedong Yonggungsa Temple... Yes... The photos vaguely remind me. Either before or after Christmas (I can't recall, my memory formation wasn't great during my Busanian hours and minutes), I came to this popular seaside temple. Unfortunately, I was just going through the touristic motions. Pushing through without pause. Pushing through with pulse. So, obviously, I didn't feel impressed at the time and only these photos so many years later have faintly stirred something in me. It's a Buddhist site dating back to the Goryeo Dynasty of the 14th century, with a name that means Korean Dragon Palace Temple. According to legend, a sea god appeared in the dreams of an acclaimed religious teacher during a brutal famine and told him that if he built this temple, all their hardships would dissolve away, like salt in the ocean. It was then destroyed by a fire and cast into ruin during the Japanese invasions of Korea in the late 16th century and was finally rebuilt in the 1930s. But did I know all this from my visit? Certainly not. As I said, I was simply going through the obligatory guidebook motions. I am writing this now as an exercise in research and recollection. An exercise in picking up the pottery shards and fusing them back together into a workable, lucid thing. That's the perniciousness of depression: it destroys the autobiographical. In its dejections, it painfully accelerates the soul's entropy. The self-narrative becomes infused with a hazy wrongness. I find writing posts like these an effective approach to tidying up difficult episodes in my life. Not in a therapeutic way that wholesomely salvages them ex-post, but in a clinical, almost-archival sense. I go through these images in hopes of geolocating myself in distant, foggy moments. Back into the realm of essential human experience. Into noise and taste, scent and texture. It is probably a soft and futile hope. I look at my photos from in and around the Jagalchi fish market and can (almost) hark back my visceral disgust at seeing tanks of squirming 'penis fish', a species of marine worm consumed in some parts of East Asia. When I look at pictures of food I've ordered, I can (almost) conjure the loveliness of dwaji gukbap, a sought-after Busan specialty composed of bone broth, pork, miso, soy sauce, rice wine, and many side dishes. For as long as I could remember, I've struggled to figure out what goals and values I was supposed to cultivate... I felt like I was asleep for much of my life, and that, around the time of my Korea trip, I was slowly stirring into consciousness again and examining everything in orbit - my career, my hobbies, my personality - and reacting with a grinding despondency. But this post isn't about how I resolved this struggle. There's nearly nothing here. Just pixels and colour values. Anyway, here's a photo of Haeundae Beach on a crisp winter's day, an urban beach in Busan that's considered one of South Korea's most famous strands... Last on the list of attractions featured in this post is Busan's Gamcheon Culture Village. It presents itself as a slummy, labyrinthian Korean favela that's been squeezed through a deranged pastel children's book filter. Its origins were indeed one of hilly poverty. The village was built by the city administration during the 1920s and 30s as a way to relocate poor working families into an area secluded from the port, yet proximate enough to provide labour. What tourists see these days is the result of a 2009 effort by artists, students, and locals to regenerate the town with the power of gaudy paint cans. And that's kind of what it's all about, isn't it? Trying to cobble something together, even when its origins are suspect. Trying to dredge up something impoverished from the inner world and present it to the outer one. I will never set foot in Busan again after my psychological trials there, but these sentences you are reading right now are something I've finally made of it.
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AuthorMing is an economist, traveller, and creative writer from Melbourne, Australia. He’s a nebulous collection of particles on the lookout for a good corner to sit with a book and a cup of coffee. Archives
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