More pictures from PIFF

Pusan International Film Festival

In October, I went back to Pusan (pronounced Busan). It was the International Film Festival. Many of my friends decided to take the trip as well. Some of them took the ferry over, but I was not doing that because it was an 11 hour ferry! I have never been on a boat that long as was a bit afraid that I might become sea sick. I flew over with my friend Stu. He is a private teacher here that is from Scotland. We both stayed at Josh's house for the weekend.

We arrived early Friday morning (October 3rd). The first place we went to is an area called Seomyeon. It is where the giant fish market and shopping area is. Giant is an understatement of how large this place was. There were markets that went on in every direction. At one point we were so turned around that we had to find a main street and gather our barrings again! The fish market was awesome. Along the bay there are these tents with tables in them so you can sit and have fresh fish that they are bringing in off the boats. At the market we saw this huge chunk of meat that still had a spine in it,so I asked the woman what it was and she said "Shark"! WOW.

We also went to PIFF (Pusan International Film Festival) Square. There was a stage and booths set up for the festival. The square was packed with people watching performances on the stage and waiting in line for films. We tried to get tickets for Saturday but that was not going to happen because we are not Korean. They tend to make things really difficult for people that are not Korean, and then wonder why no other cultures attend these things! Gee, I wonder! Ha ha ha ha ha. So we decided to just wait until Saturday and go to a box office and buy tickets.

That night we went to the Casino. Here, Koreans are not allowed to go to the casino. The only people that are there are Chinese and Japanese business men, and of course foreigners. The perk of the casinos are that they serve free alcohol and this one had free food. There was a bar and a dinning area, so you could take a break from gambling and have a meal! It was great.

The next day we headed to Haeundae Beach to scope out the ticket scene. I was really afraid that all of the tickets for the outdoor theatre would be sold out. Once we got to the beach, there were people every where. The beach was lined with booths and vendors. We had to ask a few people how to get tickets before they sent us to another area about a 20 minute walk from the beach. We finally got the the box office and had to buy tickets for 10 people (mind you there were 3 of us) and they instructed us that they can only sell 2 tickets to each person. Luckily, there were some other foreigners eating lunch next door. We kindly asked them to buy extra tickets for us. The agreed and that solved that problem. The tickets were nowhere near sold out. I wasn't surprised because Koreans do everything at the last minute. We bought the tickets about 8 hours before show time!

We had lunch that day at an AMAZING Mexican place. It is a hole in the wall. Literally the place had four stools to sit on inside and a line that went down the street. The owner was from San Diego and made everything to order! It was a long wait but well worth it.

After lunch we went back to the beach to hangout, look at the vendors and meet up with everyone that we bought tickets for! We then figured out that the outdoor theatre was not at the beach we were sitting at. We had to take a taxi about 10 minutes away to another location. The theatre was amazing. We had the Pusan Skyline, ocean, and bridge as a back drop.

The first movie was a Japanese animation. I have never watched a film like this before. It luckily had English sub titles. This film was rather slow and dragged on. People were falling asleep. I payed attention though because I thought it was amazing how they construct these films. There was a malfunction with the projector in the last part of the movie so we had and "intermission" early. It took a while to fix and when the first movie finish it was pretty late. Many of us headed out and didn't stay for the second film.

It was another great weekend in Pusan. I have posted some pictures with this post and I will do another post with more pictures. Enjoy!