PIFF

October 3rd-5th, 2008

Jake and I decided to go to Pusan/Busan's international fim festival (PIFF = Pusan International Film Festival). We hopped on a bus and six hours later ended up in Pusan. I swear that was the second longest bus ride I've ever had to take. It's not easy playing cards with the person sitting next to you and requires a lot of odd turns. Inhee came with us and got us to where we were going. She even saw one of the Film Festival films with us (It was called Wendy and Lucy and was pretty good, but not very well thought out). On the metro to the bus station in Seoul, I was learning a new phrase and trying to teach it to Jake. In broken Korean, we kept repeating "I'm tipsy, keep it a secret". It wasn't until we got off the metro that I realized everyone around us could understand us. That explains the giggles.

We ate Pizza Hut's delicious cheese and garlic pizza thing. It was fantastic! Afterwards we met up with Brian, Steven, and Youngmin. Drinks and laughs and a jim jil bang. Having never been to a jim jil bang before, I was a little confused and got several odd looks, but hey, who was going to explain what I was doing wrong? Oh well. 

The jim jil bang was also wicked crowded because of the film festival. It was so uncomfortably warm. There was a warm room that was like 90 some degrees... with a core of 100 something. I nearly died. Jake was ever so helpful and located an ice room that I basically wanted to live in.

The next day, we wandered around a bit and found ourselves near the set of a movie. I took a picture and was asked to delete it... which I never did. After that we went to the museum of modern art. I'll include a couple pictures of random things we saw there:

I was told to erase this picture because this was the filming of a movie... sneaky, eh?

World's most complicated quilt!

Contact Lens Art

Pictures placed in the corner, don't know why I liked it so much.

This room was super dark and the floor looked like water, but was reflective and plastic. Crazy light show!

We decided to go see another movie and stood in line for several hours only to find out that the movie was sold out. We did meet a guy who was American, but grew up in France. We played cards, and he was reading Watership Down.

That night, after wandering around Busan, totally lost, we found a random hotel to stay at. It was cheap and it was a couple blocks from the greatest bar in 부산. The bar was called Bubble Bubble. We had a couple drinks and this group of 20 somethings were celebrating a birthday and they came over to practice their English and offered us some of the cake and we bought them a bottle of soju. Good times. 

Jake snagged a picture of the men's bathroom too... oh dear.

Back at the hotel and a couple bottles of house wine later, we fell asleep as the AC was on overdrive. After a frigid night's sleep we slept in way later than we were supposed to... still not sure how that happened. I'll blame the wine. We still had a 6 hour bus ride back to Wonju. Luckily we made it back before the 2 am curfew. Good times!