I am so behind in updating this thing...

so, last weekend (ie., the first weekend in april):

saturday michelle, tricia and I went to busan. we had planned to go to jinhae for a cherry blossom festival, but all sorts of things (namely transportation) stood in our way, so we opted for busan instead. we walked on the beach for a bit. I could have stayed there all day. it does my heart so much good to be near the sea. I had my shoes off and my jeans rolled up within a minute of stepping onto the beach. t followed suit not long after. michelle tried to keep her shoes on, but the tide was a fierce adversary and she eventually removed them. at one point one of her shoes attempted to float away as she tried to balance in order to keep her socks dry while removing the shoes. we caught it, but for the rest of her visit, right up until this morning, she swore that her shoe smelled like sea water. we dallied on the beach collecting tiny shells and taking photos, and after awhile we headed into the beachside aquarium. this was the coolest aquarium I ever remember being to...the had all sorts of exotic and awesome sea creatures, including many jellyfish, HUGE stingrays, starfish (which we got to touch), more kinds of eels than I new existed, and the cutest thing ever: an axolotl, which looks a bit like a lizard, and a lot like the cartoons of the first creature to evolve legs and crawl out of the sea. there were penguins (a type of african penguin called, I kid you not, 'jackass' penguins) and seals. there was also a huge glass tunnel to walk through, where sharks and huge sea turtles swam all around you. those sharks were vicious looking, man. we sat and watch them for awhile, making fun of their teeth. after the aquarium we walked for awhile along some trails through a kind of a cliffside...we wanted to go to another beach and thought about catching a bus, but opted for a taxi instead. when we got to the other beach, there wasn't much to do but stand and look at the sea a bit longer and collect some more shells. we had wanted to go to a mountain fortress, but it was too late by the time we left the aquarium. after exhausting the possibilities of the second beach, we headed back down to the area near the train station, to "texas street."
I had heard about texas street intermittently since arriving in korea a few weeks after tricia's first trip to busan. texas street, I was told, was the russian district of busan, where middle aged russian women of the night came out at dusk to peddle their "wares" from the doors of bars and coffee shops. all day long tricia and I had been alluding to the "russian whores" and how we would eventually swing by texas street to see them (and of course also to ingest the odd experience of walking down a korean street where all the signs are in russian and koreans conduct business in russian). we stopped by the train station first so that t could use the hwajongshil (bathroom), and while she was inside, michelle posed a question that will forever live on in my memory as one of the funniest moments of her visit: "so, what exactly is this 'russian horse'?" All day long, she had been hearing a soft s where we were saying a hard s and, and as tricia later put it "imagining a majestic animal when all I have to show you are these broken creatures." so with michelle's hopes of equine beauty swiftly dashed, we took a walk down texas street, where indeed the "russian horses," as they will forever be known, were beginning to emerge in ones and twos. one of them cursed in russian at either us or the universe in general. we walked around along the adjacent streets for awhile, through a market...the whole neighborhood was odd, and I enjoyed being there simply because it was absolutely nothing like anywhere I'd ever been before. eventually we decided to catch the train back to daegu and have dinner there.

more to come soon.