I lived in Seoul for a little over a year, and currently I’ve been in lurvely Daegu for two. But this weekend I’m in Busan for the Lunar New Year, just relaxing and reading and hanging out before my real (i.e., long) vacation in February.
Even in the middle of winter, without being able to go swimming in the ocean and enjoying the sight of throngs of tourists from within and without Korea flocking to the raw fish restaurants, the odeng stalls (Busan has the best odeng, and they sell most of it to Japan! Shock!), and, ahem, the many incredibly drunk people of all nationalities, there’s a vibe here that’s more welcoming than in the rest of the country.
Of course, Busan is a port city, and ports have always been where worlds collide.
An older Korean friend of mine claimed that Busanites are the smartest Koreans. I quickly responded that I’d been told Seoulites were. He went on to say that even before liberation from Japan in 1945, international shipping and radio waves from Japan had made Busanites the most open to foreigners, and the most internationally minded. (Mind you, resentment against Japan remains high to this day, but attitudes towards the more modern and open world view that Japan represented is a bit different, albeit complicated.)
Going back centuries, Busan was the first Korean city that allowed for foreigners to trade with the natives. And while they were hardly embraced, it was a far cry from the attitudes towards foreigners throughout the rest of the peninsula (overland trade with China to the north being a notable exception).
Pretentious navel gazing on my part? Probably. But if I didn’t enjoy my current job in Daegu so much I’d definitely be looking to find work here, in South Korea’s most international of cities.
Also, parts of it are gorgeous.