Family Vacation - Part 3

Day three of our vacation: Wednesday was a rainy day in Busan, so we took advantage of the yucky weather to spend a day indoors at the Busan Aquarium. While tit is pretty small and doesn't really compare to some of its American counterparts, it was pretty much perfect for our wees. The best attractions were the otters, sharks, and penguins. Interestingly, while there were plenty of live penguins swimming right in front of them, my girls were much more taken with 1) the little penguin statues on one side of the exhibit and 2) the video of penguins on the other side of the exhibit. DaddyMunk and I kept trying to steer them back to the real live penguins, but no dice. Huh. We went to see the shark feeding and happened to sit in front of a trio of ladies from Pohang! I'd say "small world", but this is a small country, so really, I guess it wasn't too unlikely. But we never meet people from Pohang when we're away.

JMunk and her favorite penguin.

In front of the shark tank

WMunk enjoyed the aquarium, too.

That night we ate dinner at a Japanese/Korean restaurant. We can get that kind of cuisine at home, but it was what we really needed that night. The special treat at that meal were the GIANT fried shrimp that came with JMunk's meal. I think they were as big as her head!


Day four: Thursday was our last full day in Busan, and we spent the first part of it looking for good Russian food in Chinatown. You read that right. There's a pretty large Russian population in Busan connected with the shipping port, and many of them have little businesses in Busan's Chinatown (every big city's got one, no?). We strolled down a pretty empty Texas Street and found lots of little Russian and Filipino eateries, but since it was early in the day every place looked pretty dead. (I will admit to being very silly and giddy and trying to convince DaddyMunky that nearly every Russian man I saw was a mobster of some sort. I had lots of fun inventing stories for them in my head.) We stopped at the tourist information booth for foreigners and asked them to point us to the best Russian restaurant. They sent us to The Tiger.

It looked a little sketchy and when we entered we were greeted by three women, presumably elderly mother and her daughters sitting at one of the five tables making blini. We weren't sure what we were walking into but felt like it was too late to back out. The menu looked pretty taped and pasted together. I really was unsure. We ditched the menu and DaddyMunk whipped out his Russian skills and ordered things not on the menu. What a delicious surprise! We feasted on the very best borscht and blini we've ever had, along with some scrumptious cabbage and meat dumplings. It may well have been the very best meal of our trip.




That evening we found a branch of my favorite American pizza chain, Papa John's. While it hardly measured up to our fantastic lunch, it was pretty tasty and one of those occasionally needed comforts of home.