Haeundaegongwon

Today marks the start our trip to South Korea, specifically Busan! 🎉
Our flight to Busan was quite early, so we had to arrive at the airport around 8:30-9am. Yebin was not 100% but on the road to recovery! ❤️ We got to Narita airport with all our big luggages and checked in! Sadly Maya, Farheen and myself were slightly over the max limit of free checked luggage so we had to pay a small fee. 😅 Our flight was on time and not long at all (about 2 hours). We finally landed in Busan and made it through customs quicker than expected! Since we had a lot of luggage and we didn’t want to go through the trouble of lugging it on the public transit, we decided to take a taxi. Luckily in Korea, Yebin and Jen were with us, so they could speak Korean to the locals. We found a driver of a minivan who offered to take us for ~$40 CAD (40,000 won). But Jen said he had a bit of a sketchy vibe to him… 🙃 Luckily nothing happened and we got to our hotel in one piece!
We checked in and went up to our rooms! Maya and I shared one room, Jen, Farheen and Yebin shared the other room. The view was quite nice, you could see the buildings with a mountain at the back!
One thing we noticed when arriving was that we seemed to have chosen a hotel right near the market, so there were a lot of elderly people walking on the streets. The smell in the air was very similar to Asian markets I’ve been to, but Maya was quite sensitive to this smell haha. 😅 On the bright side, there were plenty of pharmacies around, so Yebin and Farheen visited one of them to see if they could find some products to help them! Another bonus was that there was a convenience store on the first floor of our building so we’d always frequent that! Yebin decided to stay at the hotel for the day so Jen and Farheen went to grab her some rice porridge. We also had a Starbucks as well, so Maya and I went there to wait for the two ladies! 😄 I think I got either a Youthberry tea or Yuja tea (I can’t quite remember haha) 😅 Maya got some sort of iced coffee latte. We both thought our drinks were quite sweet. We met up with Farheen (who also got a drink at Starbucks) and Jen. We decided to chill at the hotel a bit before we left to the Haeundae Beach. When we were ready, we took the subway (which was about 45 mins) to the beach and it was so pretty!! It was a bit cloudy that day so sadly not many sunset pics. But we did get a few good pics there! We even made a fun little video (which I won’t be posting here haha). 😂
Around 6:30pm, we left to go to Spa Land. This is a huge indoor spa with a bath, several saunas and foot baths! It’s located in the Shinsege mall in Centum City. We arrived at the mall and looked around for a bit but went to the spa quickly as they close at 10pm. We arrived, paid a small fee and entered the spa to change! It gave similar vibes to Go Place in Markham but a lot bigger and nicer 🥰 We explored the place a bit but wanted to eat as the main restaurant closed at 8pm. They also had a ramen bar which had so many different ramen packs! Farheen really wanted to try it so she stayed to eat ramen while us 3 went to the restaurant. Maya and I both ordered jajangmyeon (black bean noodles) and it came with fried dumplings. Jen was craving something spicy ever since she was in Japan so she ordered Dak galbi (spicy stir fryer chicken). We all also ordered beer! I tried Terra beer (cause I always see it on kdramas) 😂 and both Maya and Jen ordered Kloud beer! 🍻
After dinner, Maya and Jen wanted to check out the bath. The bath was separated between females and males so you had to strip down to enter. Farheen and I opted to just explore the spa’s many features! We first walked around and found a cute photo booth. For 5 won, we got 4 photo booth strips! It was so fun! 🥸We walked around more, found a facial/massage area but it was closed and the staff had left for the day. There was a movie room, as well as a relaxation room where you can lie on these big chairs and have individual TV’s in front of you. There were also large massage chairs in the hall area, so Farheen and I paid 3 won for a 15 min massage! Let me tell you, it was well worth it! After all the walking we did in Japan, the massage chair felt so nice! 💆🏻‍♀️
After the massage, we walked around the ground floor and found an outdoor foot bath area. There were several shallow pools of different temperatures where you can sit and rest your feet in or just walk through. It was very relaxing and quite therapeutic since the ground was all cobblestones so definitely good for the circulation! 😂
It was near closing time, but we saw that the spa had so many sauna rooms. We quickly went into almost all of them (literally walked in, sat for a few mins, then left 🤣) We were having too much fun here!
We finally met up with Jen and Maya, who both mentioned the bath was really relaxing as well!
We all took the transit back to our hotel and had probably the best sleep we’ve had during our whole trip so far! 😴Read more