Saturday

I did finally make it to Busan. The train ride went fairly quickly, though I was half asleep for most of it. The KTX is really fast. I think it averaged around 295 for most of the trip.
Once in Busan, I made my way to the hostel to meet my friends. We all then went for some much needed coffee. They hadn't slept much, either, although for different reasons. Most of them had started drinking on the train ride down there and hadn't stopped once they arrived. They were up until the wee hours of the morning, I think. Thank goodness for Starbucks. It was a nice walk to get there. After we had our fix, we headed for the subway.
Only some of the group were diving Saturday, so the rest of us that were there that morning went to see Beomunsa Temple. It was a very nice hike up to the temple, but my body is still feeling it. The temple was very busy due to Chusok coming up in a couple of weeks. There were lanterns hung up everywhere and craft tables for people to make mini lotus flowers and such. There were also displays of Korean art and photography. After wandering around for a while up there, we made our way back down and then went for a visit to sauna.
The sauna we went to claims to be the largest sauna in Asia. I had never really been to a sauna here before. I had only been to a jimjilbang, which is a co-ed sauna, where you are given a tshirt and shorts to wear. The other saunas are segregated. Basically public baths. Yianni was the only guy with us at the time, so he was on his own. The rest of us (only 4 at the time) had a great time jumping from bath to bath. It is like hot tubs all over the place of varying temperature, size, aroma or feature. We tried out the pepper aroma bath (looked kinda like tea, didn't smell like anything, comfortable hot), the jasmine bath (purplish water, no smell, warm but not hot), a salt bath (salty, very hot), a cold water bath next to the salt water bath (kinda icy cold, good for circulation?), a yellow mud bath, a few other baths inside as well as a couple of the open air baths (outside with shades all the way around): we tried the VERY HOT, and comfortable hot pools, but avoided the VERY cold one. We then had a nice scrub down. A body scrub, face massage and hair shampoo was I think 20000 won(? I forget). It was a bit strange at first, since you are completely naked. Not to mention the fact that the little old ladies that are doing the scrubbing were also naked. They are quite rough, too. They give you a good scrubbing to get all of the dead skin off. It rolls off, actually, in what some of my Korean friends refer to as skin noodles.
When we were finished at the sauna, we felt so relaxed. It would be nice to do that before going to bed.
We met up with the rest of the group, those that had gone diving that day and those that had arrived that day or were doing other things for the day. We all went to a nice little dwaeji kalbi (marinated pork) restaurant that overlooked Haeundae beach. Sorry... no pics of the meal.
We finished off our day down on beach doing some good old drinking.