Welcome to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story.
In this episode, host Katherine LaGrave sits down with New York Times bestselling author and Afar contributing writer Peggy Orenstein, who recently traded her usual slow-travel style for the bustling energy of Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city.
Known for her thoughtful explorations of walking trails like the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage and Slovenia’s Juliana Trail, Peggy discovered that sometimes speeding things up can lead to extraordinary discoveries.
Transcript
Katherine LaGrave, host: Welcome to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story.
I’m Katherine LaGrave, deputy editor at Afar. I’m pretty lucky. I get to brainstorm, assign, and edit features for our print magazine. And I get to work with writers who have an ear for incredible travel stories.
Peggy Orenstein is one of those writers. A New York Times bestselling author, Peggy is an Afar contributing writer, and I often think of her as our sloooooow walking and travel person: her first story for us was about tackling the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage, and for her most recent one, she hiked Slovenia’s new Juliana Trail. Well, her most recent one until her most recent one—that is. And that one was a little different.
Because this time, she sped things up by visiting Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city. Busan is bustling, but to Peggy, that was one of its many, many charms.
I sat down with Peggy to understand why she chose Busan in the first place and perhaps even more importantly, why she’s already planning on going back.
Katherine [in interview]: Welcome, Peggy. So happy to be chatting with you today and thanks for making the time.
Peggy Orenstein: I’m happy to be here.
Katherine: So I wanna start generally, where did you first hear about Busan and what did you hear about it?
Peggy: Well, you know, I’m just a fan of going to the kind of slightly off-brand city in the country. When you go to the main city, when you go to Paris, when you go to London, it’s like you go to those cities, you don’t really go to the country, you go to that place.
And so by going to someplace that’s maybe a second city or a third city or a less popular city, um, you can learn so much. So with Busan, first of all, I have a friend who lives there, honestly, but also there’s this fantastic movie that’s called Ode to My Father. Do you know that movie?
Katherine: No, I don’t think we’ve talked about that.
Peggy: This is something that’s not in this story, but um, I watched it three times. It’s kind of a melodrama and you have to see it on something like Tubi, but it’s this movie about Korea as the, what we call the Korean War was starting when the communists were coming down from the north and North Korean cities were falling and everybody fled to Busan.
The city just ballooned in population like overnight, and hundreds of thousands of people came and just took residence in the streets. And it’s a story of this one family through that era. And I was so captivated by what they did to survive and the markets that were there and the sort of what it would mean for a city to go from being this sort of small coastal place to ballooning into, you know, the, this major refuge.
Katherine: There’s also this bigger idea of visiting so-called Second Cities, which I love. And you start the story in such an interesting way. What inspired your lead sentences?
Peggy: Years ago I was sitting in on a friend’s high school classroom, uh, and she was a history teacher and she was teaching, I was kind of surprised by the lesson she was teaching.
She was talking about Abigail Adams and, and I thought, you know, Why are you starting there? And she said, “Well, if you start with George Washington, you’re never gonna get to Abigail Adams. But if you start with Abigail Adams, you know you’re eventually gonna get to George.”
Because if you begin with the obvious, it’s like you might, you might never get beyond, um, the expected. You might never get beyond the tried and true. You might never get beyond the beaten path. But if you start with something that’s maybe a little over there, a little to the side, a little bit. Not, you know, crazy, but something that somebody might not initially think of. You’ll probably eventually get to that main place and you’ll be enriched along the way, so I kind of took her lesson and apply it to travel now.
Katherine: I love that. Speaking of known things, you write in the story that Korean cuisine is often associated with beef, but that Busan’s big flex is seafood. What was your favorite seafood experience?
Peggy: My favorite seafood experience was a little bit of the weirdness. They have a fish market there that is sort of similar to what Tsukiji is in Tokyo, and it’s right on the water. And you can go and you can see all the seafood that they’ve pulled out of the ocean earlier that day, and you can point to what you want and then it goes directly upstairs to the second story where they give you a number and that’s the restaurant you’re assigned to.
It’s a large open space. And the, you know, the restaurants, as it were, are kind of not distinguished from one another. And they bring you the food that, um, you’ve just pointed out in, you know, in successive stages. And my favorite was, uh, octopus, was brought. And it was, it was still wriggling. And I put a piece in my mouth and it immediately, it was a tentacle, it like clung to the side of my mouth, which didn’t feel great. Um, and I, you know, I quickly, I swallowed. It had like, a sort of sesame oil on it and sesame seasoning. It was very tasty, but it was a really strange experience.
And then I went back to my hotel later that night and I was reading about that and, uh, it said that there’s a certain number of people who, um, actually die every year eating that meal. And I had been with my friends and I said, “Ya’ll, you might’ve told me that.” And my friend Alex said, “Didn’t I say chew, chew chew?” And I said, “No, you did not.”
So I feel kind of, um, like a badge of honor, uh, when I tell anybody that I’ve been home, when I tell Korean friends or other people who’ve been there that I, that I ate that, they’re, they’re pretty impressed, I gotta say.
Katherine: It does sound like quite an epic experience, and I love how you write about it in the story. Another epic experience you have: Busan is home to the country’s largest Korean-style bathhouse. What was that like?
Peggy: Spa land. Um, uh, that was the best. The amazing thing about Busan that I had not anticipated was that it has, you know, a little bit of everything. So it had this incredible history, which was a wonderful to learn, and these old markets that you could wander through.
It had amazing seafood, which was distinctive in Korea. It had beach, you know, shoreline that was just gorgeous, and then it had the biggest Korean spa, and if you’ve never been in a Korean spa, I’m very sorry, first of all, and it’s something you must experience in life. But you go in and it had 22, it was a two-story, like a Disneyland of spa almost, except in a good way. Um, with 22 thermal baths and 13 saunas and all these radiation rooms and a restaurant and a cafe. So the spas of Korea, you know, it’s a place of community. It’s a place you spend with your family. It’s a place you go with your friends. It’s wellness and um, it’s kind of, you know, really essential to Korean culture.
And so what you do is you in, in the women’s, there’s single-sex divisions and um, co-ed areas. And in the single-sex division, you strip down and you shower and you go into a room that’s filled with shallow pools. Kind of like if you’ve ever been to Japan, there’s sort of a similar kind of things in Japanese baths.
And there’s all these, you know, like some of them are supposed to relieve neuralgia or they’re supposed to make your bloodstream go faster or something. But really it’s just hot water. And sometimes it has, I don’t know, stuff in it that, you know, salt or electricity or I don’t know.
And you soak and you unwind and you just enjoy yourself. And then you can get a—well, to call it a massage would be kind of—it’s, it’s a scrub and it’s these ladies and they always are wearing black lace bras and black underwear. No matter where you do it, if you do it in San Francisco, if you do it in L.A., if you do it in Korea, doesn’t matter. They’re always wearing that. And they have these exfoliating mitts that are, that, that are kind of almost like weapons and they scrub you like you’re— this isn’t gonna sound good—but it is! Like you’re like, you’re a piece of tenderizing meat and, and the dead skin kind of peels off of you, from head to toe, and then they kind of sluice you with warm water and then they give you a more of a rubdown than a massage. It’s like on the edge of painful, but you walk out feeling completely relaxed and your skin will be softer than it has been since you were six months old.
And it’s so much fun. And then you put on your t-shirt that they give you, they give you like a t-shirt and shorts to walk around the co-ed areas in, and you just relax. You go to the different saunas, you have a little meal, you soak your feet in the foot baths, you hang out with your friends and then, and you wear the—the thing that I love in Korea was that you roll up a towel—this is for no reason at all. This is just for fun—you roll up a towel and you kind of fold the ends and it looks like a ram’s head, like a sheep’s head, and you put it on your head and everybody’s walking around in these ridiculous sheep’s head towel hats. They serve no purpose. They are just strictly—I mean, you can wipe your head with them, I guess, in the sauna—but they are strictly just to have a good time and laugh and that I appreciate it too.
Katherine: That is quite the visual. You write a little bit about the intangible, the spirit of Busan. You know, it’s something that you mention hearing about before you go on the trip. I’m curious how you would characterize that feeling, of the people of the place.
Peggy: Well, you know, Busan has had this legacy of, it’s, it’s this weird combination of tranquility and turbulence I think that characterizes Busan.
So on one hand you have these beautiful beaches that you can walk along. You have these tremendous hikes. There’s all this nature. I went up to a really stunning Buddhist temple up on the mountain that just was so idyllic and peaceful and filled me with such a sense of calm.
But then at the same time, there is a history there of, uh, of real turbulence because of all of the, of upheavals and wars and the invasion by Japan in the ‘30s was started in Busan, when the communists came down from the North Bussan for a while was the only part of the country that was not taken over. It was a place of refugees. So there’s all of this kind of vibrant, turbulent street market life and also a kind of pragmatism of the people there because they’ve had to live through a lot of upheaval and they just keep on keeping on.
So it had both this kind of peaceful quality and also evidence of this turbulence of history. And the other thing about Busan that I kind of loved was that it’s, it’s in the South, right? And so people, generally speaking, it seems in, you know, in countries, the South always has a reputation for being more laid back, for being warmer.
Apparently, people from Bussan have an accent when they speak Korean, that people in the north kind of make fun of. I don’t even know what they’re talking about ’cause I don’t speak Korean, but there’s, but they have a real reputation, the people in Bussan, which I really felt for being very welcoming, for being very warm, for being very practical, as opposed to sort of the more bustling, business oriented, cool culture of Seoul and the more northern part of South Korea.
Katherine: OK. You’ve got one perfect day in Busan, how are you spending it? Walk us through that.
Peggy: Oh, oh gosh. The thing about Busan is it’s very long and thin, so it’s hard. You have to kind of focus on one of the—I can’t do one perfect day. That’s too hard.
Katherine: OK. Imagine there’s so many perfect days.
Peggy: Can I do two perfect days?
Katherine: You could could do two perfect days. I, I really thought I had a couple perfect days. Like if, if I were in the old neighborhood of the city, I would wake up, I would go to Momo’s coffee and sit and watch the port, the working port. I would go over to the fish market and the I would eat a lot is what I would do, and then I would wander through.
One of the things that amazed me were these very tiny stores that would be like the size of an old phone booth, and they would be just filled top to bottom with hair dye from the 1950s or something, some weird thing. Or cigarettes or or liquor and just rows and rows of it. Or there would be a whole street that was nothing but books.
And so I loved wandering through there. I would do that, and then in the later afternoon, I would probably go over to the history museum and look at all the ways the city has changed over time. So that’s what I would do on one perfect day and on a second perfect day, I would go up to the beach and I would take a walk on the beach in the morning, and then I would spend the whole entire day at spa land because really what could be better?
Those would be two for pre—and maybe if I was feeling a little more ambitious, I might go up to one of the temples to have a moment of calm after all of that spa treatment. And then I would have to go out for a spectacular meal to re-toxify.
Katherine: The full circle.
Peggy: Yeah, that’s probably more like four days. But, you know, it just, I just, it really was a place I, I, I felt like I went kind of on this whim theory that one should go to, you know, not go to the main city, but the promise that it fulfilled for me was huge. And I just, I felt like I had such an incredible and meaningful experience to me, and I left feeling like, yeah, I don’t, I can’t say I know all about Korea, but I left feeling like I really, really got to know something important and essential. And I’ll tell you, Katherine, I’m actually planning on going back in January ’cause I loved it so much.
Katherine: I didn’t know that. That’s very exciting.
Peggy: I’m going back in January ’cause my, my husband actually has some work there and so I’m tagging along. It would not be the month I would probably—if I were going to expand my Busan itinerary further—would not be my choice because I would want to go to some of the smaller towns where you would be doing more outdoorsy type of things. And so to do that, I would wanna go back, and will someday go back, in April or May or November.
But since it’s winter, I think my main expansion will probably be food-related because what are you gonna do in the middle of January, right? I just am gonna have to explore the food scene. There’s a Michelin-starred restaurant that I really wanna go to there, and yeah, and I wanna go back to all the places that I’ve been already and I really, what could be better on a January day than going to spa land?
Katherine: I wanna go to spa land. Sounds so great.
Peggy: Let’s go together. Come with. Join me in January.
Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to Peggy’s story and to her social media handles. Join me in two weeks for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award-winning features writers.
I’ll be speaking with Emma John, a London-based journalist and Afar contributing writer who ticked off her 43rd U.S. state this spring when she visited Door County, Wisconsin, and spent her time eating Polish and Mediterranean food, hiking state parks and nature preserves, and learning from locals about all of the very good change that is happening in this so-called “Cape Cod of the Midwest.”
Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform.
It helps other travelers find it. This has been Unpacked: Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LeGrave.
