running and exploring in Dadaepo Beach

 Our latest explorations took us to Dadaepo Beach, in Busan.  We set out and met our friends at a subway stop and then took a bus out to the beach.  Dadaepo is known for being a bit out of the way and not as built up as Busan's other beaches.  It is a nice area but lacks the commercial line up of bars, hotels, and restaurants of some of the nearby beaches.









It took some walking around for our crew of six to find some hotel rooms but we finally found a place within walking distance of the beach.  Our search was so long, in fact, that we stopped for dinner at one of the nicer places we found, a shabu-shabu restaurant.  It was my first time with this style of food but the owner helped us along with putting the meat on the table grill and adding vegetables to the boiling soup in the middle.  We used the tray of veggies and the meat to make spring rolls to dip in a few different sauces and then eat.  The soup was some of the best I've had here, with bok-choy one of my favorite veggies.




After dropping our stuff off at the hotel we headed down to explore the beach.  It is an almost bare beach with nothing built up on it.  There was some evidence of some construction in progress to make what might be a boardwalk of something but it didn't look like much progress had been made recently.  The biggest attraction was a popular fountain show that took place at dark.  The fountain was lit up by colorful lights and a choreographed show to intense music was really fun to watch.





As we walked around we also stopped at an outdoor arcade, which are pretty popular here.  There were some batting cages, a trampoline, some video games, a whack-a-mole machine, and a basketball shooting game to play.  We took some swings and hit some dingers in the batting cages and watched as our friends Dave and Tom and Allie played the basketball game.  Nikki attempted to take down the high score on the whack-a-mole game but was fooled again by those pesky moles.



We stopped by Domino's pizza for dinner and then headed back to the hotel to call it an early night.  We had a big race the next morning.

We arrived at the starting line area at around 8:15 the next morning.  Sadly, it was raining a little but it didn't keep up for long.  Nikki was running her first 5K race and I was running a half marathon.  My race started earlier so I wasn't able to see her run, but she did great!  I finished the half marathon feeling good and ended up really enjoying the run because it stayed close by the water the whole time.




After then run we grabbed a few cans of beer to celebrate our accomplishments.  We all walked down to the beach, which was surprisingly deserted.  The waves were gently rolling and we could see high clouds and mist covering the tops of nearby mountains.  It was a great view and it was made better by our feelings of accomplishment about our races.

We grabbed a bus and headed back into town for some huge cheeseburgers at Breezeburn's.  We had a huge hunger that only a giant burger could satisfy.
teaching english in korea. 
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