BUSAN

Amidst our short trip to Seoul, we managed to squeeze in a day for Busan, the second largest city in South Korea. The train to Busan (no coincidence intended!) via KTX is highly recommended and convenient from Seoul. Well, it is somewhat similar to what you would see in the recent film Train to Busan, of course, minus all the apocalyptic zombies. The KTX train is well equipped with wifi and comfortable seats, where my friends slept through most of the 2.5 hours journey on an early morning. Perhaps they would not sleep in if they were to watch the film before this trip.

Gamcheon Cultural Village — "The East of Santorini". When we first had sight of these colourful lego-like buildings, as tourist as we can get, we could not stop snapping photos away even when it began to rain. The rain stopped and we proceed to spend half a day following a trail based on the village map, where we got an overview of Gamcheon in different angles. There's a thing about these quaint villages and small towns that I really like, I'm not sure what or why exactly, but I guess it is the slow life in such environment that attracts me.

Jalgachi Fish Market — Busan is located by the sea and is eventually known for its fresh seafood. At Jalgachi, you can select your seafood from its array of fresh catch and select get a restaurant to cook it for you or vice versa, choose a restaurant first then your seafood. We did the latter. I'm not so much of a seafood lover, so I wasn't that keen on paying too much for it especially when the prices here are on the higher side even after much bargaining. But trying to be a good sport with my friends, I caved in. Though a tad pricey, what you get are fresh, sweet and juicy seafoods

If time were on our side, we would spend at least 2 days in Busan instead of a day trip which was not sufficient us for us to cover more places. Albeit a short day trip, it was still truly memorable...like how we actually did miss our train back to Seoul by being late for 5 minutes.

YELLOW RIBBON RUN 2016

One of my personal goal is to participate in a long run before I turn 25. While there are a multiple of such runs in Singapore annually, I have been putting it off as I am always waiting for the day I would be ready physically first before signing up for a long run. When the time came to register for the Yellow Ribbon Run this year, I hesitated for awhile but eventually took a leap of faith and signed myself up for the 10km category, cause I will never be ready if I don't ever start. So with this, I finally began running again.

Running is one of my least favourite form of exercise despite knowing what good it does to my body, but as we know running can be so tiring and difficult. The first three sessions were bad, but I improved from my fourth run onwards, increasing a kilometre to my distance on subsequent run without stopping. With 6.5 weeks, I managed to train up to 8km before the actual run. I'm thinking of consolidating this experience and my ongoing training into a separate post in a few month's time, we'll see how this goes!

 

The day came and I completed my first ever 10km run, though I personally felt I did not do as well as I hope it to be. As I only have time after work hours to train in the evening or at night, my body was somehow not that conditioned to running under the sun and immense heat. Nevertheless, it is still a milestone to have gone from zero running in years to completing 10km in less than 7 weeks. I believe this would be a good kick start to my future runs and journey to becoming fitter.

NIGHT FEST '16

It's Night Festival 2 weekends ago, and following our annual tradition, Nathaniel and I visit Night Fest again for the 3rd year. You can read up on our previous experience here – 2015 and 2014.

On the morning of that Friday, the 'annual' haze hits Singapore at a PSI level of over 200 and I thought "what a bummer" if we had to put off this year's visit if the haze persists...But the skies and air did clear, so we managed to resume with the plan.

Without saying, the Festival Village is what we looked forward to (mostly because of the fairy lights hovering over the area), though we chose not to dine there this time because of the heat and crowd, but instead we got ourselves a jar of coconut shake to beat the heat. I personally felt this year's Night Fest was a tad on the down side; there weren't anything significant to remember or perhaps I was just too tired after a long week at work to enjoy the experience. Nonetheless, Night Fest is still an event worth looking forward to each year, so till we meet again in 2017!