Busan

Busan is Korea with its shoes off: the country's second city and first port, wrapped around hills and bays at the bottom of the peninsula, where the fish market sings at dawn — the ajumma of Jagalchi calling their prices over tanks of things still moving —, where a hillside of refugees' shacks became a village of painted houses and murals, and where the beach at Haeundae, a mile and a half of sand with a wall of towers behind it, holds the country's summer. Across a bay a bridge lights up like a necklace at night; on a headland to the north-east a temple sits on the rocks with the sea at its feet; and in the mountains behind, Beomeosa has kept its monks since 678.

The traveller wakes early for Jagalchi and eats what was just pointed at, raw, upstairs, with the harbour in the window; climbs Gamcheon's lanes and finds the little prince on his wall; takes the funicular of a hundred steps to the Busan Tower and looks down on Nampo and the film festival's square; rides the metro east to Gwangalli for the bridge at dusk and to Haeundae for the sand, the night market and the little train that runs along the cliffs; takes a bus to Yonggungsa to see a temple with waves for a courtyard; and, if the mountain calls, spends a night at Beomeosa as a guest of the monks.

The Guide's honesty: Busan is easy, honest and less pretty than it is alive — the city is a working port, the streets are steep, and the metro is the way —; the fish is superb and the market's upstairs restaurants price by the plate: agree it first; Gamcheon is a neighbourhood, not a theme park — people live behind the murals, and the lanes are theirs at seven —; August fills the beaches to the sea; the KTX from Seoul is two hours and a quarter and worth every won; and Busan's dialect is louder, warmer and rougher than the capital's — take it as the welcome it is.