Insane weekend: To Japan, part 1 (videos)

So this weekend was an extra long one for me because my school had its anniversary holiday in addition to the Buddha's Birthday holiday. So I did what anyone would do if they were a crazy person with a lot of off-time in Korea -- I traveled to Japan.

It all started really early around 7:00am at Seoul Station, to take the KTX bullet train.



I took this one all the way to Busan Station. This is basically one end of the line to the other, and is the longest KTX journey possible at the moment.

The KTX travels at around 300 km/h and everything looks kind of like this.




After arriving at Busan Station, I had to take the subway for one stop. Because of this area of Busan's importance as an international transfer point, announcements are in Korean, English, Japanese and Mandarin.



I finally arrived at Busan International Terminal, where I had some time to wait for the ferry to Japan.





The view was less than spectacular.



The ferry's safety video somehow manages to meet its challenge to be trilingual in English, Korean and Japanese.



There was a movie shown, but it ended faster than normal. So what did they do? They showed sumo.



I finally arrived in Fukuoka, Japan in the evening. Customs actually asked questions (unlike Korea, Hong Kong and Macau) but it wasn't too bad. All foreigners must give fingerprint samples and have a photo taken but it wasn't too unreasonable.





More videos for part 2 tomorrow.

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Coming next:

• To Japan, part 2 (videos)
• To Japan, part 3 (videos)
• To DMZ (videos and photos)
• To Japan (photos)