Busan week: day 4 -- Busan aquarium and Shinsaegae mall
Today I wasn't in a mood to travel all the way to Busan station (it's about 35-50 mins from Haeundae beach, depending on the traffic; also the Haeundae -> Busan (bus #1003) route is longer than the other way around). So we decided to do some local sightseeing, which included Busan aquarium and Shinsegae mall.
As I have mentioned here, I was super excited to visit the Busan aquarium because it offered the once in a lifetime opportunity to swim with the sharks. Unfortunately, my hopes were shattered because when I inquired about it, I was sent from one desk to another and then asked to call some phone number where the man only spoke Korean. I spent 30 mins running from desk-to-desk, by which time my wife was pissed off because my daughter being difficult to be managed by her alone. We also did not get to sit in the glass-bottomed boat because my daughter was too young. The actual fishes weren't that exciting since the variety was almost the same as what we had already seen in COEX mall aquarium in Seoul. I did manage to get 1 macro image that I liked a lot
Continue reading →Busan week: day 3 -- Taejongdae
The first half of our third day (see the first 2 here and here) in Busan was the lowest point of the whole week. We had a reservation for the "Eulsukdo eco" tour in the morning, but my daughter vomited just when we were about to reach Busan station. We had no choice but to head back to the hotel.
Once we were ready again, We took the looped city tour bus and visited Taejongdae. It is a hill which hosts the Taejongdae resort. This time, we took the Haeundae loop tour bus to go from Haeundae beach to busan and it passed via the famous Gwangan bridge:
Continue reading →Busan week: day 2 -- YeongGungsa temple
Before coming to Busan I had done some basic research about the places to visit in Busan. We had found that there are some city tours available. These tours were of 2 different types: looped and themed. The ticket for either was 10,000 won (approx. 10$). The difference between the 2 is that in the looped tour, there are buses that go around Busan in a circular fashion, and you can buy the ticket once (from the driver), and get in and down at any of the places (tourist spots) that the bus stops at. There is 1 bus every 30 mins (between 9.30am and 5pm starting from Busan station), so you can practically go to place A -> visit it for as long as you wish -> hop into the next bus and go to place B -> and so on. This mode of travel is extremely convenient and cheap; especially if you like traveling on your own and don't need a guide (have done some basic homework of what places interest you and you want to visit). There are 2 different routes of the looped tours, called the "Haeundae" and "Taejongdae" loops, and the same ticket works on both.
The 2nd type of city tour buses are the "themed" tours: "History and Culture", "Haedong YeongGung temple", "Eulsukdo Eco" and "Night view". These tours are about 3hrs 40 mins each, and the buses leave twice a day; except for the "Night view" which is about 2.5hrs long, and runs only once in the evening. One good thing about themed Busan city tours is that you can call up their online help-desk (+82-51-464-9898) and do a reservation but actually purchase the ticket from the driver (at the start of the tour). The bad thing is that the help-desk (in my experience) is open only for about 2 hours between 9-11am in the morning; and some of the tours get full about 10 days in advance.
Continue reading →Busan week: day 1 -- Haeundae beach
First of all, let me wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2014! Second, let me pray for Golbin! to get bigger, both in terms of readers and storytellers :)
This and the next few of my stories are going to be about my week-long travel to Busan, South Korea. I went there with my wife and 1 year old daughter in the week of Christmas (23-28 Dec), because of different reasons
Continue reading →How to include environment variables in crontab
As you all probably already know (from here), I am currently working on a project that needs me to collect data from various online resources. Since this data needs to be collected at regular intervals (due to updates happening to the data continuously), and not in just one go, I am using cronjob scripts to collect this data.
While writing this script I faced a lot of problems, and that is what I will discuss today. In the hope that someone out there will find something important from my mistakes and learnings, and that this post may be helpful in solving similar problems for him/her too.
Continue reading →