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

Finally, we got a cartoon-painting made of the 3 of us and went back to the hotel for lunch

In the evening we visited Shinsegae which has its name in the Guinness book of world records as the worlds largest shopping mall. This time we traveled by the subway because

• Haeundae subway station was pretty close from our hotel
• Shinsegae is directly reachable from the "City Centum" subway station
• City centum station is just 3 stations away from Haeundae station
• We would be able to avoid the heavy evening traffic

Although we had seen the mall from outside a lot of times now (because it is on the way when traveling Busan <-> Haeundae), this was the first time we were inside it. And although it was not immediately apparent how huge it was, it was fascinating to see an ice-rink inside it. I even gave ice-skating a try but gave up within just 20 minutes after falling hard twice ;)

But the most weird and disappointingly surprising thing about the world's largest mall was that it closes at 8pm! Yes you heard it right, it shuts down at 8pm. This was completely unexpected for us, and very inconvenient too. Because we had to rush out and found ourselves trapped in the wrong part of the mall. The elevators would either take us to a road-side exit (we didn't know which side of the mall), or to a do-not-enter red-tape. Eventually, with a baby in my hands, I did what I had to do. Entered the no-entry zone, found my way to the part that I knew we had entered from (the part that was connected to the subway station) and took the elevator from there. All this crazy running took us about 15 minutes, just to come from the 7th floor to the basement. It was one of the weirdest experience ever!