Views of Busan City 2, South Korea

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Flower pots like this are the decreed decoration by city authorities. Come winter they are all suddenly replanted with hardy flower heads of red and white cabbages.	Chalgachi (now Jalgachi) is Busan's fish market, and famous in this fish-obsessed culture. Many war widows became fish vendors at Chalgachi to survive.	Dried herbs, dried bark, dried fungus, dried fish --- you see them everywhere. My favourite though, dried fruit, is expensive and in few kinds (unlike China).	Several long underground arcades, following subway lines, are the liveliest retail areas in Busan. This one is at Nampodong.	Lotte is South Korea's biggest retailing chaebol (conglomerate) with many kinds of outlets. Its department stores are pitched at prestige, with high prices. This is a subway store entrance at Seomyeon.
The Somyeon Lotte department store works hard at its upmarket image. There are plenty of takers, but recently large discount retailers are offering some stiff competition.	The rather bleak exterior of the Lotte Seomeon store, reminiscent of earlier Soviet Block store architecture for the privileged nomenklatura	Glitzy Migliore store architecture (contrast with Lotte) -- but the interior is largely a collection of fashion clothes booths, with unmarked prices	Most retailing is at least two or three decades behind the West. This is the old pattern of "specialist streets" with small garage-shops in one area dealing in similar products.	A few meters from Seomeon's commercial downtown heart, you find several blocks of machine tools and supplies. Some are workshops, with big lathes crammed into tiny garage-shop holes.