With the 13th Annual Pusan International Film Festival starting the next day, some pre-opening festivities are taking place in downtown, in Nampo-dong district at the PIFF Square.

Here is a belly dancing routine that is part of the festivities. Middle Eastern style belly dancing was gaining popularity in South Korea as a popular form of exercise.

As I watched this performance, I thought of a dear belly dancer friend of mine - novelist/writing mentor Gayle Brandeis. Her first novel, The Book of Dead Birds, is partly set in Korea, and one of the protagonists is Song Hye-yang (Helen Sing Lo).

In the story, Song Hye-yang leaves her native Jeju Island and arrives here in Busan, on her way up to Suwon to join her friend at the Korean Folk Village; according to the story, she arrives on a ferry, and takes a long bus ride to Suwon. But as I thought about it, the bus terminal is a long way to the north, while I noted that both the ferry terminal and the train station are only a kilometer away, and within a short walk of each other. Moreover, it was 1968, no expressways existed then, and the primitive roads would have made the bus trip impractical. The more likely scenario, had the story been real, would have been for Song Hye-yang to walk to the train station then take a slow, non-air-conditioned local train up to Suwon, most likely a bone-jarring ten-hour ride and possibly standing room only, but at least dirt cheap.

(By contrast, my ride up to Seoul the next day will take 2 hours and 55 minutes on the bullet train with four intermediate stops - 2 hours 40 minutes if limited to two mandatory intermediate stops. I will also get full air-conditioned comfort, not to mention a reserved seat. The steam-powered local train, long out of service, would have taken a full twelve hours for the same journey.)