South Korea

Busan hit me differently than I expected. I came in by cruise ship and the first thing I saw from the deck was this long, low skyline pressed between green hills and grey water — the kind of city that looks compact from a distance but just keeps going the deeper you walk into it. The cold was sharp and dry, the light almost too clean, and there was this particular smell near the port of salt and diesel and something frying somewhere that I'll probably always associate with arrival.

The fish market was the part I keep going back to in my head. Basin after basin of live shellfish, bundles of seaweed piled in pink plastic colanders, whole mackerel laid out in rows with that blue-silver sheen they have when they're very fresh. I didn't buy anything — I just walked slowly and looked. It felt like a place that had been running the same way for a hundred years and wasn't in any hurry to change.

The night before we left, I caught the Busan New Port Bridge lit up in shifting colours over the harbour — pink bleeding into blue, the cables fanning out like wire drawing in the dark, the whole reflection doubling everything in the water below. That's the image I kept. Not a selfie spot, not a performance — just the city showing off a little, right before I had to go.