In 2011, I visited Busan with my mother for the first time.

The summer before I left for university in Seoul, my mother and I went on a duo trip to Korea. At the time, I didn’t speak Korean well and the trip was an endless blur of place after place, names that I forgot the moment I heard them. We were taken on buses, in taxis, in cars, on ferries, determined to squeeze in every possible sight during my mother’s brief stay. Nobody explained anything to me and I just obediently went along.

In 2021, Cedric and I took a trip to Busan together.

I had been living in Korea for years now. Covid had made going out in public uncomfortable, jostled between strangers on the subway and crowded buses. Armed with our masks and cameras, we took the KTX to Busan for a three day trip in May. We were just any other Seoulite who escapes the city before the hot summer comes.

I won’t share with you everything we did - Busan has a lot to offer and you’ll have to go for yourself - but I had a moment of discovery during this visit.

Cedric and I decided to visit a place called 해동 용궁사 (Haedong Yonggunsa temple), especially as tourism had effectively stopped, and we were keen to capture some photos of one of Korea’s rare seaside temples while it would be empty of people.

As we walked the road towards the temple, quiet and peaceful in the mild May early morning, I was struck by a strange feeling. I’ve been here before, I thought, looking at the stone statues that lined the path towards the temple. Climbing the 108 steps, I remembered vividly the very same scene - the blue sea splashing against the cliffside where the beautiful 해동 용궁사 was perched. I came here ten years ago with my mother. Back then, it was loud and noisy, filled with people who had come to take photos, to pray, or to wander the temple grounds.

This time, it was quiet, only the sound of the gentle waves lapping against the rocks and the steady 목탁 beat in the distance.

It’s strange… coming back to some place you’d been before but having forgotten it until then. I’ve lived my life moving from one place to another; the military brat’s life. Here for a year then gone off to somewhere new. What does it feel like to return to familiar places, where you’ve built up memories over years? I wouldn’t know. Of everywhere I’ve been, Seoul has been my home for the longest. It was a peculiar feeling, coming back to this spot (though it is Busan) and being struck suddenly by a distant memory, knowing that I had been before here, walked these same stone steps, looked over the same blue water.