I’m doing 24 fun or new things before I turn 24. You can see the rest of my list here.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Dylan and I made quite the trek out to one of Busan’s many beaches, Dadaepo. The draw was the Dadaepo Sunset Fountain of Dreams (believe it or not that’s its real, official name), a water fountain show with multicoloured lights and water spray patterns, choreographed to music of all kinds. We’d been excited about theshow, but we hadn’t anticipated just how much we would love the beach itself.
It was absolutely stunning – when we looked to our right, it was all soft sand stretching as far as the eye could see, and on our left, green trees and big rocks curving around the coast. As is typical with these kinds of things, the photos don’t quite do it justice.
We arrived in the late afternoon and did the coastal walk (Korea is home to so many beautiful coastal walks that they’ve become one of our favourite pastimes) to the place where the walkway ended. From there we scampered over some rocks and dodged some creepy insects, ending up on a big rock listening to lovely music and talking as the sun started setting. It was a pretty blissful afternoon. The fountain was just icing on the cake!
But my favourite part of the day had to be the discovery of a free outdoor trampoline and the subsequent jumping around on it like a maniac until I had cramps from laughing so hard and my legs were too weak to catch me on the big bounces (resulting in quite a few painless tumbles & giggles). On the way from the bus stop to the beach, right on the main road, there was a little outdoor arcade, fairly run-down and with no employees. It was just open to the elements and to the public, and when we walked by there were just a few people in the batting cage. Everyone was utterly uninterested in the perfectly decent trampoline sitting unused right alongside them!
After a brief moment of looking around flabbergasted that it was free and that nobody was going to stop us, we climbed up the little ladder and onto the bouncy castle of our dreams. For me, it was one of those awesome moments in life where you get exactly what you want without having known that it was what you wanted. When I put “go trampolining” on my 24 Before 24 list, I’d pictured visiting one of the indoor trampoline rooms that are so common here in Korea. It never occurred to me that it would end up being an absolutely perfect moment – spontaneous, outdoors, with views of the fountain and the trees, full of giddy joy and hysterical laughter – and one that I was lucky enough to share with such a great friend. I know it sounds so cliché, but it made me feel like a kid again. Free and happy.
It was also an excellent reminder to stay open to new experiences and to doing things just because they’re insanely fun. If I hadn’t decided (totally arbitrarily) to put trampolining on my list this year, I might have walked right by that arcade without a second thought. I think we all get so used to doing things a certain way and going through the motions of our routines, but I want to remember to keep trying to incorporate joy and fun and impracticality into my life as much as I can. It’s really worth it.
