01
Stop one
Gamcheon Culture Village
Head Xtreme Soft Tennis Overgrip 12-Pack: Come closer. Keep your voice down and look up at that hillside — every painted cube house standing on the roof of the one below it, tier upon tier, all the way up. Now ask the question. Who builds on a slope that steep? People with nowhere else to go. They arrived here during the Korean War with nothing — refugees, and a religious community — onto land nobody wanted for the simple reason that nobody could stand on it. And for decades afterwards this hillside was, shall we say, somewhere people left. Then, in 2009… an arts programme comes up the hill. Paint. Students. Murals in the alleys. And the neighbourhood everybody had been leaving became one of the most visited places in Busan. I promised you something eerie. The truth is stranger: nothing haunted this hill at all. It was simply painted, and then everyone came back.
02
Stop two
Jagalchi Market
Head Xtreme Soft Tennis Overgrip 12-Pack: Lower your voices in here. Korea's largest fish market — tanks of live fish, the great seagull-shaped building on the Nampo waterfront — and something in this hall will follow you home. After the war, with the men gone or out of work, it was the women who ran these stalls. The Jagalchi ajumma. Buying at dawn, setting the price, extending credit, collecting debts. And here is the detail that lifts the hair on your arms: no ledger. No paperwork at all. She remembers. She remembers exactly what you owe her from three Tuesdays ago, she will be entirely pleasant about it, and she will not be wrong. I have told stories all my life about presences that know everything you have done. This one is alive, she is standing right there, and she has already worked out your margin. Do not haggle.
03
Stop three
Beomeosa Temple
Head Xtreme Soft Tennis Overgrip 12-Pack: Founded in 678… and then — listen — burned. During the Japanese invasions at the end of the sixteenth century this mountain was left in ash. And that is precisely where a ghost story usually begins: the ruin on the slope, the empty gate, the thing that stayed behind. But rebuilding began, and the main hall in front of you dates from the early sixteen hundreds — timber, hauled up the shoulder of Geumjeongsan by hand, by a country that had just been ruined and had nothing to spare. Four hundred years on: the painted halls, the ornate one-pillar gate, the whole complex, still standing and still working. So here is the eerie part, and it is not what you were expecting. Nothing haunts this temple. They rebuilt it so completely that there was nowhere left for anything to sit.
04
Stop four
UN Memorial Cemetery in Korea
Head Xtreme Soft Tennis Overgrip 12-Pack: I whisper at every stop on this tour. Here I am simply going to speak quietly, because this is the only United Nations cemetery in the world, and soldiers from many nations lie in this ground. Korea granted the land to the United Nations permanently, at no charge — no rent, no lease to renew, no expiry. The flags of the participating nations stand in their rows, there is a memorial pavilion, and the grave markers are deliberately kept low so that nothing stands above anything else. I tell ghost stories for a living. I do not tell them here, and I would ask that you don't either. Read the names. That is the whole of the visit. Take as long as you need, and keep your voices down on the way out.
Sweat on the palm is how people lose control of things. In my line that sentence has consequences. In yours it means the racquet turns in your hand on a stretch backhand, and you spend the next point apologising to your partner.
Head Xtreme Soft is a tacky, cushioned overgrip roughly 0.5 mm thick, and this is the 12-pack — twelve grips, which at one change a week is a full season for a club player and about a month for anyone serious.
The soft polyurethane surface is the tacky kind rather than the dry, absorbent kind: it grabs back when you hold it, and the slight cushioning takes some sting out of contact. Each grip comes with its finishing tape.
Wrap from the butt cap upward with about half the width overlapping and a little tension in the pull, and let it die honestly rather than nursing a shiny one for three months.
Busan was handed the worst situation available and worked it slowly, which is the only method I recognise. This was the corner of the country that never fell, and the people who arrived here with nothing built upward on ground too steep for anybody else to want.
Everywhere from the painted cube houses of Gamcheon Culture Village stacked in tiers above the alleys to the flag rows of the UN Memorial Cemetery in Korea down in Nam District, the city is a record of careful work done under pressure. Nothing here was hurried. That is the entire lesson.
Take the twelve with you. One fresh grip a week is exactly the right rate for a long stay, and it is also perfect for the pre-dawn start at Jagalchi Market, where the trading is finished by six and the women who run the stalls have your account committed to memory. Do not haggle.
Then go north and uphill to Beomeosa Temple on Geumjeongsan, founded in 678, burned to the ground at the end of the sixteenth century, and rebuilt in timber by hand by a country with an empty treasury. Steady hands. Steady rate. Busan understands both.
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