T A B L E_T A L K What to see, where to eat, when to go to Spain. Share your tips and stories in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Swimsuits -- and more! By Beverly Gage Past and present collide at Atlantic City's annual Miss America extravaganza (09/23/98) The cheapest air ticket around By Dawn MacKeen Couriers fly halfway around the world at half (or less) the normal price (09/22/98) Paris' cafe renaissance By David Downie There's a lively new scene in the City of Caffeine (09/21/98) The heart of a tourist hustler By Lisa Dreier Lonely in India, she befriended the local playboy. Who could know what would happen next? (09/18/98) In shackles with the Freedom Bag By Carol Lloyd The perfect luggage -- for a pygmy (09/17/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		L E T T E R _ F R O M _ P U S A N : the party's over The decadent dream world of expats in South Korea has turned into an economic nightmare. BY ROLF POTTS | PUSAN, South Korea At first glance, it's hard to tell that the IMF era has hit Pusan. Nearly one year after the crash of the economy, the streets of Korea's biggest port city still look as crowded and gaudy as they did one year ago. Groups of Korean men still swagger the sidewalks in golf-course plaids like Vegas Rat Packers on their way to three-martini lunches, middle-aged Korean housewives still dress for the market with the frighteningly self-conscious glamour of Zsa Zsa Gabor, and college-age girls still wobble on designer platform shoes and squawk into cell phones at bus stops. Traffic is still a breakneck blur of luxury cars and taxis, delivery trucks and mopeds, overused horns and under-heeded speed limits. And -- towering on every horizon -- enormous construction cranes still hoist I-beams, steadily adding to the city's collection of bland concrete high-rise apartment complexes, which glow yellow in the early evening like cramped armadas of "Battlestar Galactica" spaceships, cruising nowhere. To the untrained foreign eye, Pusan still looks like a manic boomtown. But the Americans and Canadians who have lived here for the last couple of years know better. This is because the seasoned expatriates of Pusan know their garbage. Just over one year ago, street-side garbage piles provided an almost inexhaustible supply of perfectly usable desks, couches, tables, television sets, electric fans and personal computers for itinerant foreigners looking to stock a rented room for a few months. At the time, Koreans were still giddy from three decades of steady economic growth, and throwing out perfectly usable electronics and home furnishings was a sly act of one-upmanship among the middle class. Koreans looked on in haughty bemusement as young Americans enthusiastically carted garbage back to their apartments. These days, what's left of Pusan's expatriate community has all but given up dumpster diving. These days street-side couches are usually stained and sodden; the desks and tables unusable; the cast-off television sets broken. These days, the garbage of Pusan is just garbage. I have been living and teaching English in this southeastern Korean city of 4.5 million people for nearly two years now. The city never fails to amaze and bewilder me. The act of walking down the streets of Pusan is an exercise in possibility. On a given day, I am equally likely to be greeted by a Buddhist monk wearing Air Jordans as I am by a woman in a stewardess uniform handing out promotional toilet tissue. I have stopped noticing details such as children screaming "Hello!" or men urinating in public or vegetable truck loudspeakers blasting "Home on the Range." I can attain instant celebrity status on a given street corner by speaking a few phrases of Korean with a rough, drawling Pusan accent. Even death has a creepy proximity here. One afternoon I was walking to a friend's house when I turned a corner and saw a man pinned between a building and a dump-truck. He had probably been dead for about two minutes. The force of the collision had knocked his pants to his knees and crushed his legs like ribbons. This was not a moment I had prepared myself for, so I stood dumbly watching amid a small crowd of people, not sure what to do. Finally, someone went up and hiked up the dead man's pants. It was the only reasonable option, and I think all the people there were surprised with themselves for not thinking of it first. Despite such urban jadedness, Pusan has been dubbed the "Korean Riviera" by the local tourist authority in the hopes of attracting Japanese tourists. In keeping with this resort reputation, Pusan's biggest hotel has a Las Vegas show. This summer I lucked into free tickets and witnessed the strangest spectacle to hit this corner of Asia since Dutch sailors first washed ashore 400 years ago: an unrepentantly 1960s-style showgirl revue performed by bare-breasted Russians to a room full of Japanese businessmen on the site of an ancient Korean fishing community. It was like visiting some vulgar, endearing vision of heaven. Before economic hard times hit, the Vegas show was staffed with genuine American performers, and I saw them around town from time to time. They would show up at various university-district haunts in groups of two or three on Friday nights, and sometimes I would talk to them. They were remarkably down-to-earth. A job is a job, they told me. I regret I never asked them the question that burned foremost in my mind. "What," I desperately wanted to ask them, "will you be doing when you're 60? How will you rationalize this strange time in this dirty Asian port town to yourself when your body is failing you and the world has become so efficient and sophisticated that it no longer makes sense to you? How will you rationalize this to your children? To your grandchildren?" But then: How will I? N E X T+P A G E | An expat boom time