taylor and i had the opportunity to visit the largest fish market on korea's east coast, located in pohan. after having seen a little fish market action in daejon, i was really excited to see the real deal. i was sure that there would be tons of amazingly bizarre things for sale here. and this there certainly was. this part of the east coast is known as a mecca for squid fishing (squiding?), which was made quite apparent by the row upon row of squid hung out to dry on lines along the roadway. also, at night, you could see strange bright lights shining past the horizon at sea. these were squid boats, and they apparently use the incredibly bright lights to attract squid to their boats. so, as you can imagine, there was plenty of squid in this market.
there was also a lot of otcopus, some fresh, some dried, even some that was still alive. also, several varieties of octopus.
aside from squid and octopus, there was a huge amount of, well, fish. many different kinds of fish, long slender fish, wide flat fish, tiny fish, big fish, but no huge fish.
the market was divided into two main sections; the first was what you would expect a fish market to look like, with dead fish on ice, while the second section had live fish swimming around in little tubs.
there were several things for sale that are of the sea, but not what you would generally think of as being "fish", or even edible. there were rays, several unidentifiable invertebrates, and even whale meat.
one thing that was quite surprising about this market was the smell. while it did smell like fish, it was not nearly as bad as i had been preparing myself for. in fact, taylor thought it wasn't even as bad as the smell in the daejon market. it was, however, loud, crowded and crazy. everybody needed to tell you, it seemed, why their fish was better than the fish in the stall next door. some stalls even had samples of the raw fish for you to try out.
we finished looking around, and got down to what we came for: eating. many of the stalls with the live fish are connected to little restaurants. you pick out which kind of fish you want, and then have a seat in the restaurant. then they slice it up and bring it out to you. we had bibimbap, which is a kind of rice bowl with tons of veggies that you mix in, with sashimi flat fish. i don't know exactly what kind of fish it was, but it was in fact, the flat fish. if you're confused about how we navigated all of this, or even made it to the market in the first place, i neglected to mention that we had a korean tour guide, our lively and colorful boss, don.
