Korea Trip #3 – Fish Market – From Hiding to Blogging

Any trips to Busan will not complete without visiting its Jagalchi Fish Market.

When we were there smell of fishes was floating in the air. Walking around only to surprisingly notice the market was huge! It was full of all kinds of fishes, every species I can or can’t image. Colorful ones, skinny ones, fat ones, dry ones, wet ones, cooked ones, raw ones, weird ones, you name it!

Here are a few photos I took while I was there. Please help me to name them!

There were countless stands on the side of the roads or on the first floor of the building to display and sell processed or live fishes. Every stand is selling very similar products as others nearby, I was wondering how much profit they can make. Those long hours staying outside must be due to a labor of love kept inside the fishermen and fisherladies.

Once I saw an octopus crawling out of the water tank and falling onto hard ground. It was like a big piece of slime trying to roll away using its suckers. After hearing my screaming the owner picked it up and threw back to the tank. I murmured “how can people eat that thing?” The owner didn’t understand what I was saying and continuously sell a pile of octopus.

We had lunch on the second floor above the indoor fish market. The lunch was all about seafood from belt fishes, oysters and clams, in the form of baked, fried or hotpot. By the end of the lunch the friendly owner lady offered us a dish of fresh something (I don’t remember what it is) from ocean. When the dish of the fresh was brought to the table I found that one piece of them was still wriggling around, I guessed that the so-called fresh might be one of the limbs from octopus. For the reason of politeness I picked up a small piece and put into mouth, wondering whether it would be crawling back out later.

There are some live crabs waving their feet around in water. They are the biggest one I have ever seen in my life, with body over 1 foot across. I reached close to the face of one of the crabs to snap couple of photos and ran away immediately before it used its long claws to drag me into water. Later when I reviewed the photos I found even though those crabs had scary claws they did have a cute funny faces.