Jagalchi Market • 자갈치시장
As you all probably figured from my previous posts, the weather has been really hot here in Seoul and in the past week, I've been staying indoors most of the time. Exploring (and sometimes even finding the will to walk around outside in this hot weather) has became rather hard and air-conditioned restaurants and cafes have became my refuge during these 35°+C hot summer days. With that said, thought I'd share with you some of the shots from my trip to Busan last summer that I haven't got around to post to mix it up with all the cafes and restaurants posts ;)
So last year, I decided to go to Busan for a couple of days just because I never been there before. I was there for 4 days and spent the first two days alone. That was officially my first solo trip outside Seoul in South Korea. It was quite an interesting and fun experience. I was a little bit nervous to be honest, since Busan is not a city that I'm familiar with. But I guess that's what made it fun at the same time. Plus, since I'm alone, I didn't have to worry about anybody else and got to do everything in my own pace according to what I felt like doing. Should I take the bus or taxi, skip this place or stay here longer, should I eat lunch now or later, or should I simply stay in at the hotel because the weather's too hot—these kind of questions I could just winged it depending on how I felt. A pretty nice feeling I should say.
One of the places I visited on my first day was the Jagalchi Market (자갈치시장). Jagalchi market is probably one of the common place that is closely associated to Busan, so I thought I should at least give this place a visit. I just have to checked this off my list because this was my first visit to Busan ya know. I arrived pretty late in the afternoon around 4pm so the market wasn't too busy. There were people buying fish here and there, a couple of tourists groups, and fishmongers who were cleaning their stalls or trying to convince passerbys to stop at their stalls to at least take a look at their seafood selections.
I ended up ordering the Korean raw fish, hweh (희), from one of the stalls at the market. Didn't have a specific reason, really, other than the ahjussi who was manning the stall was friendly and nice. I can't remember which fish I had but I do remember that the hweh wasn't as good as I expected it to be. Maybe I just didn't order correctly, since I know very little about fish, let alone which fish is good for hweh. Anyways, one side of the fish was for the hweh and the other side was deep fried and it was served with rice and banchan (반찬). I did enjoy the deep-fried part better than the hweh for sure. It was delicious.
I went back to the stall after I finished eating and the ahjussi was kind enough to let me took pictures around his stalls and even posed for me holding the big crab. My first seafood market experience was definitely interesting and I couldn't get over how much colors there were in this place. A lot was definitely going on despite the lack of crowd. I left the market thinking I probably should ask one of my Korean friends to take me to a good hweh place so I know what a good hweh tastes like.
