Sunday, October 11, 2009

Walking to Jegi-dong and around Kyungdong Market

As I said in my last post, I found a way on Google Maps to walk to Jegi-dong by following the Cheonggyechong to another small stream right up to the main street and walking a little more and arriving right where I wanted to be. Well, I followed that path correctly, but as it turns out, that second stream stopped about 100 m down because it was under construction (how can a stream be under construction? Only in Seoul would this be possible). So, we walked down some back streets to come and arrive in Jegi-dong. As I suspected, it was about a half an hour walk.




We arrived in Jegi-dong but we were about 2 hours early for the field trip. I grabbed some lunch at Kimbap Chongguk and then we decided to walk around Kyungdong Market. This was not my first time to Kyungdong Market. Last time was to find some traditional Korean medicine. This time around we had time to just wander freely. This market is a must see in Seoul if you're interested in unusual things, or just need a fresh dose of culture shock.

Kyungdong Market is most famous for it's medicinal market, though they sell fresh seafood, fruit, vegetables and assortments of other random things that you'd expect to find at a market. It's actually a great place to buy vegetables. They have some of the cheapest prices I've seen in this city.
These wriggly little fish are used to make chueotang; a soup made of these fish ground into a paste.

Deer antlers are a rather expensive but popular medicinal item when making hanyak, Korean traditional medicine.

Duck Eggs. I learned a new word yesterday: 오리 (ohri)-duck.

Bees for sale.

Down in the fish market...

10 points to the first person to guess what kind of meat this is correctly... hint, look at the feet.

Love me some dried fish

Chicken is ridiculously cheap at the market. One whole chicken is only 2,000 won ($1.71 USD)

The next adventure after looking through the market was the Seoul Yangnyeongsi: Herb Medicine Museum for our field trip, but I'll write about that in the next post.

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