Go Fish

            A goal of mine while in Korea is to go sightseeing once a week to learn more about Korean’s and their culture. The lobby in the hotel has a lot of local maps of Changwon and I was lucky enough to find one in English. Being without a car I needed to find something interesting within walking or biking distance and decided upon the Masan Fish Market. Masan is in a neighboring town but I think it is technically considered part of Changwon. The fish market was appealing because I knew it’d give a taste of the local flavor much like the Vancouver fish market I visited when I was in middle school. GoogleMaps was helpful in finding the location of our hotel and the fish market but unfortunately in Korea you can’t get directions on Google. After some time zooming in and tracing the roads it appeared the journey needed bikes. The hotel has some mountain bikes for rent for only \2,000 for three hours. The best guess for the biking distance was around 9km which made sense because it took just under an hour to get there with some stopping time to take photos. You can see the two cities on the map below. Point A is the hotel, Point B is the Masan Fish Market.

View Larger Map
       
          The bike path was alongside the road but I saw many interesting things along the way. There was a prison, a large river, a Pizza Hut, a really cool bridge, some local boats, a nature walk, and a lot of ship-building facilities. I once read that one of the largest exports of this region of South Korea is ships. These weren’t your standard 30’ sailboats; they were massive ships that were getting pieced together in about 60’ X 60’ X 60’ sections. My best guess is that they were cargo ships. The cranes needed to lift each section were the largest I’ve ever seen at about 100’ high and 250’ across.

The first glimpe of Masan

Massive ship components

 

The largest crane I've ever seen



Just one of about 35 different pieces at this facility

 

On the bridge to Masan



Looking over the bay that leads into the Korean Strait

             In the heart of the town I was clueless where the fish market was and after asking a taxi driver he pointed that it was only about 100 feet away. Before going in I grabbed a Gatorade at the local market and made sure I had my camera with me. At first glance it was like a farmer’s market with a long ¼ mile hallway with smaller alleys branching off to the sides. The only things I could see from the outside were fresh vegetables including garlic, two-foot long stalks of scallions, peppers, lettuce, and massive carrots that were about two inches in diameter. A few steps into the fish market I realized they had what I was shopping for, pictures of bizarre foods. I felt like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern, TV food show hosts known for filming exotic world foods. Unlike them I had little intentions of trying the local fare.

Masan Fish Market

A fancier sign

 

The first glimpse



These are appetizers for drinking at the bar. You eat everything but the head.

 

Dried Squid

 

Eels on the left and I have no clue what's on the right



Live Octopus and some kind of shell-less turtle



More fish

 

Raw Pig



Cooked Pig



A typical stand



You can see a dining area in the background



Grabbing a snack for later

            A majority of the food booths were about the size of a children’s bedroom and had an eating area behind them. My impression was that you could buy the seafood to bring home or they could prepare your lunch for you right on the spot. About 80% of the stands were staffed by older women, hardly any men. There were about 150 different stands but many sold the same items as the person next to them. For example, there were about four pork stands next to each other, all serving the same cuts of meat: head, butt, and foot. If you think that’s unappetizing, it was actually some of the best looking food there. The seafood was unlike anything in America with octopus, turtles, pointy shellfish, eels, and fish I haven’t even seen on The Discovery Channel. Most of the seafood was alive and swimming in household buckets except for a few stands that sold dried out stingrays, squid, and sardines of various sizes.

            One customer at the market spoke a little English and we struck up a conversation in the seafood area. He wanted to know about America and I wanted to know what was all around me. I kept pointing at the most bizarre food I’d seen so far and all the female stand owners kept laughing. One female merchant took one of the slimy pieces of fish and offered it to me. I pointed to the Korean next to me and he ate it. My stomach was not prepared to eat it just yet. Back at Samsung I shared the pictures asking what I was offered and they didn’t find it too appetizing either so that made me feel a little better.



The lady in the purple vest offered me some free samples

The orange and black slimy things were just not for me.

            The picture below is an assortment of rice cakes from the cafeteria last Thursday. It was the day before Samsung Techwin’s Birthday, a day all workers get off. The engineers were very excited to receive these rice cakes and I could tell it was a special treat for them. They tasted different than an American dessert, especially the rainbow cake that was rice based. They weren’t super sweet with a taste more like a nutty and fruity granola bar with the consistency of Jell-O. At the Masan Fish Market there was one stand that sold just rice cakes, it is also pictured below.

Samsung Rice Cakes

Rice Cakes at the Masan Fish Market