Wednesday Market

On Wednesday mornings, the ground just outside of our apartment building is extra bustling. I can peer out from our 12th floor balcony and see the tents rising and the trucks unloading.

Each week a little market sets up on the street below. It has a bit of everything, but most involve some type of food - fruit, vegetables, seafood, Korean side dishes or street food. Clothing, toys, housewares and plants fill up other tents. Handwritten signs and vocal vendors beckon you to come and take a closer look.

 This string of tents (on the left side of the picture above; to the right here) is my favorite vendor, a modest vegetable dreamland. They have a wide selection and a few popular items available in bulk, like the huge red bags of garlic. It's also the only place that I've been able to find fresh cilantro.

Most of the basic Korean street foods are available here too. Isaac and I finally gave into the yummy smells and had a junkfood dinner here for a total cost of 6500 won, about $5.50.

On the two long skewers is odeng, fish cake, which absorbs the flavor of the broth it's cooked in, which is the amber liquid in the cups. It's slightly salty and...fishy? And a good ol' corn dog. In addition to being doubly battered and deep-fried, it is coated in sugar and ketchup.

In the bowl is a mixture of ddeokbokki and kimmari. Ddeokbokki is made of rice cake (it's not sweet, just a chewy, bland blob made of rice) soaked in a spicy sweet sauce. Kimmari is clear noodles wrapped up in seaweed and deep-fried. So that's chewy and crunchy blobs in a sweet and spicy sauce. Can't go wrong there.

These wandering markets are nice and convenient. They set up in the parking lots of different apartment buildings each day. Sometimes as I walk around town, I see the colorful tents somewhere else. When the weather is especially nice, other special markets come as well. One weekend, a night market visited our apartment building. It didn't have the fresh produce, but had lots of street food and cute fair games like throwing darts at balloons to win a stuffed animal.

Yes that's a lot of meat! Isaac said it reminded him of southern style barbecue; and you can see the grill which cooked it in the picture below.

It's Wednesday here now, so I will inevitably go wander through the market again. But it will be the last time for a little while.

This Friday we leave for our honeymoon in Europe. There are still quite a few details we are unsure of, but that uncertainty will be part of the fun.