To market, to market

NAMDAEMUN market, located at the centre of Seoul, pulses with activity. It's the largest traditional market in Korea and apparently hundreds of years old, with more than 1000 shops.

We've visited a handful of times now, and every time the webbed laneways are teeming. Stalls spill out from shop fronts onto the street displaying giant jars of ginseng and different kinds of seaweed; old Korean men and women man food stalls, submerging tasty treats in bubbling vats of oil or sit on the bitumen peeling raddishes or stirring hissing pots of silkworm larvae.

This is the best place to soak up the traditional Korean atmosphere and the variety of food is phenomenal.
Dozens of food vendors wheel into the streets and set up plastic tents, under which people slurp on platefuls of pippis, jap-chae (cold noodles), tteok poki and an assortment of grilled skewers.

Eat street is excellent for tourists. An entire laneway is devoted to different eateries, each with a Korean woman out the front, skilled at harassing you into eating at her joint.The choice is hard considering every place sells the same Korean dishes, which are all displayed in plastic models out the front next to the pots of lungs and other pig parts. These places are always crammed with tables, packed cheek-to-jowl, so it's the sort of place you go when you're starving and want to hunker down on some food and get out.


For lunch on Sunday we tried a traditional Korean pumpkin porridge. It was a thick rice gruel made slightly sweet with a smattering of red beans - kidney beans that are cooked in sugar and usually used to stuff rice cakes and other sweet things. It was delicious - quite bland but simultaneously comforting, and since I had a queezy stomach that day it was very soothing. Plus it wasn't as filling as I'd expected from a rice gruel, so it left some room for u-dong and dolsot bibimbap.

Doughnuts are the ultimate sweet treat in this country. This stall is at the entrance of eat street so it's hard to walk past without at least stopping and gazing at their beauty.

Anywhere in Korea there's always a line of people waiting for doughnuts hot off the pan - but nobody minds. It's just as nice to stand there mesmerised by the smells, watching the cook deftly rolling and stuffing the batter and then handing you a serviette or a bit of cardboard wrapped around your hot doughnut.
The ones pictured here are sugared and crunchy ones, filled with red bean paste. They really are exquisite. There's also very heavy, dense glutinous rice doughnuts, though I think Wes is more of a fan of these ones. The pancakes cooking in the background are gorgeous. They're made by rolling the batter and filling it with a sweet roasted sesame/honey mixture and then squashing it down to fry into a crispy flat pancake.