Busan Part 3: Jagalchi Fish Market

WE had anticipated a knock-you-about pong at Korea's biggest fish market.

The kind that has you burying your nose in your shirt for relief - subtley, of course, so as not to piss off the ajummas even more and look totally like a tourist. (Though the white skin and enormous camera hanging from the neck is usually a pretty good indication.)

But due to the fact Busan's Jagalchi Markets were not indoors, as we'd expected, it was like any other stroll through a wet market in Korea.
It was all narrow laneways lined with colourful umbrellas and buckets of anything and everything reaped from the ocean.

Enormous octopus were splayed out on tables; live octopus were lobbed together in buckets, writhing about and making a tremendous effort to escape, sucking up and over the side then flopping onto the bitumen before being scooped back to reality.

Fish were in every type and form - alive in buckets, freshly caught, dried, and a few tables of cooked fish outside eateries for the hungry.
I'm not a seafood person, but I thought that even if I was, Koreans really do take it to a new level. Not one that I'm sure I dig but still fun for perusing.

Everything from fish to wormy things are gutted out the front of eateries and quickly taken inside to cook (or not). Octopus are eaten alive and kicking - literally in this case, and yes, apparently the suckers can be hazardous for the windpipe going down.

Raw fish restaurants are clustered around the beaches at Busan, and from what we saw, the bottom floors were like fish markets in themselves, with everything alive in buckets. Customers simply walk around, point to their fish of choice and then go upstairs where it is filleted for eating.

Anyone for seafood?

In Busan Part 4: hitting the Korean food wall (at 10 months and three weeks - not too bad I say) only to be saved by The Mother of all tteok poki's.