BUSAN-A-RAMA: Jagalchi Fish Market

Last Sunday, Bryan and I embarked on a little trek to a small film festival we heard about in an area of town we had not yet been to. Due to our lack of knowledge of the Korean language...and Korea's lack of street signs...we got lost :(. It is easy to get frustrated in those situations, but we accepted that moving abroad lends itself to those kinds of moments and so we decided to flip the day into a positive one.

It just so happened that South Korea's largest fish market was in the same area! Bryan and I had both been very curious and excited to see this place, and were happy to spend our afternoon exploring.

The actual market is huge building, maybe 7 stories tall. The bottom floor is this open market with millions of live fish (flounders, eels, crabs, lobsters, mussles, etc). On the floors above the market there are tons of restaurants where you take the live fish that you bought, and they cook it/prepare it for you and serve it to you.

Bryan LOVES shrimp, and we found the BIGGEST shrimp either of us have ever seen, ever. We are planning to come back here soon to buy some and cook them at home. We were in awe.

Given the matching shirts, I think they might be buying some food for their "100th day" anniversary :)

The market is run almost entirely by these women called "ajumas", or married women. They are a super tough breed and they handle the fish, and the cleaning of the fish with such ease and quickness. A lot of them wear pink aprons which I thought was a funny girly touch for such a dirty/macho job.

Its hard to tell from the photo, but these crabs were HUGE. For those of you out there that are "Deadliest Catch" fans (Bryan and I are both avid followers...), we named these crabs "Bigger than the crabs on 'Deadliest Catch' Crabs"