Moving On

After the tour of GyeongJu I was dropped at the bus station. This is the beginning of the real journey. I took a bus alone to Pusan, the second largest city in Korea. I don't know anybody, nor am I with anyone bilingual. From here on out was my first real experience doing everything I needed to do for myself by myself. I had to get a hotel room, ask directions, determine bus routes and fares, order at restaurants, and make my way back to Seoul entirely on my own in Korean.

After a night in a motel that was obviously geared towards ladies of the night, if you will, I awoke in Pusan, just a ship away from HaeUnDae, the biggest tourist beach in the city. The sunrise was a little disappointing given the hazy morning, but the sea was beautiful. Pusan sits on the Sea of Japan (the East Sea, Korean insist). When you look at a map, Japan looks so close that you'd expect to be able to sea it from the shore, but Japan wasn't there for all I knew.



My first destination in Pusan was the fish market. I had heard rumor of this fish market. The sign outside claims that it's world famous. Naturally I'm skeptical than any pile of fish could possibly world famous. So I took the subway to the JaGalChi market in order to discover world fame and dead fish. Everyone knows that I am a man lacking all sense of direction, but when you can smell a place 8 minutes away it's hard not to find your way there.

It was probably 2 or 3 miles long, not counting the small tributary streets branching off it. There were at least a hundred boats in the bay behind. There were more fish than I ever thought were in the entire East Sea, much less than could ever be caught in one morning in one town. There were live fish, dead fish, iced fish, slabs of fish, fish flayed open, dried fish, cured fish, smoked fish, flat fish, eels, giant crabs, boxes full of blue crabs, sting rays, buckets of worms, turtles, shells, mollusks, clams, piles of squid, assorted baskets, octopi crawling out of bowls, giant motionless octopi, things that looked like burnt mushroom halves, things that (if taken out of context of Fish Market) I couldn't have told you if they came from the ocean or my nose, mounds and mounds of tiny fish and shrimp, old women chopping, slicing, poking, hanging, shelling, frying, skinning, kabobing, arranging, icing, dragging, announcing, haggling, cracking, spraying, wiping, scraping, and any other verb you can come up with. I saw one shark, two or three kinds of eel, three kinds of octopus, squid ranging from purple to gray to pink to white, things that I never thought were fish in the first place, and everywhere you turned there were tons of people shopping for the freshest fish in the country, and I mean fresh. Even as I was walking up and down the market, men in boots and smelling salty were dragging trash can sized buckets and crates attached to strings up and down to their respective tents, sloshing water as they went.