The Main Market

We thought we had been to the market until we found out that every 4th and 9th day (14th, 19th, 24th...) there is a huge market in downtown Changwon. We have since been there just about every opportunity we had and it's not that hard since I work less than a 1 minute walk from this market.

"The Market" is a big 3 floor building that has lots of no frills shops and on market day tons of local farmers and others surround this building with their little booths. There are so many booths that the sidewalks for 1-2 blocks from the market centre are filled with more vendors. Inside the building they mostly sell the following: what looks like knock off clothes, homemade pillows and blankets, some bulk food, frozen and dried fish/seafood, shoes, bags, flowers, knick knacks and a strange kind of grocery store in the basement where we managed to finally find some familiar spices like basil, parsley and oregano.

The first time we went to "The Market" we were so excited that we spent $60 Cnd on produce and eggs. What would have been 1 month or more worth of produce back home lasted us 7-8 days here. We bought 10 English cucumbers for $4 Cnd, 30 eggs for $5 Cnd and 8 big Asian pears for $5 Cnd among other things. Some of the deals seemed like it was the same price as we would have seen back home, however for here it was a good deal.

A side note, whenever we walk around this market we think of John. All the good products at the best prices available and if you speak Korean you could haggle a little. This place had John written all over it.

Kimchi is the most consumed product in South Korea. Koreans eat kimchi (pickled cabbage) at just about every meal so it would only make sense to be able to find some kimchi at "The Market" and we did. There are several stands that sold kimchi but we have yet to buy any and I don't think we will since we always get kimchi as a side dish with whatever we order at any restaurant. This booth had kimchi of all flavours and several other pickled items like whole garlics.

Some of the vendors yell out their deals like you see this fish guy doing. He was quite entertaining and when someone would buy his long scary looking fish he would clean them 3 at a time, chop them in into 3 big pieces each, salt them and bag them for sale all in under 20 seconds. It's not that he had "the mad skills" but all fish guys would do this at that speed. We also found a shop on the side of the building that had hanging pork. There were 3 butchers chopping away yelling their deals, which kind of felt like I was at the Korean version of"Licks". (the hamburger place that the employees sing songs while you wait in line...)

I know the prices look confusing but we just take off one "0" and add a $ sign and it's pretty close to the conversion. (5000 won = $5.00 cdn) So far we bought a pillow the size of Angèle for $17 Cnd and a new pair of no name shoes for Pierre at $17 Cnd. We haven't found any good priced electronics yet, which is what we were hoping to find.

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