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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Crossing Guard

We were out shopping this weekend and we saw the coolest crossing guard ever. He reminded me of Micheal Jackson with his outfit and of Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 3 when he's directing traffic at the start of the movie. This guy had some major moves to tell cars which way to go and although he was talkng non-stop and he was definitely dancing. This would have been way better shown if I had a camcorder but the rapid shots I got with my camera will have to do. There was so much movement that I had a hard time knowing who's turn it was, but the cars all understood him. At the end of each traffic direction change, he would finish with a bow as you see in the picture. It was kind of like a nice thank you, as is the norm in Korean culture.

Meat Department

Meat has been a small challenge in South Korea. We miss beef. To our parents reading this, we would like to place a order for the best and biggest steak (Angèle wants mushrooms) when we get back to Canada.

They eat a lot of pork in S. Korea and they don't clean off the fat as much as we would like. The only clean piece of meat that we found was pork tenderloin which was reasonably priced at approx $2.50 cnd for 1. We bought what we thought was bacon, as you see here with bone in it, but it didn't taste like bacon at all. We are assuming that in Canada they cook, smoke and season the bacon before packing it. We think this is bacon straight from the pig, untouched, bone and all. So, we'll have a side order of bacon with our steak.

Ground beef isn't common in S. Korea either, we only found chopped beef which is extremely expense as you see here this pack cost approx. $11.00 cnd and tasted like steak in our spaghetti sauce. We aren't sure if we will do that again.

We have yet to find a clean, boneless, skinless chicken breast either. They seem to only pluck and gut the chicken then chop it up into small pieces, in no particular order, and price it for sale. *Yummy!

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*hint of sarcasm.

Produce Department

There is a grocery store called the GS Supermarket that is 10 minutes away on foot and we buy most of our products there. We find just about everything we could need there but it is more expensive then the market shops. The produce department is pretty good and the cheapest item that we purchase would have to be oranges. We buy about 25-30 clementines (Christmas oranges) for about $3.00 cnd. You could buy them by the case, bagged or loose. If you bag your own you must give your bag to the produce employee who weighs it and prices it for you which is something that is usually done at the cash register back home.

One really cool thing is their lettuce. They don't seem to eat bowls of salad like we do, they mostly use lettuce to wrap the meat they BBQ. So buying a head of lettuce or romaine isn't common. Some poor Joe's job at the grocery store is to separate all the leaves from the heads of lettuce for sale by weight. This pile looks kind of picked through so the leaves aren't nicely placed like it usually is but you get to see the cool fog machine that keeps them moist.

We can buy watermelon (with seeds) and they are the size of a cantaloupe for $21.00 cnd. I hear they are huge and cheap in the summer so I'll have to wait. One item that we haven't seen is celery but I was never a big fan of celery anyway.

I know this isn't produce but I don't want to make a blog on just eggs. You can easily find chicken eggs all over and if you shop around you can get 10 eggs for $1.50 cnd but they only have brown eggs and we find that the yolk is much darker and has a stronger taste. The coolest thing that we got to try was Quail eggs which are also all over the place. We only had a hard boiled one at a restaurant as it came as a side dish with one of our meals. To our surprise, it tasted just like a normal egg but smaller.

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South Korean Malls

So far finding things in malls has been quite the challenge. The malls look more like small apartment buildings covered in signs. The signs advertise what store, shop, school, restaurant, gym, pharmacy, dentist, pool hall... etc is in that building. Most signs have a number on the bottom right and the letter F which tells you what floor the business is on. This makes it very difficult to find things since I don't read Korean and not all signs are self explanatory with images. I found myself having to walk up each floor of a few buildings to see what they had and it's amazing how many stores they can fit in one building.

I really enjoyed figuring this out because I always wondered what all the lights and signs on city buildings were for in movies that have a set in Asia, now I know.