Like so many of the most memorable places I've visited in my travels, Korea's soul seems to be in its markets. Seoul is packed with markets, from open air vendors of dried dates and pickles to fishmongers cutting up and cooking wriggling sea creatures inches from the feet of passing pedestrians to multi-story indoor clothing markets in modern buildings that stay open practically all night.
The fishmarket in Busan, famous throughout Korea, was a non-stop series of sideshows of doomed sea creatures, from the living to the dead to the dried. Fish swam in bubbling tanks, lay piled on ice, hung in chains of yellow plastic to dry, and sizzled on grills. I saw slime-oozing hagfish being impaled with screwdrivers and filleted, the pieces of flesh still moving as they cooked over coals. An octopus escaped momentarily from its tank, only to be recaptured, weighed, and ripped apart by the gloved hands of a smiling fishmongeress. I walked past endless stalls of fish and seafood -- tanks of sedentary flounders, heaps of tiny dried shrimp, freshly caught octopus and squid with their tentacles neatly laid out -- and I kept wondering, who could possibly eat all that?
Chungbu Market, just around the corner from my Seoul hotel, seemed like a typical open-air market (protected by plastic and cloth awnings) with a lot of the same kind of fish, though more of the dried variety, and lots of dried dates, seaweed, chilis, condiments and fruit, some with homemade electric devices that rotated long strips of thin plastic to keep away flies. Stalls were already open when I first walked through at 8 am, dodging overloaded motor scooters and women carrying on their heads trays of hot meals covered by newspaper to be delivered to market vendors.
But not many blocks away, Dong Dae Mun market stayed open practically all night. Sleek, modern mall-like buildings held floors and floors of fashionable clothing, cafes, and restaurants connected by escalators. Nearby, another, more old-school indoor clothing market had dozens of small stalls on every floor, each barely big enough for two or three people to sit, surrounded by clothes piled up or hanging from floor to ceiling. At 1:30 a.m., vendors sat watching small TVs hidden under piles of goods, or shared full meals (including stews and kimchi and rice and side dishes) off of metal trays delivered by local restaurants, or simply dozed on their merchandise. With closing time at 4:30 a.m., they still had a ways to go. Outside, packed lanes were lined with vendors of clothing, souvenirs, and food. At 2 a.m. it was as busy as lunchtime in Manhattan; piles of dumplings and eggs sat ready, skewers of meat sizzled on charcoal grills and pots of spicy red fishcake stew bubbled on portable stoves.
These markets become the focal point of a kind of streetlife you just don't see in most American cities, where businesses tend to retreat behind walls of glass that separate merchant and customer.
In Korea, many stores that aren't even in officially designated market areas have a sidewalk presence. Outside of the very modern, central areas of the city, it seems that stores everywhere open up and spill onto the sidewalk, with goods arranged appealingly in fully open-air storefronts monitored by merchants perched on plastic chairs. A walk down Uljiro Street took me past dozens of shops selling lightbulbs, hardware, lumber, housewares, sheet metal goods -- none of them hidden behind glass storefronts. There's an immediacy about the connection one can make with the goods and the vendors here that is missing in most American shopping areas. A single object can catch your eye and bring you to a stop, or a nod from a shopowner can slow you down in a way that simply isn't possible in the impersonal world of American storefronts. It kind of makes me feel bad for the loneliness of American merchants, isolated from the public by barriers of glass and window displays.
Maybe it's just an illusion, but walking through the stalls of these Seoul markets, being beckoned by shopowners, or seeing them chatting or laughing or eating, or even simply making eye contact with them, I just got the feeling I was less alone, more in touch with the soul of Seoul.
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