Korean people believe that food should be as fresh as possible. You will seldom find frozen vegetables. To help them get the freshest food available, they have a market day every 5th day. The 3rd, 8th, 13th, 18th, 23rd and 28th of every month.

I decided to go and have a look and here is my first market day experience.

Everywhere you look , you will find fresh vegetables. Mostly some sort of a root plant, like radishes(lots of them), onions carrots and some other strange looking roots. Some fruits that are popular at the moment is strawberries, melons, persimmons and Korean pears.You can buy plants and something to snack on. The snacks are mostly some sort of rice bases cookie and they taste amazing.

Seafood is very popular here. AS you can see, it is as fresh as you can get. The sea-cucumbers were still alive and apparently you just chop it up and eat it just as it is. There was stingrays, squids, shellfish and a few different kinds of crabs. Then as always you will find the catch of the day.

As I walked along the street, I found this huge wheelbarrow full of bugs. They are also something to snack on when you are on the street. Apparently they are a very good source of protein, but believe me they are not that good. Then you get your different size chickens, bigger radishes, more strange looking roots and some socks…

Koreans love dried fish. Mostly anchovies, which they use for side dishes or to snack on while waiting for your food. Here you can see the little mountains of anchovies. A variant on the anchovy is dried shrimps. They also have some sort of sausage that’s made of pork, but it didn’t look very good. Lastly, you will definitely find some cow meat here.

At the end of my day, I just bought some fruit and made myself a very good fruit salad to eat for breakfast.

This was my first market day experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Seeing all the strange and different foods they have as well as some familiar ones that they use in a different way.

Keep reading, my journey is only starting…