Busan and the fish market

We arrived yesterday and didn’t have much time to explore after settling in to our 45th floor apartment near the station:

But we made up for that today spending most of it outside on a cold and sunny day (time for the vests!). The area near us has recently been developed into a kind of waterside park which is beautiful but under-used. We passed the still-being-built opera house (due to open in 2027):

We admired what we think is the newly-installed public art:

At some point, we were inveigled to sit down and join a literary festival hosted by the novelists of Busan and we thought the puppets promising – but after twenty minutes of speeches in Korean (and yes, I did translate them with Papago but was no more the wiser), we left:

We had a lunch stop carefully planned: the Jagaldi fish market which is, we understand, the largest in Korea – and it certainly looked it! The ground floor is stall after stall after stall of fresh fish of the most extraordinary types:

If you’re brave enough, you can pick your fish and they will send it upstairs to be prepared for you (raw, marinated, grilled, served as a hotpot):

We were a bit creeped out by the escaping crabs:

We went upstairs and were immediately shown to a table in a massive hall of people shovelling down all kinds of seafood and alcohol, seemingly without limit to their appetite:

The women at the next table didn’t even take their hats off (would that have been rude)?:

A little intimidated, we ordered a seafood hotpot (it had little pictures of prawns, clams and other things that definitely looked like shellfish) and were delighted with how pretty it looked (and delicious it tasted) when it arrived:

The staff were fantastic – obviously all doing it forever in their wellington boots:

And then, when we could eat no more, we wandered around the dried fish area for a bit:

Outside, on the front, we heard the sound of someone singing – karaoke maybe? – and were thoroughly enchanted by the elderly men who were dancing along – one very happy to show off to me. (If you are reading this on your email, click here to get to the blog and see the videos):

And of course there were the usual street sights – too many to include, but there were a few we couldn’t omit:

First, an invention that we’ve never seen before:

You might not be any clearer with the explanation of the label in Korean:

Papago, the Korean specialist translator, tells us the following:

The second is a church, of which there are many, many, many throughout Korea, often with these unlikely steeples:

And finally a dog out for the afternoon (and his friend):