Noryangjin Fish Market

Some friends came over from Hong Kong for a visit, and they wanted to hit up the Noryangjin fish market. To be honest, from the 7 years that I have stayed in Korea I had never visited the Noryangjin fish market. I felt kind of weird being a semi-tour guide for my friends who had no idea how this market worked, and boy was it a tumultuous experience. It wasn't as negative as I have been painting the experience to be, but it was definitely an intense chapter. 

The moment I got off from Noryangjin station from line number 1, and then approached the exit of the station closest to the market, I had to halt for a second because of the complicated setup of a path that was set up before me. There was a bridge that ran parallel along the train station which led to the market that was visible in the distance. The bridge was a level above the station, but the exit led to a set of stairs that took you down a level, and then gave you an option of three or four different paths leading downwards into some tight corridors. It was a bizarre setup because you had to pointlessly go up and down leaving some people confused to as where they had to go. Also, the bridge itself, and the exterior of the building that was the fish market, had a really ghetto atmosphere because of the graffiti indicating the future demolition of the building. 

If you make your way through the bridge you will make yourself to the rooftop car park area of the fish market building. You can make your way down the stairs until you get to the middle level where you can get a semi-aerial view of the market. I highly recommend taking a few pics from this view, as it is very delightful to the eyes. The middle area has a bunch of doors leading to empty rooms that are piled up with garbage and construction waste. It's not the friendliest of atmospheres so its best to make yourself down to the main market area where it is livelier and more active. 

The market area was pretty relaxed because it was still around 10 AM in the morning, and I was getting a preview by my self, before my friends joined me. When my friends eventually joined me around 11 AM things got pretty aggressive with very forward sales people trying to out hustle their competition in order to make their sales. My friends were from Hong Kong, and the store owners guessed that they were Chinese so they approached them while they were speaking Chinese. Some vendors were speaking in Japanese and some in English. 

My friends wanted to try a variety of seafood so we ended up buying a big variety of things to try. I mean we bought an enormous amount of food. There was literally enough food to feed two families... Anyways, we bought most of our seafood from one lady who seemed the least aggressive in terms of sales, and she was generally a pretty informative lady who was trying her best to help.

We ended up buying around 80 USD worth of food among the three of us. After we purchased the fresh seafood a lady approached us and offered to take our food over to a restaurant. I recommend that you don't follow these people if you already have a restaurant in mind that you want to eat at. We already had a place that we had in mind so we took our food over to the restaurant, but it wasn't easy trying to convince the lady that we were doing things our way. 

We entered a restaurant that had the most people dining in it as we had no idea which place was the popular eatery. To be honest, all of the restaurants seemed to offer the same services, so it really didn't seem to matter where you entered because none of the restaurants were doing anything too fancy, unless you entered a Japanese sushi establishment. When we entered the restaurant we showed the server our purchases, and then we informed her on the way that we wanted our food to be cooked. They had a variety of services ranging from raw, steamed, boiled, stir fried, salted, spiced up, and casserole options. Of course there is a service charge for each cooking option, but it was far cheaper in comparison to what you would get elsewhere because you didn't need to pay for the ingredients. The overall fee that we were charged for eating in was around 60 USD. All together we ended up spending around 140 USD, and when we divided the pay into three parts, each person ended up spending around 40~50 USD. Considering the amount of food that we ate, it was not as expensive as we thought it would have been. We ended up with a lot of left overs so I took the rest of the left overs home.  

I'm not much of a seafood person, but I think if you want an interesting seafood experience this is a nice market to come by. Generally speaking, most people in Korea that I have met don't really eat much seafood unless they travel to the coastal areas of the country. From what I've heard, the seafood is the freshest on the eastern side of the country.