It was a late morning for us, we slept for about 12 hours and then kind of lingered in bed for an hour whilst watching Flight Plan (first movie Sean Bean didn't die??). When we finally succeeded in getting our skinny jeans on over our long johns, We made our way to the Noryangjin Fish Market and picked ourselves up some interesting stuff.
We bought a whole fluke, two abalones, a sea squirt (or sea pineapple), two sea cucumbers and a baby octopus. I have a feeling that we may have been ripped off (even after haggling in a mixture of terrible Korean and Mandarin) but we were too excited about our food. After paying, the fish seller gave our bag of goods to another lady (who was also speaking to us in Mandarin) who then brought us to a restaurant on the second level.
Our next challenge was trying to communicate with a waitress how we wanted our seafood cooked. Again I was speaking very broken Mandarin to a Korean lady fluent in Mandarin (should probably had stayed in Chinese school for more than a year when I was 11). Well the waitress went off and and came back with our first dish, fluke sashimi. Probably the freshest sashimi I have ever had (I say this because we ordered a whole fluke and saw the guy bash it in the head with a hook). There isn't a lot of taste in fluke compared to fatty tuna or salmon, next time we will get a whole salmon from this market (yes I will be back).
Our next dish was the sea squirt and sea cucumber, sashimi style. The sea cucumber had a mild sweet flavour and the sea squirt was.........slimy and a bit bitter. Probably won't order that again. Finally, the main reason we came to South Korea, sannakji 산낙지. Baby octopus cut up whilst still alive and served whilst still moving. To decrease the chances of a tentacle getting stuck in our throats and causing us to choke to death, we dipped the wriggling pieces into sesame oil and chewed for a very long time before swallowing. Our verdict? Super delicious. Definitely recommend everyone who visits Korea to try it.
The last dishes to come out was the other half of our fluke cooked in some sort of sauce and our BBQ'd abalone. The abalone had some nasty looking green guts (tastes like the usual guts taste).
So that was our late breakfast (at 12pm).
Hope my jacket doesn't smell like a fish market
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