Day 5 - We started off with a breakfast of champions at the Starbucks in our hotel, which hit the spot for us. There was a small street market just a bit up from our hotel, so we wandered over there before catching taxis to the temple we were planning to visit. Here are a few shots of the kids walking through the market. Jae explained that traditionally Koreans prefer their fish alive when they buy it, so fish that's already dead tend to be sold at much cheaper prices to the "working class" people. Some of these fish were salt dried, but others weren't.
The lady below was occasionally dumping water on her fish to keep them fresh.
You could also get red meat and produce at this market.
Octopus anyone?
Reagan and Sara
The kids were complaining about the smell - time to go!
We jumped in a cab and took a fairly long trip - 45 minutes or so to the Haedong Yonggung Temple, which was right on the water.
They had these statutes with the zodiac sign for the year of your birth. We couldn't remember what Reagan is, so she has a photo with almost all of them :)
This statue is for safe driving - see the wheel in the front? Several of them had boxes for you to put money into them in exchange for the blessing.
they were getting ready for Buddha's birthday, so the lights were a bit of a bummer and they distracted from the view.
Here's a close up of the painting on the temple ceiling.
Several of the zodiac statues
Not stroller friendly at all, but so worth it :)
At this station you could make a donation for good grades. We emptied our wallets here...just kidding, but we did donate :)
Brock loved this little guy. I have other pictures of him touching buddha's nipples, but I decided to leave those out - I'm guessing that's bad juju and we canceled out all of the good donations we made.
You could buy these little figurines in the gift shop and set them around. They each had different blessings with them.
Snack break!
So, the main reason we went to Busan was to visit this fish market. Jae was telling us that you can tour the market and pick out your fish, then go upstairs and they will cook it for you. It was crazy. Outside had lots of vendors selling dead/dried fish, but inside was a visual and nasal overload :) There were so many things that I didn't even know what they were.
Dried sting rays.
Amazingly enough, we ran into another group of people that we know from Okinawa. So, we all decided to eat together. We had a group of 20 for lunch. Jae did all the picking/communicating for us and soon we were ushered upstairs. The lady below was weighing some of our choices.
Here's our two crabs. I'll try to remember how the meal went, but we don't really like seafood, so we weren't planning to eat. We knew this going in, so I had snacks for the kids. We were plenty happy with the experience and didn't feel like we missed out. So, first to the table was some sashimi. Not sure what the fish type was, but it was thinly sliced. Next were some oysters. Then came a blackened fish that was whole. You just used your chopsticks to pick off pieces. Then the cooked crab came out, along with some prawns and scallops. I think the last dish was a fish head soup.
Here we are getting ready for lunch.
Apparently the ladies serving us felt bad for us because we weren't eating. They kept talking to Jae and trying to deliver food to us. We ended up with the side dishes that come with the meal. Big beans, kimchi, carrots, broccoli, garlic and a few other things I can't identify.
As I mentioned, we were having snacks at our table. Reagan had a bag of the sweet/salty M&M's and the server lady was interested. She tried a few, and then a few minutes later came back for more. She seemed most interested in the little cookies that were in the bag. We loved this and Reagan got such a kick out of sharing her snack.
This is the fish head soup.
a few more pictures of the market
After lunch we headed to the train station to return to Seoul. We learned that we could upgrade to first class for only $20 extra/seat, so we splurged on the way home. Front facing and bigger seats - so worth the $.
We headed out to dinner when we got back and went to a "Black pig" restaurant. I guess it means a berkshire pig and is supposed to be a huge treat here. The concept was the same as the Korean BBQ restaurant that we went to the other night, just with pork. Very tasty.
