Meg & Rach in Seoul 서울

I Believe the Unofficial Name Would Be "Fish Gut Soup"

Hello everyone! Here is a quick update before we tell you of our adventures in Tokyo!

Last Saturday for dinner we went to the Garak Seafood Market (가락수산물 시장) with our Korean friends. I didn't have too much time to look around (I plan to go back), but the things I saw were awesome! Huge sting-ray for sale, giant octopus tentacles, tanks upon tanks of live fish and other squirming delicacies. It was a curious-fish lovers paradise, and dinner didn't disappoint either!

We ate huge plates of sashimi (raw fish slices including such fish as flatfish 광어, sea bass 농어), whole crabs in a sweet soy type sauce, and ark clam 꼬막, and a soup filled with EVERY part of fish and shell. So I got to experience eating fish intestine and goodness knows what else, which led me to call the soup "fish gut" soup, even though I'm sure there is a much more appetizing name for it!

On the way out of dinner, I saw a couple with a plate of squirming baby octopus tentacle. I had heard about this - apparently they cut up the baby octopus and serve it right away, so its still wriggling all over your plate. I was so entertained by it that the lady picked up a squirming tentacle with her chopsticks, dipped it in the sesame oil and fed it to me! The best part was - it was delicious! I'm definitely going back to get a plate of my own!

On Sunday we went to Seoul Tower located in Namsan Park. We hiked up a bunch of stairs surrounded by trees and plant lif

e (a nice break from the city) to get a great view of the city! Its too bad it was kinda cloudy when we went but we plan to go back and go to the observatory.

One of the most interesting things about the tower was that the fences surrounding the tower were covered in little padlocks. Apparently, sometime, someone hooked a padlock to the fence and wrote on it a declaration of his/her love for their significant other and then threw the key over the edge. Now, the fences are covered with padlocks with messages such as "Bob and Sue forever" or "Billy + Amy = Love" (except usually in Korean).

After the hike, we headed over to the 2009 Lotus Lantern Festival where they had a 2 hour long parade of lanterns in honor of Budda's birthday. The parade was very impressive with hundreds of people and lantern floats marching down one of the busiest roads of the city (obviously closed to traffic at this point). We were able to snatch one of the best seats in the house after climbing onto a subway station overhang. Rach and I were on a mission to get a lantern to take home so after the parade we searched the streets and found...well, quite a few!