Causing a scene

Yesterday, Julie and I spent the morning at Namdaemun Market. (I’m still kicking myself because I forgot to charge my camera battery.) As is typical of me, I missed 90 percent of it the first time I went.

One thing about Asian markets (at least that I’ve found) is that you can miss them entirely if you don’t know what you are looking for—or at.

The first time I went, I saw all these wonderful outdoor stalls selling all kinds of things—clothes and handbags, pots and pans; others selling jewelry, shoes, luggage … There was even one stall selling live carp and snapping turtles. (For food, I think, not pets.) Truly, I think just about anything you could think of to buy, you could find it at Namdaemun.

But, I totally overlooked the indoor markets. If you actually enter any of the somewhat nondescript doorways, you will find yet another world of shopping. The international goods market, for example, is almost just like going to Target back home, if Target also sold whisky and ginseng, that is.

Another building is nothing but pots and pans, china, and dishes.

It’s really incredible and my description doesn’t begin to do it justice. It’s something you have to see to believe. Some of the stuff is pretty cheap, both in price and quality, but other items are really very nice and similar to what you’d buy in a department store.

The thing I wanted to blog about though was an incident with one of the food vendors as we were leaving. Namdaemun also has lots and lots of food stalls, and small restaurants, selling stuff that looks delicious. (You can watch a lady making homemade noodles in front of one of the restaurants. Noodles you can later eat in a steaming bowl of 라면 (ramyeon).

Lots of the vendors (both food and the other variety) shout or chant or clap their hands to get your attention. They can be very creative. Some people sort of chant what they have in a sing-song voice (the same as the guy who sells vegetables from a truck in our neighborhood), and some of them just shout and clap their hands to make noise so you will look at them.

The best I saw yesterday was the cute guy selling hotteok (I can’t seem to find the correct Korean spelling. I will update later). These are round bread-like desserts that look like silver dollar pancakes, but are filled with sweet-bean paste. Anway, he was calling out what he had to passers-by. When he saw us approach, he immediately switched to English, calling out that “These are sweet pancakes, very good! You’ll like them!’ and smiling. As we passed by his stall (we’d just finished lunch) he shouted out, ‘JULIE! JENNIFER! JESSICA! JANE!’ hoping, I assume, that our names were in there somewhere.

(Maybe a lot of English teachers have names that start with ‘J’?) I thought it was pretty impressive–at least a variation of the same old pitch. We should have gone back and bought one to reward his ingenuity. But we didn’t.