Saturday, June 16, 2012

Birthday Weekend/Majang Meat Market

Since Friday was my birthday Eric took me out to a cute little Italian restaurant after work.  It was set up and decorated to look like an authentic Italian restaurant and the food tasted quite good too!  We also explored Dongdaemun, a very large, nighttime street market.  It is similar to many of the markets here and somewhat like Portland's Saturday market back home, but on a much larger scale.  Many of the street vendors do not start setting up their tents of stuff until 8:00 or 9:00 at night, hence the reason it is a nighttime market.  It's largely the black market area where you can buy very cheap, but very fake, brand name clothes, wallets, sunglasses, handbags, etc. Even though it is a nighttime market it was packed with people when we were there until almost midnight last night.

Today we went on a mission to find a particular meat market we had heard about.  We are always looking for good deals on our meat so decided to check it out.  This particular market, the Majang Meat Market (selling only beef and pork, we checked before we went!), supplies seventy percent of the meat in Seoul.  When you see the way Koreans eat their meat you realize this is a HUGE amount.  It is largely a whole sale market where restaurants and supermarkets go to buy their large quantities early in the morning, but they are also willing to sell small quantities.   Though I will say the lady we bought from laughed quite a bit when we told her we only wanted one kilogram.  The market was pretty big and very different from anything you will find in America.  In Asia, and really in most of the world, NO part of the animal goes uneaten so they had ALL parts of the cow and pig on display and for sale.  How you go about eating somethings, like the whole head, I'm not sure but there were many available to choose from.  One thing that we found interesting were the many old women sitting on a bench next to meat that was out in the open with their fly swatters.  Anytime a fly would come close to their meat they would shoo it away with the fly swatter.  We were hoping to find some ground beef, but that is apparently nonexistent in Korea so we settled for some beef slices (from a closed refrigerated case) which Eric did his best to turn into homemade ground beef for some homemade burgers tonight.  Very tasty!! (especially since we had some Burgerville spread recently sent to us!)

An interesting note on beef in Korea-- As with many things here, anything that is made in Korea is going to have the highest demand, as well as the largest price tag.  Many Koreans will not eat beef that is from the US or Australia, only Korean beef.  Korean beef often means a cow was purchased elsewhere but lived and was fed on Korean soil for about six months before being sold as beef.  Since the demand for Korean beef is so high it is outrageously more expensive than any beef imported from the US or Australia.  We were assured by the lady we brought from today that we were buying Korean beef.  We are smart enough to know otherwise since we know we did not pay anywhere close to the price of Korean beef (one man was selling it for roughly the equivalent of $35/lb!!) and have read many places they will try to tell people (especially foreigners) they are buying Korean beef for a very good price when it is really Australian or American beef.  At $35/lb. you can see why we are completely okay with our beef being made in America!

My Korean co-teacher bought me a birthday cake to share with my kindergartners.  Tommy enjoyed it on his face, shirt and the table in addition to in his mouth.

 All of the yellow tents were vendors selling different things at Dongdeamun.  There were many, many long streets of yellow tents.
Entrance to Majang Meat Market.  We didn't take pictures of the meat for sale because we didn't particularly want to look at all the different types of meat they had there many times!

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