가락시장 Garak Wholesale Market

Since we were at Garak Market anyway to film with Arirang, we poked around on our own in between filming and after we were finished filming. I never knew that Garak Market was a wholesale market. It's the place where supermarkets and restaurants will go to buy massive quantities of food to sell. It's not really a place tourists get to see, so it was actually a really great opportunity for me.

Garak Market is huge. It is divided into section depending on what they are selling. For example, there is a fruit market, seafood market, meat market, vegetable market. Then there is an entire market just for cabbage... because Koreans eat that much cabbage in their lives that they need an entire cabbage division to auction it off every day. When we arrived here with Arirang TV, we were hoping that we could catch an auction going on. But we were there too early. Auctions go on in the evening. They asked if I wanted to stay and film at 8pm when the auction started, but it was so cold and I was so tired by this point in the day that I said, let's just do it and get it over with.

Everything was covered up inside trucks, but being Arirang TV, they just asked the truck owners to open up the covers on the trucks so we could get a good view of alllll the cabbage that would go on auction that evening. It really was a breathtaking sight.

 

Finally, we finished filming, but before heading home, we thought we'd look around and do some shopping and photo taking. 

Some of the fruits and veggies for sale were quite cheap, but other things were just normal priced. Maybe we saved money on something, but other more expensive things kind of evened it out.

It was a reallly cold day. I can't believe these people do this for a living throughout the winter too...

As the sun was setting we found ourselves just in time to catch a vegetable auction. While the auctioneer rattled on in his auctioneer voice (it's just like in English, completely unintelligible unless you know what's going on) people went through boxes of lettuce checking for quality. I snapped this video while we watched the auction.

After walking around the vegetable auction, we wandered across the road to the seafood market. Here were endless stalls of all sorts of interesting fishy things.

The boyfriend was amazed by the cheap price of take out 회 (sashimi) so we picked up some to bring to the boyfriend's family's house. We got two full plates of 회 plus a plate full of oysters for 25,000 won. I guess that's a pretty good price. Though, take out 회 tends to be a bit cheaper since they don't need to give you all the panchan (side dishes) and soup and whatnot.

 

 Our 회 chef

If you ever get the opportunity to get into Garak Market in Songpa-gu (not too far from Jamshil) you should definitely make your way there. In the evening time is when the auctions start, so it's a good time to be there. Although, if you go during the day you might be able to check out the small non-wholesale market section which is fairly cheap as far as markets go. And make sure to pick up some 회 while you're there!