My stepdad has been promising to buy me abalone to eat (as well as California Lobster and teaching me to drive as stickshift) for several years now. I've finally, sadly, realized it's never going to happen, so for my first taste of abalone, I went with abalone porridge. It was rather expensive ($15) but it was fairly good, and new.
I bought my ferry ticket, an overnight ferry with Japanese sleeping areas (similar to the situation in the jimjillbang, but in several slightly smaller rooms) for the next night as the day ferries were all booked. Wandering around the downtown area was vaguely interesting and I went into a memorial I passed on the way that was okay, then walked over to the Busan Tower. The view was lovely but there were huge masses of Japanese tourists there, despite the dull gray day, so I didn't stay for long.
Walking towards the fish market took me through a film festival square with generic mall-type stores, a cheap market and an expensive yuppie market with windows I had to tear myself away from. All four of these markets/shopping areas were within about three blocks of each other, which I found interesting.
These ones are actually properly dead.
Eventually I walked into the fish market. My guidebook had called it "possibly the smelliest place in the world," but I couldn't smell anything. I breathed in very deeply, wondering about this, and was greeted with a slight fishy smell, but when I exhaled, I again couldn't smell anything.
This was really weird and worried me so when I got back to the jimjillbang, I looked on webmd and between my slight sniffling, my headaches (about which I'd written "My headaches feel a bit like sinus pressure, sort of like when you can't get your ears to pop and it hurts a bit. Damn, I wish they'd go away," and my lack of smell, I diagnosed myself with sinusitis, which is basically when all your mucus gets blocked up in your head. You cure it pretty much the same way you'd cure a cold: sleep, drink hot liquids, and try to drain your sinuses by steam, though anti-biotics may help. Since I now knew I had a disease, I was especially keen to get back and cure myself by hanging out in a hot tub.
The fish market was interesting though, especially the live octopuses for sale. You could buy them and they would cut it up right there but the tentacles keep moving, at which point, people eat them, as they struggle. Some of the tentacles, unaware they're already dead, continue to resist and poke through peoples internal organs, killing several people each year. I did not try them.
Back at the jimjillbang, the actual name of which I still don't know, I screwed around online and bathed, taking special care to breathe in as much hot steam as possible and put my entire head underwater, and went to bed.
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