second floor of a working fish market, fluorescent tubes overhead casting flat white light onto wet steel counter edges and glass tanks murky with circulating seawater, the harbor window behind her going silver in the seven-a.m. half-light before it commits to grey — last piece of pale sliced fish lifted on chopsticks, halmeoni already turned back to cutting board — the meal is ending without ceremony
The halmeoni didn't ask if I wanted it. She just gestured — a short, definitive movement toward the white bowl — and I sat down.
White bowl of thinly sliced raw fish — likely geoduck or whelk — with dark sesame-vinegar dipping sauce in a small dish beside it, chopsticks resting on the rim
The second floor of Jagalchi at seven in the morning is not a performance. The fluorescent light is flat and the tanks are loud and the women behind the cases have been there since before the harbor turned color. The bowl had something pale in it, thinly sliced, a dipping sauce dark with sesame and something acidic I couldn't name. I ate it standing. The texture was muscle — dense, resistant, then gone. I didn't ask. She watched me until I finished the last piece and then turned back to her cutting board.
The harbor through the window was going silver, the way it does just before it decides to be grey.
Yeongdo Bridge span from pedestrian walkway, Korean road signage visible, Busan harbor going silver-grey through rain haze beyond the railing
I wore the cargo pants because something was going to splash and it did — not from a tank but from the rain that came in around nine and turned the street outside into a sound installation. Every awning a different pitch. The canvas shoes were wrong in thirty seconds. I walked anyway, through Nampo, through the covered market corridor where even the rain couldn't reach but the smell of it could. Wet stone. Cold steel. Something being fried one stall over.
covered market corridor in Nampo, a compressed tunnel of corrugated-roof stalls maybe three meters wide, steel-pipe frames hung with plastic sheeting, wet stone underfoot, the corridor's far mouth open to rain-grey street — sound of rain hitting every awning at a different pitch audible but rain itself unreachable — stopped mid-stride, head turned toward a frying stall off her left shoulder — smell preceding sight, she hasn't found it yet
By the time I got to Yeongdo the linen shirt was damp and helping no one. The bridge over. The hill up. The rain had softened to something that wasn't quite mist.
on the Yeongdo hillside, a narrow concrete-paved lane barely wide enough for one, retaining wall to the left, apartment blocks stacked vertically up the slope behind her — windows starting to show interior light in the early evening interval between rain and dusk, a woman two floors up mid-gesture with laundry between rain intervals — she has paused on the lane looking up the staircase of apartments — not at the laundry woman, at the pattern of lit and unlit windows above
I changed in the late afternoon into dry clothes before going back out. The hill behind the guesthouse was visible from the window, apartments stacked the way they are when topography made the decision. Lights starting. A woman two floors up hanging laundry between the rain intervals, optimistic or experienced, I couldn't tell.
I ate standing at another counter. I didn't catch the name of what I ordered.
What she wore
day2-scene1
I wore the mini skirt to Jagalchi and nobody looked twice — the halmeoni was focused entirely on making me eat the thing in the bowl.
day2-scene2
The linen shirt went on when the rain got serious — it doesn't actually keep you dry but it feels like it's trying.
day2-scene3
Changed for the evening because Yeongdo at dusk deserves something that isn't damp linen — just clean black trousers and a quiet top and the feeling of the hill behind you.