Last night at Gwangjang market, I found myself being hand-fed by two different old ladies.  The first one had boxes of kimbap and samples ready on toothpicks.  When we tried to take the toothpicks, she shook her head, pointed at us, and said, 'ahhhh!'

'Ahhh?' we responded, really more inquiringly than acquiescent, but in the kimbap went.  Her tactic worked, and we walked away $3 poorer with a bulging plastic container of rice, seaweed, pickled ginger, carrots, and a mystery yellow sauce.

The second one was serving what I guess you'd call Korean-style sashimi out of portable tank.  I had my slight doubts about eating raw fish served out of a tank on an 85 degree day in a bustling, dusty, dirty market full of display platters of raw chicken, buckets of flopping sole, motorcycles rigged with about 100 extra pounds of support structure, and old drunken men with platters of blood sausage, chicken feet, and soju - but my doubts were much slighter than my desire for sashimi.  Plus, a Korean-Australian couple sitting at the stand's benches heartily recommended this lady's fish.  Starved for English,it probably wouldn't have mattered what they said - I would have sat next to them anyway.

The fish came out on a bed of either noodles or a very starchy and crunchy vegetable, flanked by both chili sauce and a soy/wasabi mix (but pre-mixed, and mostly wasabi - after all, this is Korea, the land of spice).  There was salmon, a variety of white fish, some hamachi-like yellow fish, conch, octopus, squid, and scallops.  I started out eating it the way I knew how, the Japanese way: chopstick up a slice, dip the edge in soy/wasabi, pop it in mouth.  But apparently this was incorrect, because the lady actually came out from behind her stall, shaking her head.  Opening the package of roasted seaweed slices I hadn't noticed next to me, she came up next to me, speared a fish, rolled it in sauce, plunked it in the seaweed, wrapped it up, dumped it in her hand, and shoved it into my mouth before it (my mouth) was even all the way open.  Then, satisfied, she marched away.

At the end of the meal, I couldn't really chew my octopus, so I had to hide it under a pile of noodles and mystery leaf (shiso, mint, citrus... if something could be all of the above, that's what this would have been), pay her, and lose myself in the bustle of the market before she noticed I had left it, lest she chase after me and shove it in my mouth.