My favorite smell came from the roasted sweet potato stand. There, the humble sweet potato was placed into a special sweet potato roaster -- something that looked like an old tyme-y pot belly stove or steam punk smoker with a face of tiny little potato-sized drawers for roasting. The stove with its cute little compartments was enough make me giddy with excitement, but the smell of roasted sweet potatoes? Omg the smell is one of the best smells in the world, recognizable from way down the street and Pavlovian in it's ability to make one's mouth water. How could something so simple be so exquisitely good? And yet, isn't that how it always is?
I selected the plumpest of the plump of the sweet potatoes, paid my dollar, and carried my paper-wrapped hot potato in my freezing cold hands like a prized jewel, peeling away at it's delicate skin from time to time to bite into its steaming hot sweet orange flesh. We discovered a maze of even more market stalls, one tiny little street opening up into building after building of covered food vendors. Holy crap we were in heaven. I nudged Sly about a million times -- "what's that?" "can we try it?" "I wonder what that tastes like." I had the eyes of a wild woman scanning all the stalls chomping at the bit, deciding what to eat next.
My normal MO when it comes to eating at unfamiliar places is to just find a restaurant/stall/spot where a lot of people are eating. In this case we found a food stand where a bunch of older ladies were sipping soup and talking loudly (I discovered later it may have been more for the Korean drama that was on tv) and decided that this was the spot. We weren't *that* hungry but one stall over a lady was selling all kinds of stuffed pancakes -- egg and scallion, egg with ground pork. egg with anything you could want. The kind old Halmoni spoke to me as if I spoke Korean, but then, realizing that I only spoke food, handed me a sample to try. And with that, we plopped down on the cold bench and ordered several types of pancakes, which she heated up on a well seasoned griddle and served with salty sesame and soy sauce.
"This isn't even a big market," Sly said. My head swiveled around to stare at him, eyes popping out of my noggin even more than before. "It's not?" I squealed. Korean markets: I think this is the beginning of a beautiful gut-busting friendship.