some good music at Dongdaemun market

I went over to the Dongdaemun flea market on the other side of Seoul because I heard there was a guy selling refurbished kayagums there. No such luck, or maybe he wasn't there this week.


But there were piles of all manner of other crap to check out. It is, like every other market I have been here, incredibly crowded and piled high with stuff in all directions. Since it is inside on the ring of a stadium, it is dark and very crowded with narrow, warren-like alleys and stuff piled way over your head. About half of the vendors are selling new junk, the other half is more traditional flea market style with everything you can imgaine. Lots of musical instruments, but nothing worthwhile. Many old guitars with "Gibson" on the headstock but paper labels inside with Asian writing. Somebody needs to get the counterfeiters on a more even keel...


The stadium the flea market was in had a stage set up on the far end, on which these four women were singing. They were dressed in lavish, colorful and heavily sequined dresses with hoop skirts, kind of swaying back and forth. You might be forgiven for assuming that they would be singing beautiful melodies, but actually it was entirely different: rather gutteral music, with some nice falsetto moments. I enjoyed it tremendously. I recorded some on my digital still camera, so the footage is terrible but the sound is ok, it gives you at least a little taste of what it was like. I usually carry around an MP3 recorder but didn't today (of course). I was very pleased to have happened across it. There were other musicians as the afternoon progressed but not as interesting I didn't think.

You can click on this and it should open and play:


MOV03597.MPG



The vendors there sell food too. Here are some dried tentacles.



And here, a far more foul looking food, is a corndog that also features embedded french fries in the corn.

Lots of vendors selling corn dogs.

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