Adventures in Dongdaemun - Culinary and Otherwise

My friend Stacy and I decided to go to the Dongdaemun craft market again today. We both needed a few things for some craft projects that are in progress. We were on a mission to find buttons. We both needed very specific types of buttons for a project. The buttons are on the same floor as the jewelry making supplies. 

In Korea, accessories are a very big deal. They are cheap and plentiful, and some of them are like nothing I've ever seen before. Koreans especially seem to love headbands. Some of the headbands here are amazing. They are big, and sparkly, and have feathers poking out of them at all angles. I've purchased a few of the amazing, sparkly headbands over the past 15 months, but today I experienced headbands like never before. 

This is Kate Middleton. She's wearing a type of hat that is commonly called a "topper". It's small, and it doesn't actually fit on your head, you just pin it on top. Sometimes they can have a brim, like this one does.

Or sometimes, they're a bit more feathery. It seems that Koreans have taken the idea of the topper, and attached it to a headband. I tried several of these on, and really liked them. However I decided that they probably wouldn't be appropriate for most of the places that I go, so I regretfully left them in the amazing headband-topper bin. Stacy and I explored the rest of the floor and found the buttons we were looking for. As we were getting ready to leave, we both saw another store with the amazing headband-toppers. Only these were different. 

These were fuzzy! As you can probably deduce from the above picture, I did in fact come home with one of the amazing headband-toppers. 

Isn't it fun?!? I thought it was pretty amazing. 

I thought that this was enough adventure for one day, but clearly I underestimated things. Stacy and I have gone to Dongdaemun several times together. To get there from our meeting point, you have to walk through this alley with a TON of street food and other assorted things for sale in these tiny kiosks. Some of the street food looks a little strange, and I've been toying around with the idea of taking some pictures for awhile now. But it was always too crowded, or it was too dark, or I just didn't feel like it. Today the crowds were pretty light, relatively speaking of course, and it was still daylight. So I snapped a picture of this food stand. 

There was one type of food in particular that has been catching my eye as being Very Strange and Odd. Can you guess what it is?

This is a hot dog, dipped in batter, rolled in french fries, stuck on a stick and deep fried. I'd never seen anything quite like it, even at the State Fair. 

Not only did I take a picture, I actually took the plunge and spent a whole $2 to buy one in the name of investigative journalism. Stacy and I both tried a little, and were both surprised by how delicious this was! It certainly isn't something I'd eat every day, or even every week. It looks like a heart attack on a stick. But it was pretty amazing.  

After eating the heart attack on a stick (I feel like it needs a better name...) I stopped at a fruit stand and bought a giant pear to cleanse my system.