Following weeks of colds and generally feeling rubbish Kat, Emily and I decided to visit the Seoul herbal medicine market in the hope of finding something to remedy our ailments.

The market was huge and had plenty of medicine to choose from, but we discovered two drawbacks – everything was in Korean and we don’t know anything about herbal medicine! Luckily we found a very nice man who, after having lived in London, spoke very good English. He showed us a mixture of, well…. twigs that will apparently make us feel better.

As we had little hope of finding anyone else who could show us how to prepare the herbs we decided to go for it and purchase his twigs! Whilst he was making us up a bag he gave us some tea to sample and a twig he told us to chew on. Once I got over how odd it was to be stood in a shop chewing a piece of wood I realsied that it had a sweet taste and the longer I chewed it the sweeter it got!

The market was a fantastic place to visit despite our lack of knowledge of the products on sale. The streets were lined with stalls containing baskets of brightly coloured herbs with elderly Koreans nestled between the baskets waiting for someone to make a purchase. It was the way I’d imagined Korea to be before I arrived!

According to the Tour to Korea website, market has more than one thousand herb clinics, herbal medicine shops and drugstores, this has expanded from just 20 shops during the 1960s. Also the products are fairly cheap because they are delivered directly from herb plantations.

* Posted by j150vsc on 17/12/2006.