Daegu has the most famous medicinal herb market in Korea, and I'm ashamed to admit I had never visited it until yesterday. I happened to be downtown for Sunday Yoga and I decided to finally check out Yangnyeongsi. To my surprise, they were having their annual festival! I wanted to learn more about traditional medicine, but unfortunately none of it was in English. There were several tables with different dried mushrooms, pieces of bark, and some kind of grain. There were accupressure demonstrations (I had seen one earlier at Chinhae but not realized what it was). Korean traditional medicine is somewhat less shocking than Chinese medicine, and I didn't see any organs in jars or dried pieces of monkey or anything. If that stuff is a part of Korean medicine, it's not out on the street. And, of course, there was ginseng.
Asians are obsessed with ginseng, which is supposed to be a bit of a cure all. I can attest that it does make you feel better, though it's definitely an acquired taste. The market had ginseng tea, ginseng candies, really expensive ginseng roots preserved in a jar, and even ginseng twigim, or deep fried ginseng.
I was sorry I didn't understand anything, but it was still worth seeing. Korean traditional medicine shops have massive versions of the korean traditional medicine chest, which is a beautiful wooden chest with several drawers, each of which has a symbol on it. I picked up an English language brochure on my way out and saw that I had walked through a “healthy rain drops from the sky” tunnel, passed something called the “human organ experience,” and missed out on the “Nintendo health experience.”
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