Why go?
To see the Oriental Medicine Market.
Is it worth going out of your way to visit?
No. We went out of our way to visit Daegu because I really wanted to visit the Oriental Medicine Market that my guide book had a special box about. It was staggeringly disappointing.
Daegu
Daegu is a much bigger city than I expected and it took us a long time to drive into and a long time to drive out of (we went in from Jeonju and went out to Haeinsa and it took a lot longer than expected. We wondered if it might have been on a par with driving across Birmingham for the first time with a very basic map).
We parked somewhere central (well, it was more a case of dumping the car in the street shown below) so we could go on the metro or walk to the market. As it happened, we parked a c10-minute walk from the metro and the stop we needed was the next stop, Banwoldang – this we found out by good fortune rather than anyone we asked being able to help us or even show us roughly where we were on our dreadful map.
Once you come out of the metro station, Banwoldang (out of which there are a lot of exits to choose from – we followed the Medicine Market exit but I’m not remotely convinced we did take the correct exit), you can smell the herbs/roots etc.
This was all very promising and I was actually quite excited. We wandered around, saw quite a lot of shops selling roots and twigs and jars of stuff, but not the big buckets/bags of weird and wonderful things, from dried insects to roots and bark, that I was expecting to see.
I had previously read someone’s blog about Daegu and had seen a photo of a gate in a roundabout that marked the beginning of the market. I had also read that it was a bit disappointing, but I really wanted to see all these bizarre things.
We picked up a local map from Tourist Information and set off. In that map, there was a picture a stone tea pot, which marked the main market area. There was also a picture of the gate I’d seen before.
Having failed to find the market where the guide book says it was, we wandered down a quiet road where a large tour group had just come from. As we walked down the road, I could see the big gate at the end of the road so we headed down there, knowing that was a big junction and one road off it, the one with the tea pot, would be the road we’d detoured a good few hours for me to see.
As we got to the gate, I realised the tea pot statue was on the road we’d walked down, the quiet road with dusty old shops with containers of twigs and jars of ginseng, for example. It was at that point I had the full realisation I had trusted the guide book yet again, only to be disappointed. That was it.
The map we’d been given said that there was a wholesale market under the Daegu Yangnyeongsi Oriental Medicine Museum, which we had passed a few times. I believe the museum is interesting and reviews seem fairly good, however we weren’t in the mood for a museum so didn’t go inside.
Sure enough, as we walked round the museum, we discovered a kind of extra large garage type area literally under the museum. There was no one else around except for a man in a small office. The area was full of bags of dried stuff and there were jars of stuff on one wall. No insects, no reindeer horns, etc, just lots of dried herbs and berries.
It made for some interesting photos but it wasn’t remotely worth detouring to see.
We then walked around that area and to a young, trendy kind of area where there were lots of restaurants, so many that it took us about half an hour of wandering to finally pick one. We had a pleasant pizza lunch, I tried to get over my feelings of disappointment and we headed back to the car (which I had spent the day convinced would be towed away as I knew we’d probably parked somewhere we shouldn’t have – as it turned out, we had parked in a paying area and we had a ticket which was a mere 5,000 won and which a ticket man collected off us when we got to the car).
Would I go again?
No.