Pupper Ponyo and friends at the COEX Aquarium!

It's amazing what one can come across in

Asia's largest underground shopping mall

Do you get the impression too that the fish in the picture

wanted to befriend Puppet Ponyo?

 

 I wonder ... are they related?! ;b

I get the feeling reactions to this fish will be split 

between those who think it's super ugly and 

others who think its lips would be great to eat! ;D

More than once on my recent South Korean vacation, I found myself in an underground shopping mall.  But while the Myeongdong undergound mall near the hotel my mother and I stayed at, and the Incheon underground mall that linked to the closest subway station to Sinpo International Market (where we had had the awesome Korean fried chicken) came across as unattractively low end, the COEX Mall located a stone's throw away from the impressive Bongeunsa was an entirely different proposition.

Not that my mother and I did any shopping there, mind!  Instead, we headed there after our Bongeunsa visit for lunch -- at a restaurant serving Korean food (my mother had more naengmyun while I had a plate of spicy squid and rice) where we were mistaken for Japanese people and thus had the server speaking Japanese to us, thereby giving me the surreal experience of hearing naengmyun referred to as soba and my dish referred as as ikadon!

After our satisfying lunch, my mother and I decided we might as well check out the mall's aquarium since we were already in the complex.  If truth be told, we didn't have particularly high expectations for the COEX Aquarium -- and our first impressions of the facility was that it was on the amateurish side.

The deeper we ventured into the aquarium though, the more we (and Puppet Ponyo, who popped out every once in a while from my backpack, too!) liked it -- finding some of the designs of the displays to be pretty innovative.  (I especially liked the part where they made it look like fish were swimming in such as a telephone box and drinks vending machine, and the section where one could have one's hands cleaned by "doctor fish".)

Also of interest was the aquatic life on display -- with some scary creatures, other fascinating ones, and still others that I frankly found super cute!  The usual suspects, such as crocodiles, whales and penguins were there -- but so too were such as manatees, a greater variety of eels than I knew existed, and a whole bunch of fish which eyes I found beautiful and also disconcertingly human-like!

And yes, I have to admit it: whereas I used to laugh at those Japanese I heard uttering "oishii!" (delicious) exclamations in aquariums (like those in Osaka and Okinawa), I go to thinking that too about certain of the creatures I caught sight of at this Seoul facility!  In particular, I was moved to imagine how tasty the thick lips of certain fish would be and how fantastic a meal certain Japanese crabs' super long legs would have made and, when looking at the eels, wonder how something that was so delicous could look so horrifying! ;D