The Kok Family

When I was growing up in Sioux Center I had a paper route. I learned a lot about managing money and getting a job done from my mom and dad.  I also had some income. I don’t remember what I spent all of my earnings on, but I do remember two things that I spent some of it on: Christmas lights and a 20 gallon aquarium with stand and various accoutrements. The aquarium stayed at the house after I graduated from Dordt, but I think over the years, its made it’s way to the garage.

I’ve always wanted to set one up again, but when you move every year or two, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to have an aquarium. Also, for many years we had our wonderful German Shepherd, Ally, so the pet void was filled. Either way, I’ve been bugging Jessica on and off over the years to let me keep an aquarium and either she’s finally given in or I’ve convinced myself that she has.

Living in here in Seoul, I’ve learned that there is market for everything and anything right here in the city. I’m convinced that if you looked long enough, you could probably find pretty much anything you could ever think of buying.  So, with that in mind, I started scouring the internet for intel on a tropical fish/aquarium market. Low and behold, I found a few sites indicating that such a market did exist in the Dongdaemun shopping area. We hopped on the Blue line (line 4) at Hoehyeon station right by our house, and four stops later we arrived at Dongdaemun station, headed for exit 7, walked a block to the east and had arrived at the tropical fish and exotic pet market.

There were probably about 15-25 shops with aquariums and fish. The first place we walked into had a huge tank of these really cool looking fish. They had a pointy snout with whiskers and a big rectangular mouth on the underside that you could see opening and closing constantly. These guys were 10,000 won a piece and about 5-6 inches long, so probably to big for our tank.

We saw a lot of familiar tropical fish as well, including my favorite, neon tetras. I’ve never seen so many tetras together. It was really neat to see them swimming in a school. They moved individually but also as a group. Very cool.

There were a lot of salt water tanks as well. It was fun to look at the fish with the kids and be able to say, “Hey, remember seeing this fish and that fish when we were snorkeling in Saipan?”  There were also some beautiful corals and sea anemones on display in the tanks.  Not only were there fish at the market, we also saw hedgehogs, roosters, rabbits, turtles, mice, iguanas, and various other creatures for sale.  Pieter really wanted to bring home a mouse, but I thought that might be hard to explain to Jessica when we got home.

I hope to go back to the market soon to pick out a tank, light, filter, heater, substrate, and plants. Hopefully we can set that up over Christmas and then we’ll pick up some fish before the new year!  I’ll keep you posted 🙂

-André