Beach city hosting boxing championships could be Bundoran – except for king crab

It’s the critters that have been making us feel bad. The daily walk up Sammu-ro, past December Hotel and Izakaya, brings us to the pedestrian-zone ungraciously dubbed ‘Suzi Street’, where the favourite coffee shop – mornings only – sits on the sunny side of the street.

Chosen for its extraordinary claim of “you can feel the love of Mama has toward her child when you drink our coffee”, the area is a brash Legoland of strip-light restaurants, smoked glass-fronted bars and street vendors selling deep fried chicken and fish lollypops.

Beside many of the buildings sit large bath-sized tanks of edible sea life. Flat fish, tuna, giant mussels, monster limpets – Spiderman suction gloves have nothing on these puppies – and king crab with one metre spans, all ready to be power-scrubbed and eaten by cross-legged locals at low tables.

In the slow mornings, you will catch some of the 74 boxing team members wandering around and you might meet a drawn-looking Katie Taylor beating out her daily mileage from the Ibiza Hotel, alone with her 'me time' and the stresses of maintaining a scarcely believable unbeaten record in the majors spanning 10 years.

Howya Katie?

“I’m starvin’,” she says, standing there at 59.9 kilos, not a spare bit on her, a smile cracking her gaunt competition face.

Anxiously peer out

At night, Suzi Street is a boxer-free zone. Eat. Sleep. Box. At night is when

Jeju

City wakes up. The king crab are unlikely celebrities from the Discovery Channel’s

Deadliest Catch

and anxiously peer out from their bubbly water at flash photographers and glass-slamming children.

Playing their deadly dual role, they are also reluctant assistants in the tourist entertainment industry. If crabs can have a disappointed look . . . well, they know what’s coming.

It’s a tough life break, but those crustaceans just don’t draw Korean sympathy. There are no liberation commandoes here. Think Dublin at night with large open tanks and the morning streets of Temple Bar surely decorated with king crab road kill.

Despite the late-night culture, Jeju is relatively crime free. The taxi drivers are trustworthy and minimalist (come in Dublin cabbies) and the streets are safe.

But Jeju is no balmy South sea island. Actually, it’s in the northern hemisphere (a big surprise to me made clear only after demands to the captain were met with an explanation as to why the plane was skirting St Petersburg) and it’s a modern city, every kid with a phone and every store with Wi-Fi.

But it is in wintery, sleepy mode now and by the coast, which the city rolls off the volcanic slopes to hug, it is off-season Bundoran or Lahinch, Portstewart or Courtown.

By the sandy Ihe Teiwoo beach, five minutes from the centre and looking north over the East China Sea towards the Korean peninsula, the guesthouses and shops flap idly and bang in the wind.

Hunkered down with their backs against the wind, beach cleaners squat in circles, the women with giant brimmed hats and their faces masked, the men’s weathered look the colour and texture of Tollund Man, one of those preserved, sacrificial mummies pulled out of Jutland by bog cutters.

The volcanic island is a natural World Heritage Site with its frozen lava outcrops and lava tubes. Tangerines and grapefruit trees dot the countryside and all day everyday you can watch women’s golf on television.

But like any city, it’s the people and their pace, and as Jeju is cut off from the Korean landmass by a swathe of sea, the island, appropriately over illuminated in certain districts, comes across as being Seoul or Busan-lite.

Mysterious Road, for example, leads to the Teddy Bear Museum.

Compliant population

You can fall foul of the law with signs threatening thousands of won fines (w10,000 =€7.30) for jaywalking (w20,000), spitting (w20,000) and urinating (w50,000). But the police profile is so low and the city, outside of Suzi Street, so slow, they rely on the self-policing of a compliant population.

And they are patient people. It took only three days for re-education after self-satisfying sprints across the road between approaching cars as locals waited for a green man. That potentially was a lot of won.

Tourists fly and boat in from mainland Korea and China, and while it’s certain to invite calumny, the days are now running out in the quest to find an unpleasant local.

Half-blind

Even the fellas riding down the road with 10 slanted boxes stacked on the back of their motorbikes and a cigarette stereotypically clenched between their teeth and half-blind from the smoke, even they bow and curtsey (rebels not bound by age – while the pedestrians are waiting for the green man, the box man is cutting the corners on the footpath).

They are the people you see late at night in the side street cafes, oilcloth table coverings and sizzling bowls on gas burners. You peer in and think it’s got to be better than chicken teriyaki in the Hurdy Gurdy.

Now you’re thinking bigger.

Those critters on Suzi Street. They’re next.