It's alive!!!

Last night we went for sashimi for JB's birthday. Sashimi or Korean style raw fish in Pusan is usually quite the dining event. It typically begins with personally choosing live fish from tanks laid out on the ground floor of a building that is stacked high with restaurants. Once you have sentenced a bucket full of fish to a filleted fate you proceed upstairs to the designated restaurant that your fish vendor belongs to. 

As a bonus, for being foreign, funny and/or weird looking, a bunch of sea urchins, sea penises (yes that is their name) and octopuses were sent up to our table. Most of these extras were sliced and diced and looked only vaguely horrible in their deep red, pink, purple or grey splendor. The octopus on the other hand was still writhing as a mass of expanding and contracting tentacles in a small porcelain dish when it arrived at our table. 

If you live in Korea for a year you are bound to have to try this sidedish eventually. Last night was my night. The entire experience was fascinating and disgusting in equal parts and ultimately not completely successful. Watching the writhing pieces of purple sucker cover tentacles is really quite mesmerizing. Watching it curl around your chopsticks is intriguing. Putting it in your mouth doesn't happen before several fortifying shots of soju have boosted ones courage and provided the comforting thought that once swallowed it will be undoubtably be killed on arrival. My tentacle of choice was actually particularly feisty. So feisty in fact that it managed to escaped certain death by squirming its way out the side of my mouth. I now have a new rule about food: if it physically leaves my mouth on its own accord that's a clear sign it should not be eaten. It also had the consistency of snot so I wasn't too broken up when it ended up on my plate rather than my stomach. What can I say, I tried but it was not to be.

Youtube has a sweet video of exactly what this whole ordeal looks like.