Tidepool Dinner

So, in my desire to document everything that I find most fascinating and worthy of sharing in this country, I feel the need to report on my dinner in this post.

Since I am in Korea, I feel that it is only prudent to try to learn the language. This way I will no longer be daunted by taxi rides and asking how much my bill costs. So, I have recently acquired a language exchange partner who has some basic fluency in English and would like to teach me Korean in exchange for me chatting with him. This all seemed well and good to me until I asked him today if he'd like to meet for dinner instead of just coffee. His response was enthusiastic and he asked if I liked seafood.

Well of course I like seafood! Who doesn't like a good Ahi steak, or some lovely salmon? I also like shrimp and a variety of other ocean-y sorts of things, so I told him I would be happy to have seafood.

However, it seems that what he had in mind wasn't so much seafood as it was tidepool soup. I guess we had stew on the rocks.

I knew I was in trouble when we walked by a tub full of sea cucumbers on our way in. I really knew I was in trouble when I lifted the lid of the boiling stew on the table and discovered a large mussel shell and a whole crab.

Now, I don't know about you, and I'm all about adventurous eating, but having the waitress come to the table and take a scissors to a large crab was certainly enough to make me feel slightly faint. By the time she'd finished cutting apart bits of sea creatures I couldn't even begin to name I realized (metaphorically speaking) I was in over my head.

It really did seem like the cook went to the tidepools, caught anything (s)he found and boiled it in a spicy soup with some bean sprouts. By the end of the meal I had discovered (and eaten) about 10 different species of crustaceans, mollusks and cephalopods. The stew included the large mussel thing (cut into a bunch of pieces by the waitresses' cruel scissors), some smaller mussels that floated around like lost eardrums, the crab, a bunch of shrimp with their heads and legs still attached, some tiny crayfish shrimp things that you had to eat with the shells still on, a whole baby octopus (also cut into pieces- I declined the head and offered it to my partner), something that may have been sea cucumber, something else that I think was squid and some unidentifiable hardish objects that popped liquid into my mouth when I bit down on them.

I did manage to eat a fair amount of it, but I think next time, I will tell my language exchange partner that I really have just been dying for coffee. Or maybe we'll just get some rice.