Hey, belated Happy New Year! Also, belated Merry Christmas, belated Happy Hanukkah, belated Happy Boxing Day, etc. etc. Also, sorry it's taken so long to get this blog post up.
So.
Three days ago Six days ago Last week we got back from our winter vacation to Korea, and we're still recovering from it. I'd say that we got enough blogworthy material to give up the Japan game altogether and just post about our trip for all of 2012. To spare everyone the most boring of vacation recaps (a chronological recounting of where we went), this time we'll switch things up and group our trip by theme. Today, the most interesting of any trip: the food!
Korea and Japan, despite being so (relatively) close to one another, are very different places. Everyone with me so far? Cool. I think the differences between Japanese and Korean cultures are most obvious in their cuisine. Japanese food, in general, makes use of very little spice or seasoning, making use of fresh ingredients to highlight the taste of each component with great subtlety. In other words, it can be bland as fuck, especially after eating it for 2 1/2 years. Korean food is the yang to Japan's yin, or, alternatively, the Evil Mirror Universe Spock to Japan's Regular Spock. 90% of the Korean food we ate was slathered in chili sauce and raw garlic, which made for 10 days of tasty times (and uncomfortable trips to the bathroom).
We dined out for pretty much every meal during our vacation, a habit enabled by the dizzying strength of the yen, which made it seem that the whole country was having a half-off sale; we would regularly eat enormous, delicious dinners for about $6. We tasted many delicacies, none of which I can name. TANGENT ALERT: the time that it takes the human brain to begin to comprehend the syllables of a foreign language can be represented by the formula t+1, where t=how long you'll be in the country. As such, every dish, neighborhood, or person's name I heard entered my ear and traveled to my brain, where my brain promptly squinted, shrugged, and forgot it entirely. END TANGENT ALERT.
After 8 days of deliciousness, the Puritan genes that lay dormant in our American brains began to flare up and demand some form of penance, which we found in one of Korea's less well-advertised specialties: silkworm larvae.
Yep. Bugs. We ate just a big ol' cuppa bugs. One of our Couchsurfing hosts assured us that the smell was far worse than the taste. This provided some small comfort, as they smelled like wet socks.
Screwing our courage to the sticking places (which, we found, was located right in our stomach lining), we asked this nice lady for "one." Sadly, "one" unit of stewed larva means about 100 individual bugs.
You may ask, "Why?" We certainly did. The short and easy answer: because it was
there. The longer answer: because eating weird, scary foods is something we can be proud of, something that we can say we've done. Most of all, "eating bugs" can provide a comfortable worse-than scenario for any crappy day, a point that we exploited often for the rest of our trip. Ex.: "Hey, climbing this mountain totally sucks. But you know what it's better than? Eating bugs."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but
beondegi (as I have since learned that the dish is called) smells and looks nasty, and it tastes about as bad.
Here, Harry can be seen wondering if he now has eggs in his brain.
As with most foods, however, stewed bugs taste considerably better when washed down with good old American Coca-Cola. Though it must be said that Silkworm Larva Belches are a nauseating experience in their own right.
Again, we can see Our Heroes quickly undergo the transformation from Seasoned Globetrotter, Ready for Exotic Experiences...
...to Weary, Cynical Traveler Who No Longer Thinks Such Bad Things About Wendy's.
And if you look
really close (not recommended), you can even see the horrible little things' shriveled-up faces.
Having eaten enough of the paper cup's contents to consider ourselves sufficiently cool (I'd estimate 10% of the serving, or exactly Too Many bugs), we chucked the rest. Culinary Rubicon crossed. Y'know the great thing about Rubicons? You only have to cross them once.
After a couple of days, we had stopped belching up thoraxes long enough to remember that we had unfinished business in Busan: on our first day in Korea, when we were literally fresh off the boat, we were looking for something to eat in the Jagalchi fish market, a beautifully gross area with tanks full of live sea creatures directly from our nightmares. Seasick, sleep-deprived, and intimidated by our ignorance of the Korean language, we stumbled past a few restaurants, hoping to find something edible. A lady yelled to us from the doorway of one of the restaurants: "Hello!
Sashimi?" Though it wasn't quite as adventurous as we were hoping for, at least it sounded reliably delicious.
Our lunch was tasty if difficult: more yellowtail than we had ever seen in Japan accompanied by a collection of unrecognizable sauces and condiments, as well as several cloves of raw garlic and a plate of lettuce leaves. Not knowing quite what else to do, we spread a little of everything on the leaves, wrapped it around some fish, and made little tacos. We ate quickly and furtively, hoping to avoid offending anyone too badly (as it turns out, our table manners were correct if messy).
When we had finished, Jenn pointed out that everyone else in the restaurant was eating the same dish, and it was one vastly different from our tame plate of raw fish: drenched in sauce, grilled right on the table, it contained some pinkish fish that horrifically writhed through piles of onions as it cooked before their eyes. It quickly became apparent why the proprietor lured us in with the promise of sashimi: if this dish were put in front of an average confused-looking American, the reaction might be one of fright and disgust (my thoughts went to Temple of Doom as soon as I saw it). Jenn, however, realized that we were sitting on a golden opportunity that might pass us by forever if we didn't jump on it. So, for our last meal in Korea, we returned to the little restaurant for what the menu called "grilled hagfish." Hagfish is described by Wikipedia as "Lovecraftian" and "exud[ing] copious quantities of a slime or mucus of unusual composition." Bon appetit!
