You Ate WHAT? Championship Edition

By now, I think it’s safe that we don’t have anything to prove when it comes to being adventurous eaters.  Every time we get the opportunity to put some kind of unfamiliar critter in our belly, we jump at the chance: we chow down on chicken hearts, blood sausage, sheep testicles, live octopus, whale brains, and silkworm larvae.  And (except for the larvae), they’re all pretty damn good.  In our experience, people typically don’t bother eating stuff that doesn’t taste at least pretty okay, and we’ve armed ourselves with that knowledge in our quest to eat our way across the world.

With varying results.

Now, China has a bit of a reputation as far as food goes.  Actually, from what we’ve heard, it has two entirely different reputations: in the popular imagination, China does not consume what we consider “Chinese food” in the West, but rather heaping bowlfuls of sheep eyeballs and cat brains, fried mantises and pickled anus.  And of course, depending on whom you’re talking to and how potentially racist they are, dog.  According to the people we’ve met who have actually been to China, however, Chinese people are bigger fans of less intimidating cuisine like fried noodles and dumplings.  This was a dispute that we had to settle for ourselves.

On the recommendation of Wikitravel, we made our way to Beijing’s Donghuamen Night Market, a site we were told featured traditional Chinese street food, and also snakes and scorpions.  Truly a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.

We took in the sights and the smells, which were spicy enough to cut through the ever-present layer of smog.  There seemed to be a thousand dishes for sale, most of them on sticks, all of them distressingly familiar.  Grilled squid tentacles, meat dumplings, noodles with cabbage, roast chicken.  Vendors shouted in Chinese and in English, and we tuned them out as we had done with touts all day.  One voice, however, cut through:

“Hello!  Hello!  Snake!”

We did a double-take.  The vendor brandished a skewer of diamond-painted skin and smiled.  We ordered two, with chili.

Honestly, snake is the least intimidating weird food we’ve tried.  The taste and shape were so similar to a garden-variety squid tentacle (that’s what we keep in our garden, anyway) that we half-thought we’d been ripped off.  Still, if you can’t trust a complete stranger selling snake on a stick, who can you trust?  Snake is chewy, savory, and all in all more food-like than half the stuff they sell at KFC.  The scariest thing about this experience was the price tag: 60 yuan for two, amounting to about $10, a hefty sum that would buy four much more filling meals elsewhere.

Worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill our bellies for less than a hundred bucks, we wolfed down some safer offerings, which tended to be much cheaper than the exotic stuff: grilled corn, fried dumplings, and a big bowl of stewed tripe.  Our hunger thus sated, it was time to get serious.

The friendly-looking young vendor called to us as we walked past.  He gestured to his many-legged wares.  “Hello!” he said.  “Hello!”

“How much?” I asked, suspicious.  He told me that each stick of fried locusts was 30 yuan, and I waved him off, assuming we could get a better deal at a different stall.  “But!” he yelled, then abandoned his English, made antennae with his fingers, and began making cricket noises.  We thanked him and moved on.

Sadly, there seemed to be some kind of agreement or syndicate at work at Donghuamen Night Market, as all the prices were the same down the line of food stalls.  We returned to Bug Man, deciding that if 10 bucks was too much to eat bugs, then dammit, we were just going to have to spend too much.  We gave the man a fistful of cash and ordered one stick of crickets and one of miniature scorpions.

This is when it first hit me that we were doing something crazy.  Somehow it had never entered into my head that there’s a reason most people don’t eat scorpions on a daily basis.  They're pretty poisonous, right?  Or venomous?  Is there a difference?  The Fear started to kick in.  Were we about to spend the next week laid up with food poisoning?

Well, if we were, we resolved with a sigh, then at least we’d be the coolest kids in Intensive Care.  We took the plunge.

Cricket is, I’m sorry to say, not a taste sensation.  My worries disappeared with the first bite, which reminded me more than anything of the tiny shrimp that are such a popular snack in Japanese izakayas.  The main taste was of frying medium, unfortunately.  Though the feeling of having legs stick out your mouth as you chew is delightfully bizarre.

Round two: Jenn and Harry vs. scorpions!

Note: we made a delightfully witty video of Jenn eating scorpions and declaring them delicious.  Unfortunately, we can't post it due to technical something-something.  Anyway, little bitty fried scorpions became our new favorite food.

Scorpions were clearly where it was at.  Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to explore this new world of deliciousness, we headed back to Bug Man to try a more intimidating specimen.  This one was a whopping 60 yuan for a single nighmare-creature-on-a-stick, but we were in too deep to back out now.  Also it's possible that the venom was affecting our brains.  We scoffed at the startled-looking foreigners who were tentatively nibbling on chicken wings; we were obviously so, so much cooler than punks like them.  Who would bother to travel thousands of miles just to eat something they could get at home?  We chuckled, then dug into our bug.

And the reviews are in!

Yeah, we clearly flew too close to the sun on this one.  There was some sort of meat inside them claws, but they were protected by a thick layer of inedible chitin.  It tasted like a mouthful of fingernails, something I've finally learned not to eat.  It...wasn't food, really.  Gnawing on a mouthful of shards of black armor did nothing but cut up the insides of our mouths.  Discreetly, we tossed the thorax and tail in the trash, flushed with anger over wasting $10 on something that wasn't even food.  The little scorpions on sticks were a harmless delicacy, something that anyone could giggle over and praise themselves for being adventurous.  This big one?  This was sold only for ego purposes.

As we conducted our walk of shame back to the subway, our reputation had apparently already made it down the line of vendors.  "Hey," one vendor whispered to the next, probably, "here come a couple of foreigners who think they have something to prove.  Bring out the weird stuff!"  "Let's see if they'll eat raw starfish or something!"  "I bet I can get them to eat a hammer!"

"Hello!  Spiders!" called one man, holding up enormous tarantulas on sticks.  "Dog!  Dog!" shouted another, brandishing some unidentifiable cut of meat.  We had been branded as rubes.

"What did we do wrong?" we asked ourselves on the subway ride back to the hotel.  We had wanted nothing more than to eat what few dared to put in their mouths...and therein is the lesson.  There's two kinds of weird food in the world: stuff that people in other cultures really do eat, and that's scary purely for cultural reasons (balut, beonddegi, most state fair offerings); and then there's stuff that was never meant to be eaten, but enterprising cooks know that they can pass off as delicacies to gullible tourists or anyone who wants to show off their fearlessness.  The big scorpion belongs in the latter category along with those hot sauces that make you cry and throw up.  We had proven ourselves adventurous, even fearless.  What comes next for us is to pursue the wisdom that most people learn at a much younger age: don't put stuff in your mouth that isn't food.

Hippier Than Thou

The sun rose late over the last morning of the festival (or at least, we rose late).  By the time we rolled out of our tent, all our friends, all the organic coffee vendors and homeless musicians and naked children and drunken surfers were busily packing all their homes back into their cars.  There was a three-week festival coming up in Shiga prefecture, everyone said, and when we tearfully bid farewell to some of our new best friends, we tempered our loneliness by half-promising to see each other at the next festival.  We knew we wouldn’t, though.  In our hearts, we're bike hippies, not music festival hippies.

The Austrian, despite his earlier decision to stay another week to help clean up, hustled out of there with the first drunken surfer who’d give him a ride to Shiga.  The other WWOOFer had gone, too, and with such a show of affection from the Pasar crowd that I have never seen before.  Shaking, she read a statement that someone had written in phonetic Japanese, then switched to more heartfelt (if no less shaky) English.  She received a fond round of applause and many, many hugs as she went on her way.

For some reason Jenn and I were the only ones to honor the "make a weird face" edict.  Funny how that keeps happening.

By one o’clock, almost everyone was gone.  Ours was the last lonely tent still standing in the campground, the field around us stamped with squares and rectangles all different shades of yellow and brown.  It was time to get back into the Pasar groove: help out a little, play some music, maybe cook something, and just generally take in the sea air.

Though it is hard to really relax when your butt scrapes on the ground.

"Tomorrow, we'll need to you help out again," Natsu told us after Aki had retreated to wherever it is he goes.  "We have a very important seminar, and we need to get the place all cleaned up before the teachers get here."

"Of course!" we agreed, happy to have some work to do (though maybe not that happy).   "What's the seminar about?"

"Whaling."

We threw ourselves into taking down the bamboo bar, clearing bottles, sweeping dirt and dumping it into larger piles of dirt.  We were told that it was important that we stay quiet during the seminar, as the proceedings were top secret unless we paid the fifty bucks each to join in.  Also, there would be food, which we would be allowed to eat if there was any extra.

When the teachers arrived, we helped them carry large styrofoam boxes into the Dragon Room.  "What's in these, anyway?" I asked Natsu.

"Whale!  Now go light the oven, please."

I think we're gonna need a bigger oven.

It was then that it dawned on us that this was a pro-whaling seminar happening at Pasar.  Naturally, as children of the '90s in the US, Jenn and I have been thoroughly educated in the "Save the Whales" dialogue.  Specifically, we've been taught that whaling is bad and that whalers are evil, heartless monsters whose boats are fueled by the tears of crippled puppies.  Being a hippie establishment, we assumed that Pasar would naturally be on the side of some of the more prominent American hippie establishments like Greenpeace (and Captain Kirk).

Once again, we were provided with an opportunity to confront some unexamined biases we've held.  It's not that hard for an American to get behind "Save the Whales," if only because giving up eating whale isn't much of a challenge for the average American.  It's not hard to give something up if you'd never encounter it in the first place.  Though, as we discovered at a museum in Hagi, this hasn't always been the case for Americans: indeed, the US's hunger for whale oil was so insatiable a mere century and a half ago that America was fully willing to invade Japan in order to get to the whales in its waters.  But even back then, when American sailors were bringing in whales by the thousands, they still weren't really a hot commodity on the dinner table.

Japan, meanwhile, has chowed down on whale throughout its history.  Now I'm not one to accept "tradition" as a reason for basically anything, and "tradition" is used as a justification for a bunch of nasty stuff worldwide (especially in Japan), but I tried to keep an open mind as Natsu educated us. Did you know that there's actually a population boom of whales in recent years?  Or that whales are a much more sustainable food source than most livestock?  Neither did I, and I'm not terribly sure I believe either of those things now, either, but Natsu sure stated her case admirably.

Sure, whales may be intelligent and make noises that sound beautiful to human ears, but heck, pigs are at least as cute and intelligent as dogs and that hasn't really sparked a popular "Save the Pigs" campaign.  Though we were not sure about the prospect of eating such an intelligent animal, one that we'd been long taught to regard as gentle and soulful, when the pizzas topped with whale bacon came out of the brick oven, our adventurousness won out and we had a slice or three.  They were tasty as heck, though really, I'd probably eat my own head if it was served on a brick-oven pizza.

The whaling seminar wasn't the only such affair held at Pasar during our short stay there.  During the festival, there was also a lecture given on the dangers of vaccination.

"It's unhealthy to put chemicals into your body," said Natsu between puffs on her American Spirit.  Aki and Shio nodded along and lit their own cigarettes.

This is an interesting point that we keep running into: the farther to the left you go, the more you find people who share opinions with folks on the far, far right.  Pasar is as big a hippie enclave as we've ever found ourselves, a hotbed of permaculture, veganism, pacifism, organic farming...and they're also anti-vax, pro-whaling.  While I understand (and share!) a healthy skepticism when it comes to the medical industry, the controversy about vaccinations seems to be coming from a place of gratuitous anti-intellectualism.  I hadn't expected people as smart as Aki and Natsu to fall for the Naturalistic Fallacy, but there it is.  We did the hippie thing and kept our peace, sealing our lips as they told us about the evils of vaccination.

Another brief illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy at work: one afternoon, Shio went walking down by the ocean with a fishing spear, and in the evening he came back with a delicious-looking octopus.  Natsu butchered it beautifully and we ate it sashimi-style, raw with soy sauce.  Now, I'm all for foraging and fishing (as long as other people do it), but there was an implicit assumption at play here that an octopus swimming around the ocean, by virtue of it being "natural," would be healthful for human beings to eat.  Moreover, that it would be better for the people who ate it than farmed octopi that would probably be full of chemicals of an indeterminate nature.

Don't get me wrong.  The octopus was damned delicious, and I'd eat another one right this minute.  But I also don't know where this particular octopus had been or what it had been eating.  It could have been chock full of octopus flu, for all Shio had known.  I mean, it's an established fact that the ocean is 90% fish poo.  But the prevailing attitude at Pasar is that, because this octopus is natural, it is also better than anything touched by human hands.

Another illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy: because this giant, face-sized, poison-slavering spider is natural, it must be a good thing!  You know, despite all the very obvious evidence to the contrary!

Really, we shouldn't have been surprised; this wasn't our first run-in with Pasar's anti-science stance.  When I came down with a cold after a few days of sleeping in a damp, rained-on tent, I decided to pop a couple of milligrams of Japanese cold medicine.  Over-the-counter medicine in Japan is exceedingly wimpy, but as it's what's available, we have a whole pharmacy stashed in one of our bags.  My one error was to take these pills while sitting in the living room.

"Hey, what is that?" Aki asked me in English as the pill was inches from my open mouth.

"Uh...cold medicine?  I have a cold."

"Don't take that, that's no good."  He shook his head.  I was about to agree, saying that it might not be very potent, but it's all you can buy in this country, but before I could, he told me, "Go ask Natsu for homeopathy."  I tried to keep my eyebrows unraised.

Within minutes, Natsu had retrieved a clear plastic medicine chest filled with pill bottles.  She looked through the dazzling array of colored circles.  "Headache?" she asked, and I nodded.  "Phlegm?"  At last, she presented me with a small pink pill, which she instructed me to hold under my tongue until it dissolved.

"What's...uh, what's in this?"

"Sugar," she said, chipper.  Sure enough, it left a sweet taste in my mouth as it quickly melted into nothing.  I had my doubts; after all, I already take plenty of sugar, mostly administered orally, with chocolate chips.  Yet oddly enough, I did start to feel better before long, and that replaced my cold with crippling existential doubt.  The placebo effect works only if you believe in whatever you're taking, right?  And I have no faith at all in the power of sugar pills, and that very doubt should kill their efficacy, right?

As I've said, I consider myself a bit of a hippie.  I quit my job to bike around the world, I care about the environment, I've belonged to the ACLU and Amnesty International, I believe in art and love and peace, I've experimented with vegetarianism (and absolutely nothing else, Mom).  I don't have a TV.  But holy cow, I am not nearly as big a hippie as I thought I was.  Vaccinated?  Anti-whaling?  Over-the-counter drugs?  If full-time permaculture meditating organic farm hippies look down on those things, then what kinda tourist does that make me?

On our last day before hitting the road, another young, awkward WWOOFer asked Natsu what exactly "hippie" meant.  "Long hair, hemp pants, tie-die, right?"  I rolled my eyes.

"Yes, that's 'hippie style.'  It's all tied up in the '60s, there really aren't any hippies any more," she said, and my eyes stopped rolling and started bugging out.  Surely not!  How could anyone doubt that hippies are alive and well after hosting a week-long music festival on her organic farm?

"Natsu, I always thought that you and Aki were hippies," I protested.

She shook her head.  "We're alternative.  All the hippies are gone."

I kept quiet and reflected on this for the rest of the evening.  I've known many people who've self-identified as hippies, but mostly it's a term that I hear coming out of my own mouth.  Hippiedom in the US is a fairly competitive thing: vegans look down on vegetarians, bike hippies look down on hippies with cars.  I'm sure I brought this competitive spirit with me to Pasar, and whether it's a difference of culture or language, the same definition of "hippie" just doesn't seem to exist in Japan.  I don't feel like I particularly want or need to fit into a subculture that may or may not exist any more, but for some time now I've called myself a hippie with some pride.  Maybe that's just another gift from my Boomer parents.  Even if I'm not a hippie by Japanese standards, even if I'm not enough of a hippie by hippie standards, it's still a label that simplifies my multifarious life into an easy-to-understand cultural archetype.

Regardless of the nomenclature, I know that I've seen some common spirit shared by the hippies/alternatives/whatever whom I've known.  If dancing under the full moon at Pasar isn't hippie, then I still want to be whatever it is.  Whatever our ideological or lifestyle differences with Aki and Natsu and all the others in the Pasar family, we share so, so much.  That will always connect us, and that will bring us back again.

You Ate WHAT? Mystery Edition

I still have no goddamn idea what this stuff was.

You Ate WHAT?: Fear Factor Edition

From Sagada it was six hours to Baguio, all downhill.  We fought steep mountain roads and motion sickness, stopping at a roadside store to use the comfort room and try balut (perhaps not as comfortable, but decidedly tasty nonetheless).  The rest stop offered few options for food, and after we’d tried the Mr. Donut shu mai, we were ready for a challenge.

Side note about Filipino food: we are so bored of Filipino food.  Two weeks into our Korean vacation last year and we couldn’t get enough of the barbecue, the garlic and the chili; two weeks in the Philippines and we’re dying for a nice salad or something.  We’d never tried or even heard of Filipino food of any kind before coming here, and, if you haven’t been to the Philippines, I’ll bet you haven’t, either.  Our friends and Lonely Planet (which is kind of like a portable, frequently unreliable friend) warned us that Filipino cuisine isn’t really anything special, which is why it hasn’t made it overseas.  It’s been hard coming to a different conclusion, try though we might.  Every meal involves an extremely fatty cut of meat and a scoop of gummy white rice that makes us pine for the Japanese rice we’d complain about.  Filipino food is fine, generally speaking, but extremely heavy, the kind of place where “snack” means “cheeseburger” and “dessert” means “all the desserts mixed together” (and this is coming from an American, mind you).

Halo-Halo, no relation to a certain BBC comedy.

As mentioned, one point that’s stood in the way of our enjoyment of the food here has been a constant, paralyzing fear of contracting constant, paralyzing diarrhea (closely linked to our fear of Filipino toilets).  The rule that we’ve been advised to adhere to while traveling in the Third World is “Cook It, Peel It, or Forget It.”  There are many, many more such rules, of course: don’t drink the tap water, don’t order anything with ice in it (because it’s probably made with tap water), don’t eat anything that’s been sitting out all day, don’t eat raw vegetables (because they’ve been washed in tap water).  However, these rules have really cramped our style; following them strictly would rule out a good 70% of the food in this country.  It got to the point where we decided to throw caution to the wind and just eat some balut already, diarrhea be damned.

A typical balut vendor.

Balut is hands-down the most notorious Filipino dish: it’s defined as a “pregnant egg,” meaning a hard-boiled egg with a fetal chicken inside.  In America, it is most famous for being featured on the culinary showcase “Fear Factor,” a point about which one of our acquaintances had much dispute (“Man, no wonder you think that’s nasty, man, you gotta put some salt on that shit!”).  It is prepared in the traditional Filipino fashion of sitting by the side of the road in the sun all day.  Balut is eaten by cracking open a small hole in the shell, sucking out the salty, soupy liquid at the top, then peeling away bits of shell to reveal the mushy gray insides.  Needless to say, we had to try this shit; we have a reputation as eaters of the exotic and the cray-cray.

Balut is...pretty good, actually.  Like a soft, almost yogurty hard-boiled egg with a definite livery taste to it.  As we ate, we drew praise from the old ladies next to us.  “You eat balut?” one asked approvingly, dripping some of her egg-juice on the concrete.  “Oh yeah!” I replied, even as Jenn said, “First time.”  The blackish chicken-fetus wasn’t anything near as noxious as I’d expected; frankly, I’d been expecting feathers, a beak, visible eyes.  In its gooey vagueness, it resembled the innards of a frog or goldfish in the dissection pan, the ones that looked nothing like the clearly labelled organs in the biology textbook.  But, and I cannot stress this enough, however it looked, it was tasty.  Surprisingly, balut isn’t really anything to write home about (mudda, fadda, kindly disregard dis lettah).

Dig in!  Source: http://caryle.blogspot.com/

The bottom quarter of the egg was mysteriously hard, inedibly so, even, so we threw it away when nobody was looking and boarded our bus.  When our stomachs started to turn as the bus jostled down the road, we were 90% certain that it was the greasy shu mai.  Damn Mr. Donut.

Korea Part 1: In Which Harry and Jenn Eat Bugs

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!