Live Octopus

After a month of travel, I'm back in Dalian with one week before the spring semester starts.  I have yet to fully process my time in Yunnan and Thailand, and before I can do that, I need to first turn my thoughts back to Korea.  Between my Harbin trip and a rushed couple of days grading finals before heading off to Yunnan, I spent a really fun week in South Korea with friends from Oberlin and their cohorts. Although I didn't have enough time to travel around the country, except for my almost daily hourly commute between the small town of Munsan and the big city of Seoul, my excellent hosts Peter and Gerald made sure that I experienced Korean culture to the fullest, mainly in the form of crazy foods.

Thus I give you (since I had free time and was inspired by Gerald, whose much more professional videos can be viewed here)...Sannakji.

We were also treated to hongeo, or rotting sashimi (raw fish), which may require another video in the near future!

Korea was the first country I've visited where I didn't speak the language, and therefore an exciting, new linguistic challenge.  It was also the first developed Asian country I've been to (I was too young to remember Taiwan), and a welcome change from China.   And it was certainly the first country where I enjoyed the sensation of a tentacle squirming in my mouth and grabbing my tongue.  I went knowing nothing and having planned nothing, but thanks to my excellent company, I had a blast!