Clams, Muscles, and Sea Snails

Mmmmmmmm.....Fresh, grilled-at-your-table shellfish. Delicious!


Here's Tony from Minnesota (bald by choice) and Chris from North Carolina (not bald by choice) about to dig into some grilled sea snail. Not delicious, but a fun time!

Some of you may shirk from these sea creatures, but you shouldn't! As we have probably already made clear, Koreans excel at barbequing. While we might think it unsafe to carry hot coals through a raucous and crowded restaurant and place them in the middle of your table with a small grille separating the guest from the flame. Well, without the pesky liability suits that every American business owner has to avoid, Koreans are free to invent some of the best restaurant experiences in the world.* Plus, you have fewer cooks because your clients are cooking for themselves! Brilliant.

Our newest experience with grilling was in a small beach town called Manlipo (more to follow in another post, hopefully). Koreans love seafood and a big reason they go to the beach is to enjoy the fresh fish dishes that are famous in each region. Ryan and I were prepared to spend a little money eating some yummy seafood, but made the mistake of going by the mouth-watering pictures that each restaurant had displayed. That crab soup looked really good, believe you me, but after being turned away by one restaurant, we sat down at a nearly-empty restaurant (which, by the way, is against our general eating principles, but sometimes you have to bend the rules) that said it would serve us a crab soup that looked really tasty in the picture. But, since this is Korea, we were immediately befriended by the family sitting next to us, which was made up of a Korean born woman, who spoke impeccable English, her Canadian husband, their two bilingual children, and her Korean mother, who spoke no English, but made up for it with her passionate desire to communicate (which incidentily increased as she finished off 2 bottles of soju by herself). They scoffed at our order and immediately called back the waitress to order us what they had had that afternooon for lunch: grilled shellfish. Important note on ordering fresh fish in the future: order whatever looks biggest and yummiest in the tanks outside (if there are tanks, which any respectable fish restaurant in Korea will have). Duh! How did we not think of that. We are but children bumbling our way around the world and relying on the kindness (or pity of others) to save us stumbling off some precipice.

So, it turns out, crab is out of season, and they restaurant really should have said that instead of just trying to get us in the door, but luckily we were saved and the place served us one of the best meals we've had here. They brought us a bunch of delicious sides, as always, including hard boiled quail eggs and pajeon (Korean veggie pancake), then a towering plate of raw clams, a huge muscle, opened and cleaned, and a few giant sea snails. These were all thrown onto the grill until they each popped open when they were ready, cooked to perfection in their own juices. We dipped the soft, delicious mean in soy and wasabi. To be honest, we weren't crazy about the snails, which were hard to extract, overcooked, and were sort of tough and chewy, but the rest was amazing. Why don't we cook like this back home? Ryan and I are making blue prints for a proper grilling table for our someday-imaginery-house back home, so you'll all get to experience it someday.


*this statement is based on my limited experience with world cuisine

Culture Shock, Beach Edition

So, even after 9 months, Ryan and I still get a shock ocassionally. Most recently, Koreans reinforced something that we already knew about them, but still came as a funny surprise. Last weekend we headed to a new stretch of beach in the Taean National Beach front at Manlipo. Heading straight down to the beach from the tiny bus station (a seemingly empty parking lot with a barely-noticeable shack posing as a ticket office), we encountered first a number of EZ-Up tents housing numerous carnival games: shoot the bottles and win alcohol; pop the balloons with a dart and win a stuffed animal. Then one lonely amusement park ride (the oscillating pirate ship, which, after my experiences at Songdo Resort, I was smart enough to avoid), and then the beach, and hundreds upon hundreds of people packed into 200 yards of beach. Packed. Most of them were hiding under umbrellas (again, they aren't sun worshippers like me) and the others were wading into the water and playing with children or building sand castles. You know, normal(by my standards) beach stuff. See:




The strange thing was that 100 yards in either direction, there were no beach revellers. It was deserted. Only a few straggling, and obviously deviant Koreans were wandering outside the "zone." And, of course, us:




Korea is a country of 48 million people, a third larger than our home state, and it's half the size of Minnesota. Try to imagine the population density. They actually have some open space too. Not much, but some. So, I knew that Koreans were accustomed to crowds and congestion, but who knew they would seek it out when they had another option?