Cephalopods

As promised, I got access to the videos and pictures from the "octopus experience," i.e. eating it live. There really is not much to say about it other than the fact that I watched Andrew Zimmern do it, thought it was badass, and wanted to claim it as my own. Well, I talk a big game. First of all, there are apparently two ways to eat live octopus: baby octopus, in which you literally eat the entire creature in a bite, eyeballs and all. The other way is to eat a larger one's moving tentacles. We walked into the restaurant and were told the the only way this particular place served it was the tentacle way. I kept saying to my friends, "yea, yea...no, that's okay. That is fine with me...let's just do the tentacles," trying to play it cool as if I just didn't feel like going somewhere else. A full baby octopus? I just don't know about that. So if we're going to get technical here, what I ate had just been killed, but still moving.

Anyway, it came out and chills shot right up my spine. I did not expect to have the bodily reaction that I did. I felt like I was taking a final exam or something, I had butterflies just looking at these slimy things slithering around in front of me. In fact, you can hear me say "I'm seriously like, nervous" in the video. So the anticipation built even more as I could not pick one up. They are feisty little guys and suck to anything. I finally just picked one up with my hand. Eating it was no where near as bad as the buildup. It was chewy and tough, as expected. What was a really odd sensation, though, was having it move around in my mouth, sucking to my tongue or the side of my cheek. We had to be sure to chew it for a long time. Apparently people die from swallowing the tentacles too early, and they will suction right on to the throat, choking the person to death. What a way to go, eh?



After a while, the dish settles down. But once you agitate them such as poke the plate with a chopstick, or place it in sauce, they start wiggling around again. This is what it looked like swimming around in some gochugang. It looked "especially weird," to quote myself from the video, in that red thick sauce.



Anyway, I really did eat it, if that is hard to believe. Official photo documentation below:




Notice I only had to use one chopstick. It suctioned right on.

As mentioned before though, I am off to China in a day. I can only hope that I get to do things that are 100x weirder. We are ringin in a new (lunar) year, folks.