A long weekend is a rare blessing in Korea, particularly as a Hagwon employee. This long weekend – courtesy of Buddha’s birthday on Friday – was a chance to take a trip to the less touristed, less famous South West of the country. Except that there are no trains that run across the country (east to west). In order to go from Daegu to Mokpo, it is necessary to travel half way to Seoul (heading North), change stations and catch another train back towards the south. Frustratingly complicated, especially because the whole country was on the move. Having bought my tickets 2 weeks in advance, it took me leaving Daegu at 7:40 in the morning (having worked until 10:20 the night before) to reach Mokpo at 12:20.

I arrived in Mokpo, hopped on the city bus (thankfully described in the guidebook because there is NO English) and promptly found myself going in the wrong direction. One more try and I made it to the Mokpo Ferry terminal. The terminal isn’t particularly well sign-posted until you’re right on top of it. At least, it isn’t in English. It may be perfectly signposted in Korean.

I took a wander along the road, loving the hot sun (I even put on sunscreen) while I waited for my partner-in-travel to arrive. Her bus was slightly delayed by the traffic jam of people leaving Seoul for the weekend, but eventually she arrived in Mokpo and proceeded to follow in my footsteps and get on a bus going in the wrong direction. While I waited for her to change buses and find her way to the coast, I sat on the steps outside the Ferry terminal and watched the world of Mokpo pass slowly by.

Mokpo is a relatively small and underdeveloped city. The whole province of Jeollanam, in fact, is underdeveloped, in terms of infrastructure for tourist but also economically. This is, according to guidebooks and the other usual information sources, apparently partly because the opposition was, for a long time, based here. This was also the hot-bed of revolutionary resistance to dictatorial rule during the early 1980s, resulting, among other things, in various security-force crackdowns, sieges, massacres and other strategies of oppression generally employed by authoritarian regimes clinging to power in the face of change. Unsurprisingly, this adds to the appeal for me. As a result of being the trouble-makers, this region was, apparently, systematically underfunded and has only in the last few years begun to be given the kind of investment it needs. This is one of the reasons the transport systems are nowhere near as prolific and efficient as in, for example, the South-East (where I live) which has produced a large number of recent leadership figures.

After her bus adventure, Anna arrived. We were, by this stage, both a little hungry, hot and tired, so lunch first. There are seafood places all along the street across from the ferry and marina. You know they are seafood places because they have pictures of seafood creatures on their signs. There is also the dead give-away of the tanks of sea creatures outside. When I first saw shops with tank upon tank of octopus, squid, crabs, fish of all makes and sizes, not to mention eels and weird mollusc-ey things, I thought they were pet shops. How wrong I was.

We picked a restaurant at random, wandered in and gratefully settled onto our floor-cushions and ordered beer. The women working there wanted to know (all in Korean of course) if we’d be eating too or just drinking. Anna went off to point at something in the tank (no menu, let alone in English). She pointed, the women looked concerned. She pointed again. They told us the price. We were a little shocked by the prices but really didn’t feel like going elsewhere so we decided to pay anyway and pointed meaningfully at the tank of baby octopus. The price really did seem rather high for Korea, or for that matter anywhere. In retrospect, that should have been a warning.

Korean food sometimes arrives too quickly. I like being able to relax and chat for a while until the food is ready. Here they tend to bring it quickly and relax after. Even for Korea, this food arrived remarkably rapidly. They brought us a couple of sides first, one of which was baby potatoes – making me particularly happy – and then the main dish was brought out.

What was placed in front of us was a dinner-plate sized platter of cut up baby octopus. Under normal circumstances, this would not really have bothered me. I quite like octopus. I’m a big fan of calamari. But calamari, at least in my previous experience, does not usually move. I know, it’s probably my own fault – I should have learned a little more of the language before venturing into the less touristed places and we should have asked more questions before ordered. We certainly didn’t intend to order a plate of raw, grey, slimy, squirming octopus tentacles. They were moving and wriggling like a mass of worms. One, I am not kidding you, almost managed to escape off the plate. They twisted themselves around the chopsticks. They stuck, with their little suckers holding on for dear life, to the plate. We waited a while for them to die – after all, the tentacles had been severed from the bodies, waited for them to stop moving, but the minute you touched one with your chopsticks, they all wriggled madly. The woman who worked there showed us the red sauce to dip the tentacles in. Dipping them in the sauce had no effect other than to turn the grey wriggling tentacles into red-brown, dripping-with-sauce, wriggling tentacles.

Had I not heard of this ‘delicacy‘ before, I think I would honestly have assumed they were trying to play some horrific joke on the foreigners. But I had heard of it. In fact, I have friends who tried it and were warned that you have to be very careful to chew each tentacle thoroughly (and hard) to make sure that they’re dead, otherwise they can sucker onto your throat, killing more people each year than blowfish. It had never even vaguely occurred to me that anyone would assume that’s what two accidental walk-in tourists, who obviously had no idea what they were doing, wanted to order for lunch. We were horrified. Anna at least is a fairly experimental eater. I’m not. And I’m certainly not going to happily chow down on a bowl of wriggling tentacles which arrive with no warning or time to psych myself up.

Which is not to say we didn’t try it. We each tried at least two tentacles. Picked up with chopsticks (around which they instantly, squirmily wrapped themselves), dipped in the appropriate sauces and (deep breathe and eyes half-closed) stuffed into the mouth chewed as fast as possible to stop them wriggling about. We sat for a while looking at the plate, hoping all the time they’d stop moving so that we could eat the rest. They never did. We couldn’t do it. It seemed a terrible waste to leave all that expensive food but there was no way. I am very solidly a carnivore but even I cannot quite bring myself to eat something that is still fighting back after it is sliced up and sitting on the plate.

We paid our bill and left as politely as we could given that all we wanted to do was run out of there before anyone suggested any more extreme eating experiences. I have it on video (a video of lunch!) and watching it again, I can’t believe that a) I actually ate some and b) people think this is a good thing to eat. It certainly wasn’t delicious enough to make it worth the trauma, to risk death by wriggling things. That said, it didn’t taste bad, actually. Not amazing enough to make it worth it but it wouldn’t have been too offensive if only it hadn’t moved. No-one died, so I suppose we escaped relatively unscathed but we got out of Mokpo post-haste and couldn’t quite bring ourselves to eat at a seafood restaurant for the rest of the weekend.