Who needs cranberry sauce when you can have sea cucumber?

For Thanksgiving break, our principal figured out a way to get a group of us to China for only $500, plus visa fees. Sounded great! Justin and I were in.

Unfortunately, the school needed fifteen people to be interested to get the rate. Well, it didn't turn out that enough people wanted to go all the way to China, so that plan went away.

So, for Thanksgiving break, our principal decided to host a Thanksgiving potluck. The school would provide the turkey (these are very expensive over here – the one at Costco clocked in at $70) and everybody would bring a side dish. Sounded great! Justin and I were in.

Unfortunately, the school needed enough lucky potters to pull off the potluck, and not enough people wanted to get together for dinner. So that plan went away.

Finally, for Thanksgiving break, the chairman of the board of the school offered to take us to Sol Beach, a resort on the Pacific coast of Korea. The school would pay transportation and lodging. All we had to do was go. Sounded great! Justin and I were in.

We were, it turned out, almost the only people in. The music teacher came along, as did the Japanese teacher, and that was it.

Okay. I can understand not wanting to go all the way to China, and I guess theoretically I can understand not wanting to cook something. And I know that some people had other plans in advance. But seriously, I have never met a group of people it was this difficult to give away a resort weekend to.

In any case, the trip was on. We bundled into the little yellow school van and headed for the coast, which I will continue to refer to as "the coast" to avoid taking sides on the "East Sea" / "Sea of Japan" debate. They take that rather seriously over here. Forty years of colonial rule will do that to you.

Justin will do another post with temple pictures so I'll leave it to him to write about that and skip straight to the dinner. I feel we have to do something to compete with Leslie's descriptions of the Taganrog meat district, so I offer to you the Yangyang fish district, featuring aquariums full of everything from a two-foot long tuna to live eel, sea cucumbers and squid, and a king crab that was about six inches away from escaping its tub and heading for glory.

So there, at the Yangyang fish district, Justin and I rang in Thanksgiving with a hearty round of Korean sushi (which, I have to tell you, does not live up to Aunt Alice's turkey and ham). The difference between Korean sushi and Japanese sushi is that with Korean sushi, the fish is fresh. I don't mean to say that Japanese sushi serves bad fish. I just mean to say that with Japanese sushi, the fish has been dead for more than ten minutes. Fresh here means FRESH. When the squid arrived on a platter, there were still some perceptible involuntary muscle spasms going on in the tentacles. Barely perceptible, mind you, but perceptible.

And here we join the scene.

Justin, man among men, takes the first bite, claps his hand over his mouth, and starts giggling. (A man among men, yes, but he does, in fact, giggle like a girl).

"What?" I ask.

"The suckers," he said. "They're sticking to my mouth and it tickles."

"They're doing WHAT?" I say, partially as a Concerned Wife but mostly as Concerned Person Sitting Next To Him If He Barfs. He reassures me that it actually tastes good. It's just tickly.

That's not possible, says Dr. Kim. It's not that fresh. He picks up one and repeats the hand clap. He has changed his opinion. The tentacles are, in fact, sticking.

Naomi, the Japanese teacher, picks one up and dips it in her soy sauce. The suckers stick to the ceramic dish and she has to pry it off with the other chopstick.

I pick one up from the dish. I'm just trying to get a tentacle, but the suckers are sticking to the adjacent meat and so that comes up with it.

I am assuming that at this point, all of you are adequately grossed out and rooting for me to put that thing down. And half of my brain told me the same thing. But the other half of my brain, which proves to me more than anything else that I really have spent the last four months in Korea, told me to go for it.

So there I am. Brain Half #1 is making some argument about only being in Korea once and seizing opportunities and Brain Half #2 is wondering abstractly what would happen if I threw up on the host. And somewhere along the line husband-related peer pressure takes over, and I pick up the chopsticks.

And I ate it.

And it suckered to my teeth. And once I got it off my teeth, it suckered to the roof of my mouth. I even ended up with a sucker stuck on my tooth after I ate the rest of the tentacle, and I had to go in and get that one off with my fingernail.

But Justin was right. It tasted pretty good. Almost exactly like Ika Geso, but fresher. And suckier.

So that was the culinary highlight of the evening. Also in contention was the sea cucumber, which looked kind of like gelatinous salsa but tasted basically exactly like regular cucumber, with a bit of red pepper. It also edged out the $250 Russian Red King Crab. Koreans, much like the Chinese when I was there, do not consider discussing prices to be impolite. Dr. Kim mentioned quite casually that he'd bought it and what it cost, and the last time we all went out back in August he said the same thing about the bottle of wine. I think it's said with the sense of, "It's just a fact, so why not say it?"

It was excellent crab. I don't know that I ever had better. And it was very large – the leg was probably two feet long, if you straightened the joint. But in my book, for $250, the damn thing had better crack itself open and dance its way into my mouth.

On second thought, no. I've had enough of that for tonight.