After a year in Asia, I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten rice in absolutely every variety imaginable and even some that aren’t imaginable. But I opted to leave that information out.
We found a place they were satisfied with where they served large, shareable plates of rice. I knew the words for most types of meat – chicken, pork, beef, as well as some more obscure options.
“What does‘ mariscos’ mean?” I asked a friend.
“Seafood.”
My heartrate quickened and my palms began to sweat. That's vague. That's suspicious.
I’ve not eaten a single strange food since I’ve been in Colombia. I’m not actively avoiding it, I just have yet to encounter anything I consider to be that out-of-the-ordinary. Yeah, you have to pick the fish straight off the bone, and the head is still attached to it, but that's child's play. (I am very much hoping to try goat in the not-so-distant future though.)
As it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. The food had your standard variety meats with some shrimp and very normal vegetables mixed in. But I’m still suffering from some major food-induced PSD brought on by a year of living in Korea, "The Land of Terrifying Food". That's not an official slogan, but it is a free suggestion if they're looking for a new one.
In Korea, “seafood” meant there’d be a fish brain floating in your soup. That an entire octopus had been cut up and mixed into your rice. That the eel in the main course had just been killed 13 seconds ago and was still moving. Anything, ANYTHING they had managed to dig out of the ocean was fair game. Seafood means your worst nightmare is about to be literally hand delivered on a platter.
And no single day of my life has been more scarring than the closing lunch to celebrate the end of the school year, four months after I'd arrived.
We drove out to the middle of nowhere and entered a restaurant where we sat down on the floor, legs crossed. Several waiters brought out huge trays filled with tons of little plates of food. There are always a million plates, all to be shared.
I started gradually picking away at the food on the table in order of normalcy, hoping, I don't know, that a giant asteroid would hit the Earth before we got too far into the meal. Bean sprouts - gone. Spinach - gone. Kimchi - gone. There was a small plate that was unidentifiable.
"What's this?" I asked. I was seated next Shim HyeSeon, English teacher and also the only person I could talk to without relying on 97% body language.
"It's fish."
I don't even really know specific names of most fish so that answer sufficed. I popped a piece into my mouth with the chopsticks. It was weird.
"Yeah the triangle one." The triangle one? I grabbed my phone and opened Google.
"This?"
"Yeah! The triangle one. What's that called?"
Stingray. It's called stingray. And yes, while technically a fish, I don't exactly put it in the same category as salmon or tilapia. She kept eating.
"You like shrimp, right?" she asked. I looked at the plate. There was shrimp. Whole shrimp. Straight out of the ocean.
"I do, but I don't know...I've never really...It's just that it still has..."
In one fluid motion she grabbed one off the plate and ripped the head off. A few seconds later the shell was ripped off and a piece of shrimp sat on my plate that more closely resembled the "shrimp cocktail" type shrimp I was accustomed to. She put the discarded body parts back on the plate.
The waiters re-entered with more plates. Second course: raw squid, straight from the ocean to our table.
No such luck with that asteroid.
"Try it!" Shim urged, pushing the plate toward me.
"I'm okay actually," I said. I'll just enjoy a nice glass of water."I'm really full from that first course of food. I should save room for the next courses." I'd eaten the same amount as the average two-year-old out to dinner at a restaurant and was anything but full.
"No, try it! There is one for each of us!"
I held it with the chopsticks and looked at it. My hand was shaking a little bit. The legs dangled at the bottom. The eyes stared through my soul. I bit it in half while the lower part disappeared into my mouth. The squid legs were close enough to normal food that I could deal.
"Okay that wasn't so bad," I said, while looking for a place to discard the head.
"No! All of it! You can eat all of it."
I stared at the face, positioned between the two chopsticks in my hand, just a few inches away from my own face. I cannot do this.
They all stared at me, face to face with the squid. Shim inched in closer. She was tired of watching my internal debate.
“Oh fine if you can’t do it just put it back on the plate!”
I shoved the other half into my mouth. Oh my God. OH MY GOD. The eyes. The brain. The face. The heart. The organs. The body.
“Do you want more?” Never again for the rest of my existence.
“Now we will barbeque.”
Well thank God. If there’s one Korean food I could enter into competitive eating with, it’s barbeque. It’s absolutely delicious. The waiter’s disseminated the room with plates stacked to the max with food. Boneless food. Grey food. Scale-y food. Oh my God we’re barbeque-ing snake. And this is only course three which means there’s probably at least four more courses and it’s getting progressively scarier and I’m going to die.
“It is eel!”
She poked it with a chopstick and it moved. I almost jumped out the window next to me. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t like for my lunches to be straight out of an episode of Fear Factor.
"It's alive?!" I asked.
"No. Yes. It's dead but it's still a little bit alive."
They all went about their conversation in Korean unbothered while I watched the eel flop around on the grill. We ate our way through most of the plate when there was just a bloody glob left. Trying to be helpful, I started to scoop it onto the grill. She stopped me.
"We will not eat because it is the face." Oh so we do have some limitations. Of course.
Eel sushi, eel spine, and pig skin appeared on the table before the prison sentence ended. By the end of the meal I finally was full, and nauseous.
I think this was the first time I've ever really felt culture shock. My head felt dizzy and it seemed like I was moments away from waking from a dream. When we stepped outside I took a deep breath and tried to recalibrate myself.
"Now we will go get ice cream!"
I never thought I would be scared of ice cream.
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