After that I am thinking of hopping on a bus and just going somewhere which should prove interesting as there are in fact lots of places to go.

For the most part I just wanted to let everyone know I was still alive, and still avoiding squid, although not very successfully.

Thursday night after work I was invited to go to dinner with Mr. Kim and Jeanie Park (one of the Korean teachers) they asked me if I liked raw fish, and when I told them I was not opposed we ended up going to a sushi bar. You can tell if a restaurant here serves sushi by the large tanks of swimming fish outside the restaurant. Those puppies are getting carved up and served and since they must be fresh, they just let them swim merrily till they end up on your plate.

As usual, the dish was accompanied by a series of side dishes, inescapable really, some kim chi, and several things that were crunchy and tasty.

There was raw baby octopus, as well as several types of raw fish kim chi. I did sample the raw baby octopus which was less salty and see flavored then the dried squid I had tried at the beach, and although I did not find it unpleasant, it was still hard to get over the fact that I had little octopus suction cups crunching around between my teeth.

The main course was fillet of several different types of fish, all served raw, with lettuce and sesame leaves. You take the fish, but it on the leaf (your choice) add soy sauce and wassail if you desire, or the cooler red sauce (kind of like ketchup) hold you breath and eat. Essentially. It was quite yummy for the most part, I especially liked the sesame leaves which have a very strong, and almost mint flavor which went very nicely with the subtle understated taste of the fish.

There was also some steamed crab, which was quite yummy, and some clams, as well as some stuffed Korean peppers, where although shaped and looking like jalapeno poppers tasted nothing like them, and were stuffed with some sort of water grub, yum.

I also had a Korean delicacy broiled baby muskee, which was actually my favorite. The taste was not unlike sea bass, or just regular grilled trout, and it reminded me of the way I ate fish when I was a kid, catching them, cleaning, them, and cooking them over an outdoor fire. On the whole my favorite fish of the evening.

I will mention that another Korean snack food, that used to be quite a popular source of protein when food was in short supply, is the cooked grub. Essentially fried up insects full of protein. Though I have seen carts of these wheeled around at various markets, I don't think I'm going to help myself to insect any time soon (this from the person who has now had dried squid and raw octopus).

The other odd thing I've found about food anyway, is the growing realization that squid really is a tasty treat liked by many. You can find dried squid in the corner stores here, all wrapped up in plastic and vacuum sealed for munching at any time. It fascinates me how much people here like squid jerky. And squid flavored snacks (potato chips, crackers etc.) are abundant. You can even get fried squid rings at McDonalds, something that I think that Americans would benefit from.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted. Korea is playing again tonight after work, so things might get interesting.