Alive and kicking!

Eating out is an adventure ... you may or may not agree but when you do in Korea (especially sea-food restaurant), it is definitely so! Last Monday being Chuseok holiday, Stepan, Ivan and I instead of settling for just beer and normal pub-grub, decided to be adventurous - and some adventure it was. Certain things in Seoul have really surprised me - like the Dongdaemun market. Lonely planet describes this place as "the market that could clothe the world". For a first timer, I won't waste so many words. In short, it is intimidating! Yes, given the sheer number of shops, which can easily reach 5 figures, it can be quite intimidating even for people accustomed to crowded places. But the discoveries of the culinary world can be even more surprising. Before coming to Seoul, thanks to Anthony Bourdain, I knew what to expect on the table. With this knowledge, three of us embarked on your Monday night adventure. It was on Ivan's insistence, we decided to go to a sea-food restaurant.
We usually go to restaurants where the menu has pictures, to make up for our lack of knowledge about the Korean language. This restaurant satisfied the criterion, so we decided to give it a try. Most of the stuff were in form of platter, meant to be shared by 3/4 people. We tried to ask the waitress, about the dishes -which was a hopeless failure! She tried to explain everything very enthusiastically - the only problem was that we understood nothing. So we decided to try our luck and ordered something randomly. The waitress asked a few more questions - to all of which we confidently answered "ne" ("yes" in Korean) with smiling faces. The food took about 10 mins to arrive, before which we were given bright red aprons (the color made us cheerful). We were looking at other tables to figure out what others were having (not a particularly polite thing to do but we are foreigners trying to learn about Korean culture!) when our food arrived. And behold! The most prominent component of the platter was an alive octopus - Holy s***! Stepan and Ivan almost jumped up form their chairs (oh, yeah, this one had chairs for a change!) I was staring at it as if it was an alien. The platter also consisted of shrimps, mussels, carrot, onion, bean sprout and many other things but the most interesting was surely the octopus - which was a more than ideal example of being "alive and kicking"! And it was not over ...
The whole platter was covered up by a glass lid and put on the stove (at the center of the table) to cook. It might seem rather gruesome to cook and animal live but more gore was to follow. We were still curiously looking at the octopus (which was trying to throw off the lid) when the waitress appeared with scissors, pulled out the poor creature and started to cut it up in pieces. After the "operation", it was put back into the pan to be slow cooked while a host of other side dishes appeared on our table - rice, khimchi, pickled cucumber, seaweed, salad and figs along with a bottle of soju. The meal was rather sumptuous - especially because of the "fresh" octopus (which was caught from a tank placed at the exit of the restaurant). It was a pity that we didn't have a camera with us to record all the drama but we never expected such a thing in the first place. So from next time, any culinary experiment will be suitably and more vividly recorded!