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While living in Korea, I was invited to go out for dinner with the teachers from my school. We arrived at the restaurant and sat on cushions on the floor.

The evening progressed in the usual Korean-office-party style. Everyone drank too much, and suddenly I found myself the most popular girl at the party. People who had never talked to me before were pouring me drinks (very bad form to pour your own drink) and wanting to know my favourite colour. I got a few declarations of love and a marriage proposal or two.

Finally, the dish that everyone had been waiting for arrived. As the waitresses brought out the large plates, a hush fell over the crowd. The waitress put the plate down in front of me with a flourish - oysters, scallops, a few cooked shrimp, something that was quite possibly a fish's stomach.

And then I spotted it. I blinked, rubbed my eyes and looked again. There was an octopus - a live octopus - sitting on the plate, looking right back at me, its large round eyes glistening sadly in the dim light.

But what unnerved me most was the fact that although the octopus had very clearly been chopped up into many pieces, each piece was under the impression that it was still part of a larger whole. Each piece was still moving. Each tentacle bit squirmed and wriggled as though the octopus was swimming around in the big blue ocean, not sitting on a plate in a restaurant. It looked like a bucket of worms. Only I feared that we weren't about to go fishing.

"Local specialty," the teacher beside me grunted as she tried to pry a particularly tenacious piece off the plate. She finally got the tentacle unstuck and tried to put it in her mouth. The tentacle clearly did not want to be eaten. It tried to climb up her chopsticks. Shrugging, she pried it off and deposited it, still squirming, into her mouth.

It was one of the most gruesome things I had ever seen. I looked around to see several plates of limbless octopi watching as their squiggling appendages were being enthusiastically chased and devoured by drunken teachers. It was like a scene from an octopus horror movie.

It was so awful, I just had to try. I chose a little piece of tentacle that had been hiding under a lettuce leaf. I tried to pick it up with chopsticks, then a spoon, then finally my fingers. It squirmed and held on to the plate with all of its little suckers. Finally, the teacher beside me slipped a sharp knife under it and flipped it onto my spoon. "I love you," he said, his mouth full of wriggling octopus limbs.

I took a deep breath and tried to put the wee tentacle in my mouth. It clearly had other ideas, as it tried to climb the spoon handle. I picked it up in my fingers and popped it in my mouth. Salty, a bit chewy - not bad at all. A bit disturbing to feel it wriggling the whole way down, though.

Anyone thinking of visiting Korea? I know a great restaurant.

globeandmail.com

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