From the beginning, our reasons for going to Korea were personal.
In early June two of our Korean home-stay daughters, Chloe and AhRa, rode the Korail Express Train (KTX) from Seoul to spend a few days with us in Busan. With all the laughter, chatter, and personality they bring with them, it was just like old times.
We went to the beach, hiked trails, took a ferry ride, and ate in restaurants. At night we all made space for ourselves in our two rooms, the girls on sleeping mats in the "living room." Cozy.
I cannot overstate how much we enjoyed their visit; and I cannot choose some moments over others as being "the best things" about those few day, so I will just say that one memorable activity of their stay was our trip to a raw seafood restaurant on the rocks below the lighthouse on Taejongdae Island.
These views from the top and bottom of the cliffs give necessary perspective on what "seaside" dining really entails.
This was an experience that falls into the "first and only" category for us. Donna had come up with the idea of taking Chloe and AhRa by subway and then taxi out to Taejongdae for seafood on the rocks, thinking the seafood would be cooked. Of course.
We had seen the restaurants from an earlier trip to the lighthouse; but as the wind on that day was daunting, we had not ventured down to the rocks for a closer look. We knew the food would be fresh but we had somehow missed its "raw" aspect.
What had looked like cooking baskets and pots from two hundred feet up the cliff were really just holding tanks to keep the creatures alive.
It took only a few minutes for the girls to select sea squirt and sea cucumber from the tubs of salt water, and it took the cooks only a few minutes more to dispatch the creatures by chopping them into bite-size pieces and bring the delicacies in on a tray.
The darker, grey pieces are the sea cucumber and the rest is sea squirt, so far as I know. The white food in the small dish is sliced radish with whole green peppers of the hot variety, and the other two dishes have hot sauces. Apart from the raw seafood, which is common enough in Busan but not the usual fare, and apart from the reduced number of small side-dish bowls, this is how a Korean meal is served. You use your chopsticks to take from the main dish or dishes as well as from the side dishes.
There are many variations, of course, but we saw this basic format many times. I might add that this meal was unusual because we were not served kimchi, perhaps the only Korean meal we had during our four plus months without at least one bowl of kimchi. Whether this had anything to do with the fact that we were at the seaside eating raw seafood, I don't know.
Our reactions to the seafood was predictably different from Chloe and AhRa's. Donna dutifully took a piece of sea cumcumber, found that it was nothing like the cucumber she was used to, and could not swallow it. After that attempt, she needed a few minutes to recover.
I managed a piece of each and swallowed both, but decided I had done my duty and took no more. For the record, neither cucumber nor squirt had a distinctive taste to me, being both somewhat bland by themselves. The issue, I think, is with texture. Sea cucumber is rubbery, rather more solid than it looked. At least for my aging molars, it refused to break apart after serious grinding, and I eventually swallowed it whole.
The texture of the sea squirt was opposite the cucumber, being soft. I expected it to disintegrate quickly, but it too resisted chewing. Nothing would make it fragment, so again after rigorous chewing I swallowed the whole thing.
AhRa and Chloe found our efforts to eat quite amusing. I did not get a usable picture of them laughing, but in this one their attention to the seafood we could not eat is clearly evident.
Eating was not all we did on this trip. We watched the big ships coming and going outside of Busan Harbor,
and we hiked along the Taejongdae Island shore with its spectacular views.
But as was true everywhere we went in Korea -- and China, too -- it was people, in this case our remarkable and beautiful Korean daughters, who made the memorable truly unforgettable.
As I said earlier, our reasons for going to Korea were personal.
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