Chicken Feet

This is a plate of chicken feet dredged in spicy hot chili sauce. You pick 'em up and massage the bones and talons out of the foot skin and then drop the rubbery sock of rooster flesh into a communal bowl of rice and seaweed and roll up a ball of flavor to pop into your mouth.

I couldn't do it. Seeing those intricate patterns of chicken foot flesh through the veneer of hot sauce set my instinct off. It seemed to be saying to me in lucid, crystalline tones "Whatever you do, do not eat this shit."

Luckily there were plenty of side dishes like potato pancake, some fiery hot onion soup in clear broth, a bowl full of scrambled eggs in some sort of sauce, and pickled cabbage. I'm sure I offended everyone with my hoity toity cracker ass refusal to eat the main dish but instinct is instinct. Some long lost ancestor of mine must have killed a chicken and decided its lowest part, the part that roots through the ground for worms, claws through shit all day, and tears at the flesh of enemies is unclean to ingest. I can't argue with that.

I Passed a Severed Pig Head on My Way to the Nakwon Arcade

At least he looks like he died happily. Not pictured is a butcher standing off to the side hacking chunks of pig face off a stack of heads piled on cheap card table set up on the sidewalk.

The Nakwon Arcade is a building that straddles a major thoroughfare in Insadong, the craft district of Seoul. It's like a massive guitar center made up of a hundred or so smaller shops. I walked around acres and acres of musical equipment trying out hollow bodied electric guitars. I realized today that I hate haggling. I know it's customary and people enjoy the exhilaration of it or something but it just feels like arguing to me. Tell me how much it is and I'll tell you if I want to buy it. End of transaction. Anyway I would just ask for a price then walk onto the next shop, waiting to get quoted the cheapest price I'd found online. It turns out Epiphone used to be headquartered in Korea before moving to China so almost everywhere sold Casinos, the model I was interested in. I bought this from a straightforward Korean rocker dude who immediately quoted what I wanted to hear.

Listening To The Cars

I came to Korea with no music because I was curious to find out what sonic deprivation would compel me to download illegally from the internet. Tonight it was The Cars. It's hotter and humider than the inside of a napalmed watermelon on a Saturday night here in Bucheon and I'm tired of hitting the bars in hopes of finding community and a nice girl to get to know. The party scene for foreigners here is hard to navigate without feeling like a cliched honky douche. I'm feeling more like turning inward and reestablishing a connection to ideals I've held since youth. The Cars and Soju are helping to carry me through.

Edible Horrors of the Deep for sale at Jung Dong street market

Some of the gnarliest looking seafood you'll ever see.

Turtles are reptiles.

I've eaten stingray. It's really chewy with a texture like fiberglass. I was warned that it tasted like ammonia but I didn't detect it.
As a surfer my dad won't eat shark. He's superstitious about eating it because he doesn't want to accrue any karma that could boomerang back on him when he's out in the water. Man, I hope I haven't unknowingly eaten this thing in soup or something.

Summer sunset on a live seafood tank outside a restaurant near where I live. That squid's just straight chillin' with all the fish.

WANTED

There's a suspicious intensity to this lost cat's eyes that makes it look like a mugshot you'd see in the post office. I like to imagine that all the writing is a long list of crimes this cat has committed against humanity like wailing at ungodly hours, grand theft seafood, attempting to suffocate an infant by sleeping on its face, clawing expensive upholstery, etc.

I had students debate in English over which was the superior animal, Cats or Dogs, to get a sense of what the general consensus was in their culture. The team supporting cats was hard pressed to come up with positive qualities. I was surprised to learn that cats are considered thieves in Korea. I see a lot of cats lurking under parked cars and in alleys behind restaurants. They always seem uptight as they scan the urban landscape for fish scraps. In the end the team debating that Dogs were superior won with a final point that crushed all of the opposition's logic: Dogs are more delicious than cats. Haha.

Yet for some reason I've come to think of Koreans as cat people. There's a certain feline grace to them. Maybe it's wrong to zoopomorphize a culture but whatever. Koreans are shy and watch you from afar until their comfortable enough to brush up against you. They lounge around on heated floors when its cold out. They hiss and purr in speech and make sure to bury their feces...maybe I'm stretching this too far.