Road Trip III: The Road Trip of Horrors

Okay, they weren't horrors. They were just scary.

Horror #1: On Saturday the 17th, we took the bus into Sokcho, the neighboring town to Sorak National Park. (That's not the scary part.) The park is stunningly beautiful (you might even say scarily beautiful, heh heh heh -- okay, I'll stop now). It's been a UNESCO-designated world biosphere reserve since 1981,and, like all the UNESCO sites I've seen so far, for bloody good reason. Towering craggy peaks, thickly forested hillsides, over 800 varieties of plants, 120 kinds of animals -- and yes, I'm quoting from the Moon Handbook to Korea that BC left me (much more descriptive than Lonely Planet, actually). It's what you think Korea should look like.

We took the cable car up to Gwon-geumseong peak, where we hiked up for about 10 minutes and then climbed up to the very tip-top of the mountain. And when I say climbed, I mean climbed -- the last bit is really over boulders, with no guardrails and a 1,100-meter drop to the ground. In order to take a picture at one point, I lay stomach down on the edge of one of the top rocks and looked down. Scary. But just magnificent.

On Sunday the 18th, we went to the park again and hiked up to see two waterfalls located in the midst of -- again -- towering craggy peaks, etc. It's funny, I don't think of myself as a nature girl. I wouldn't even quite say that hiking is a hobby of mine, or that I love doing it. If there's a mountain in front of me, the obvious course of action to me is to hike it. What else would you do with a mountain? I can't really conceive of doing anything else with a trail before me. So when Mayu, Maiko and I were sweating up a storm, climbing up the metal staircase so thoughtfully constructed for most of the way, I wasn't happy per se. I just was. Maybe that's what appeals to me.

Horror #2: Sokcho doesn't have much to offer in the way of amusements (although we did get approached by club hawkers a few times), but it is known for its seafood. There's an area of town on the beach that features restaurant after restaurant with tubs of live fish, eel, crab, etc. -- you can point out the ichthyoid (how many minutes did I have to search to figure out that name for fish?) you want to eat, and it'll get brained on the sidewalk in front of ya.

When that happened to a customer standing beside us, I was startled, but quickly reminded myself that there's no other way for the fish to get on the table, after all. Well, I suppose you can cut its head off, which might be more humane, but ... yeah, well, anyway, it was startling. But that's not the horrifying part.

The horrifying part was when a plate of two fish, heads intact but scaled, skinned, and sliced into bite-size pieces was set in front of us. I like sashimi, so I dug in as hungrily as my two Japanese friends, and took up a slice of yummy flesh. It was good. No, it was gooooood. And then it happened.

The fish flapped its gills.

I didn't quite catch the movement the first time, when Mayu pointed it out, but the second time, you'd have to have been blind not to see. The fish flexed its gills wide open.

And again.

And again.

I was so shocked and horrified, I couldn't help it -- tears rose to my eyes. I had just swallowed a bite of that fish -- the fish that was freaking flapping its gills in front of me.

Dabbing at my eyes with a napkin, I choked out in English to Maiko, "It's dead, right? It's dead, isn't it?"

She replied in English, "Yes, it's dead."

The employee who'd convinced us to come into that restaurant stopped by our table and asked what was wrong. Maiko said in Korean, "Our friend is from America and has never seen that."

"It's dead, right?" I asked him in Korean.

"Yes, but there are still some nerves in the head that are working," he said. "

Upon closer inspection, this was the way the fish had been prepared: from the head down to the tail, both sides of the fish had been cut away and the meat sliced up into pieces. However, the spine was left intact all the way down to the tail. When I asked why they didn't simply just cut the head off, Maiko explained that that was the point -- the fact that it was moving was a clear indication of how fresh the fish was. It didn't happen all the time, but this fish must have been a strong one to keep on moving.

"But," I asked, my appetite gone, "isn't the fish able to feel pain, then?"

Mayu and Maiko both considered this for a moment. Mayu answered, "I never thought about that before."

And Maiko said, "That's why we have to eat all of it."

They resumed eating. After staring at the fish blankly for a few seconds, I reminded myself that cultural differences should be appreciated, dammit, so stop being such a baby and eat. All of it.

So I took up my chopsticks with a determined tap on the table, and ate. But not the fish that had moved. I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Last year, on my trip with my dad to Jeju Island, I saw people eating live small octopus (they cut off the tentacles and drop them, wriggling, down the hatch), and thought that it might be kind of cool to try sometime. But after the experience with the fish that moved, I don't think I can. I have nothing against eating animals, and I know darn well that someone somewhere's got to kill the fish, cow or chicken so I can enjoy my burger or whatnot. I've got nothing against killing an animal so I can eat it (although the methods used by the American meat industry are deeply disturbing, which is why I'm for buying organic). But eating while something is still alive? I'm not gonna be able to do it. It's deeper than a knee-jerk grossed-out reaction -- it's just the thought of enjoying something while that something might still be able to feel pain.

According to my dad, in those kinds of live seafood places, crabs, eels and other seafood are boiled alive to make seafood stew (which we also had that night in Sokcho). Not just dropped into boiling water, which happens in a lot of places with crabs, at least, but put into a pot of water that is then heated to the boiling point. So the eel or crab or whatnot is thinking, "Damn, it's getting hot in here! What up?" and eventually gets boiled to death. Yow. Apparently, seafood restaurants located more inland usually use frozen seafood, which seems a more kindly way to kill. I think I'll stick with those.

Horror #3: We stayed in a place run by a little old lady, where we could hear the waves breaking on the shore (one of the great things about Sorak National Park is that it has your mountains and waterfalls and forests, but a hop and a skip away, Sokcho's got your beaches and sand and very live seafood for ya). We could not, however, see the ocean, because okay, 1. we didn't have a window facing the sea, but 2. even if we had, the 2-meter-high concrete barrier topped off with barbed wire was in the way.

Sokcho is not far from the 38th parallel, and the threat of North Korean spies or invasion is taken seriously here. When we were walking back from dinner on Saturday night, Mayu and I climbed up the steps of a guard post to look at the ocean, and were talking about how you couldn't see anything except waves, when Maiko whisper-shouted to us to come down. A second later, a door opened just above the step where we were standing, and a soldier poked his head out. Mayu and I ran down the stairs, murmuring apologies, and the soldier vanished into the guard post again.

"They have guns in there," Maiko said in Japanese to Mayu and in English to me. "I saw them sticking out."

Later that night, Maiko wanted to try to get a photo of the guns, but when we did a walk-by, a sensor beeped quietly, and the soldiers inside peered out at us. At around 11:20 pm, both soldiers left the post, carrying their rifles. Maiko got a shot of them walking away.

The next morning, I went for a walk and took some pictures of the barbed wire, and the sea beyond. The beauty of the beach, and the stark reminder that war is still not technically over on the peninsula.