Masan and the squid

On the 11/12th of July I headed down to Masan to hang out with Jenn for the weekend. After our weekend in Daejeon/Suwon we had every weekend planned to be together since she was leaving (and left) on July 11. We won't be seeing eachother again for quite awhile (over a year at least) so we wanted to squeeze in as much time as possible. Masan's a cool place. I like it way better than Gumi. It's right on the ocean, although you can't really get access to it to easily. Masan is a port city, so all of the shoreline is taken up with loading docks and immigration buildings. There's this neat little island just a 10 minute ferry ride off shore though, Doetsom Island. It's pretty small, a walk around it would be quite easy. I'd say, for those of you from Nanaimo area or who know what I'm talking about, that it's about the size of Protection Island. There's a little amusement park, some restaurants and a few love motels. It was so nice to see the ocean again. I've forgotten how much I miss it. It was awesome in Busan, but there were so many people around, here Jenn and I just set up on the beach for a picnic and watched the water. After awhile though we had to head off the beach because the tide was coming in, so we set up again on a bench to continue our picnic. We had with us a bottle of soju to share and as we were pouring it a few older Koreans walked by. They tend to love it when they see us drinking Soju. It's funny. Drinking is really important in this culture. It's culturally required that you get drunk with your boss and colleagues or your friends. I'm not even joking, this isn't an excuse. It's believed that if you can get drunk enough and let all of your inhibitions go then you'll show your true self to everyone and that will make you more trustworthy. Another trust builder tends to be the nori-bong (karaokee room) since then you have to totally let down your guard and not care what everyone thinks of you.
Anyways, so we're drinking Soju and these Koreans are impressed. They didn't speak any English, but Jenn and I know enough Korean that we can usually interpret what people want. They asked where we were from, what our names were, what we were doing that day...normal questions I guess. Then they left because that was about as much as we could understand. This is where it gets funny though. They were maybe 50 feet away when they stopped, had this like little pow-wow and then came running back. They had in their hands a dried squid. Now, I like squid, I've learned to appreciate it here actually. I don't, however like dried whole squid, it smells. It still has the skin on it and it looks like a squid that died in the ocean and just happened to wash up on shore and dry out. Appetizing eh? So, anyways, they hand me the squid. I keep a straight face, as does Jenn, Oscar nominations I swear. THEN, because apparently I look confused, but really I'm disgusted as I look down and see that the squid still has it's tooth in, the guy takes the squid back and rips it in half...then tears off a piece and hands it to me. I'm to eat the squid. I don't know how Jenn lucked out and didn't get any squid, but I did, yay me. So, I eat the squid. It took me friggin forever to chew that one piece, it was like rubber, except dried out old shoe rubber that's 50 years old. Anyways, because I'm too nice I smiled and mumbled something about yumm, and they went away smiling. I kept the squid until we got back to the mainland and then threw it away. I'm nice, but I'm not taking the squid home with me.