The Worst Meal I Ever Ate

        Korean food is delicious. Know that, first and foremost. Korean food is really delicious. But some of it is, well, different from what I'm used to.
For example, I ate a silkworm pupa in Busan. It tasted pretty much like you'd expect an insectile pupa to taste: acrid, earthy, crispy like an autumn leaf and yet squishy and pulpy inside. I had to gulp back some water and swallow it like a pill, because I couldn't quite bring myself to swallow it. People buy these things from large vats on the side of the road, and eat them out of a big paper cup. Like popcorn.
The worst meal I ever ate was served to me in a local barbecue restaurant near my apartment in Suwon. But before I tell that story, I need to explain a little cultural background first.
Korea isn't satisfied with one Valentine's Day. They hold a succession of holidays over a few months. The first holiday, on February 14th, is called "Valentine's Day," and it is a day for girls to give chocolates to boys. The second holiday, on March 14th, is called "White Day," and it is a day for boys to give chocolates to girls. Boys do NOT give chocolates to girls on Valentines Day. They wait for White Day.
April 14th is "Black Day," a day for single people to eat black bean noodles.
On a tangent, Korea also celebrates "Pepero Day" on November 11th. A Pepero is a long, thin chocolate-dipped cookie made by the Lotte Corporation. It is somewhat expected that you buy a box of Pepero cookies to give away for Pepero Day. One of my more precocious and irritating students informed me that this is simply "a plan for the Pepero company to make more money." I agreed with him. It seems like you might as well celebrate "Dorito Day" or "Kit Kat Day."
But I digress.
The worst meal I ever ate? It was White Day. March 14th, 2012, and I was looking to take Melly out to a nice dinner, as a meaningful and memorable celebration of our love. I really wanted to get it right.
We had eaten Korean barbecue several times since we had arrived almost a month earlier, and man, it is AWESOME. You get a little charcoal fire-pit right there in the middle of your table, with a dazzling array of side dishes spread over the table in dozens of small bowls--kimchi of different varieties, steamed egg, radish, all sorts of wonderful pickled and spiced treasures to delight the taste-buds.  Then you grill the meat yourself, right there at the table. Strips of marinated pork or beef, charcoal grilled to perfection and served wrapped in a lettuce leaf with rice, garlic, kimchi, and pepper sauce. Astoundingly good.
So when White Day rolled around, I figured "I've pretty much got this Korean barbecue thing down. Maybe we could wander around and try someplace new?"
So we did.
We identified the restaurant as a barbecue joint by the telltale metallic vent-hoses hanging from the ceiling, sucking the smoke away from the charcoal pits in the tables. "Oh boy!" I thought. "This place looks good!"
We walked in and took a seat. The menu was in Hangul only, and written on the wall. Luckily for us, the waitress spoke English fairly well.
"What's good here?" Melly asked her. "What do most people get?"
She told us in halting English, "It is…pig…and…cow."
"Great!" we said. "We love barbecued pork and beef." And we ordered for three people (we had invited our friend Sam along for the White Day festivities).
As usual, the side dishes arrived first. Excited for another delicious Korean meal, I picked up a mysterious beige square with my chopsticks and popped it in my mouth. I chewed, and was surprised at the lack of spicy peppery flavor that is so common among Korean food. I chewed some more, and some more. And some more.
This was the moment I began to become concerned.
The chewy beige square tasted like the grease-trap of a Foreman grill. I swallowed with a bit of effort.
"What is this?" asked Melly.
"Oh, skin," the waitress replied cheerfully. "Skin of pig."
It was at that precise moment that our meal arrived. I could only say with certainty that it was a PILE of something. Whatever it was, there was plenty of it.
There were now multiple Korean waitresses helping us, wanting us to have a wonderful dining experience. They picked up the bits from the pile and put them on the grill for us. When they were ready, the waitress helped us roll the bits in a spice mixture, and, despite our polite refusals, FED the pieces to us.
There were three different varieties of pieces. The first piece the woman politely helped me eat was a white-pink, shiny, puckered little corpuscle of jiggling flesh. It was as chewy as fresh squid, and tasted like the napkin you use to blot bacon with. The second piece was a rectangular, white-pink, puckered little corpuscle of jiggling flesh. It tasted like gristle. The third piece was also a rectangular puckered little corpuscle of jiggling flesh, only it was a slightly different shade of white-pink. I don't remember what it tasted like, because by then I had erupted into a cold sweat, and I just took it with water like a pill. There was not a vegetable or a grain of rice to be seen.
Melly, Sam, and I stared at each other across the table, aghast. What in God's name were were going to do with this PILE of inedible corpuscles???
I really hate wasting food, but by the third bite I was gagging. Sam and Melly didn't even get to the third bite.
We waited for a long time. The waitresses had let us alone, but were standing across the restaurant, watching expectantly.
There was no avoiding it. After a queasy couple of moments, I waved the waitress over and said, "I'm sorry. I don't like this. I don't want it."
She looked a little hurt, but hid it well. "Oh, it's okay. This is…difficult for foreigners."
"Yes, yes it is. I'm sorry. I'm…so sorry." We paid the 30,000 won and left in a rush, ashamed. We ran to a nearby restaurant and ordered a vegetable pahjon (a tasty pancake) and tried our best to forget the horrid pile we had left behind. Our stomachs didn't unclench until the next day.
We found out later (though we sure suspected it at the time) that the pile was composed of pig intestine, pig belly-fat, and cow back-fat. A large, greasy PILE of fat and intestines. A PILE, for God's sake!!!
Korean people LOVE fat. They eat it all the time, and claim it's good for the complexion. I claim it's gross.
Well, that's that. I don't really have a clever ending for this one. Korean food is really delicious, I promise.