On a visit to Ganghwa Island with my host and friend, Rev. Chang Bin, we found ourselves at the annual salted shrimp festival. It was a very colourful sight, especially the market stalls, but no photograph can capture the sounds or smells of such a marketplace. Nor can any of my words describe just HOW salted these tiny shrimps were!! Wow! Even thinking about it makes me thirsty! Not my favourite I have to say.
Actually, during our Korean trip I tasted all sorts of dishes that you are not likely to find in the average Scottish diet. Most of them (including seaweed, stuffed octopus, tofu soup, cold noodle soup, and even stuffed pigs intestines..) I could eat... and enjoy. And some, especially kimchi, I absolutely love!
But there was one dish I was happy to steer well clear of... hot, roasted bugs. I can't remember exactly what kind of larvae they were (perhaps even silkworm) but the smell of them roasting on a stall near the Seoul Tower at Namsan ensured that I gave that particular stall a very wide bodyswerve.
On the whole, though, I am a pretty adventurous eater. I can't understand people who travel to far off places then insist on eating exactly the same things they would at home. What's the point of that?
But sometimes even I have to draw the line.
When you think of all the strange things that human beings do eat in various places around the world it makes you wonder who first decided to try eating some of these things. It also makes you wonder how many people learned the hard way what NOT to eat.
What's the strangest dish you've ever eaten?
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