ChasingDonguri

Ooh, Lovecraftian

I ate a meal at a Korean restaurant which featured the legs from these crabs in some kind of hot sauce, and they were probably the hardest-to-eat thing I've yet encountered. Not because they were bad (actually they were delicious even though the sauce stung my lips), but because I could not for the life of me figure out how I was supposed to get at the meat... and the person I was eating with had fairly minimal English. "Suck!" he kept on telling me, but all I ended up doing was sucking vigorously on a crab leg. At last I figured out that you need to bite down firmly and scrape back with your teeth; the carapace will collapse but not break apart, so that you wind up transforming the sauce-covered crab leg held in your chopsticks to a sauce-covered length of crab meat in your mouth.

(This is yet another instance of the most difficult feature of Korean food: you never know when you're supposed to eat all of something and when you're supposed to avoid part of it.)

But it's pretty cool that you live in Gunsan and you get to see the things before they've been cruelly slaughtered and amputated.