100 Things I Love About Korea # 28: Women Divers

Korea is a peninsula surrounded by countless islands.  People here "farm" both land and sea.  Korea's HaeYeon or "Sea Women" are beautiful and poignant examples of adaptation, strength, and entrepreneurism.
Diving without oxygen to up to 20 meters (70 feet) deep, these ladies pull up shell fish, seaweed, and all sorts of other food items.  I've done some free diving, and 30 feet is about my limit.  At 30 feet, my ears are pounding, and my lungs are burning.  Going down is fun, but coming up, it feels like the surface is never going to arrive.  I have all kinds of respect for these ladies.
Also, anyone who works into their 70s or 80s deserves props.  I'm just saying, I hope I can still walk when I'm 70, much less dive down as many feet as years I've lived!

100 Things I Love About Korea - #16: Funky Seafood

I'm honestly not big on seafood.  But Korea has expanded my seafood tastes 1,000 fold.  I'll now try just about anything.  

A meal like this - with a whole octopus intentionally displayed as the eye-catching feature piece - is very common.  Once at a meeting of Cheonan pastors, we had a spicy seafood soup with just about everything that lives in the ocean: all sorts of shell fish, shrimp, crab, actual fish pieces, fish innards (including intestines and ovaries full of eggs), and all sorts of other sea creatures that don't fit into easy categories.  

One of Korea's prime delicacies that I haven't tried yet is Saeng Nakji - or fresh octopus.  It's so fresh that they bring it to your table fresh out of the tank.  Then, they chop it up, and everyone digs in.  The tentacles will wrap around your chopstick (even after the chopping), and you have to eat it quickly or the suckers will get stuck in your throat.  Apparently, every year a few people die from this.  I actually want to try it before I leave.  How could you not?