Leaving Gyeongju for Ganggu, led by the YouTube Siren to parts unknown (at least to us and apparently most Westerners, as we wouldn't see any until moving on to the next town). Photo just below, we're leaving our Gyeongju hostel.
In Gerri's early research of Korea, she watched a lot of YouTube videos, featuring mostly food of course. She came across this young woman eating giant crabs at some restaurant in a small sea village, and decided, if they built it we will go. The video only said it was Ganggu and one of many restaurants there. Actually, there's 2 km (1.2 miles) worth of them along the seaport. Outside the restaurant the woman only showed a video shot of the live crab aquarium with the menu photos of food above them - two of the plates have a particular blue and white strip pattern. Rather than walk the length of them and hope for dumb luck, Gerri was able to use Google Maps to do a virtual tour and found it about a 1/4 of the way down the strip.
 A simple goal for this leg of our journeys - that restaurant shown to the right. |  |
Tickets in hand, we're ready of the day - traveling by bus in Korea is a bit of a gamble - without a Korean credit card and an identity number, you can only buy tickets in person at the bus stop, and if there's a connection, you only can do that while enroute. (there's more to this bus story in the next blog entry)
Gerri thoughts "the first step is complete - the getting there part"; Tim "mmmmmmm crabs"
The Lonely Planet tour guidebook is quite correct, July/August in Korea can be quite wet months. We'd picked up a couple permanent loaner umbrellas from a nice bellhop in Japan, but still found our bags get soaked all the way through in a driving rain. In our years of traveling we haven't had much need for umbrellas luckily (even in the UK the rain is usually just the misty kind). Somehow we've never even considered pack covers - here it's mandatory.
Crossing the bridge as our hotel is on the opposite side of the port. A supposed 13 minute walk, became a 20 minute one when we discovered the pedestrian bridge is being currently replaced.
Our quarry is just around the bend...
Yes, these are truly giant crabs. In reality, our expectations are somewhat tempered in that this is not the local giant crab season, and the crabs we'll eat are a bit smaller and taken from farther oceans but still live (north of Japan).
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Part two complete, our butts are in chairs in the restaurant of dreams.
It begins. We found out the ordering process started with the man at street level in charge of the tanks calls a woman down from above who's much better at speaking English. She appears to be the lady serving the big crab eater in the YouTube video. She tells us to pick two crabs (sizes, not say, Johnny Crab and Jenny Crab) and asked us how many steamed, cheesed, raw, and tempura. There's no other questions, they will handle the rest. The parade of plates commences.
Below are close-up photos of some of the plates above.
It's the scene from "Forest Gump", when Bubba runs down the list of ways shrimp can be prepared, but Korean style and mostly with crab.
It's the scene from "Forest Gump", when Bubba runs down the list of ways shrimp can be prepared, but Korean style and mostly with crab.
 Crab Stew |  Sashimi |  Shrimp Tempura |  Raw soy sting ray. |  Raw baby crab |
 Tempura crab legs |  Steamed crab with cheese |  The hostess removed the meat and swirled the cheese for us |
 Steamed crab |  The hostess dismembered the steamed crab for us - easy peazzy |  Yes, that's raw crab, Gerri loved it, Tim thought the texture a bit alien |
 Crab body meat in ramen |  The ramen pot with crab broth and various veggies |  Rice fried with molé |
And the damage is...
...eeeyow, we were forewarned from Gerri's research that it would be more than we've ever paid for a dinner for two, it's embarrassing, yeah, about $210 US.
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