Puppy Soup

[WARNING]  The following post is about the consumption of man's best friend.  Man's best friend meaning dog.  If you continue to read please keep any negative comments to yourself.  I have already heard every joke and rant about people who eat dog and am just trying to document my time here in Korea by writing on here.  If you don't like this post wait for the next one.  I'll talk about something more uplifting than eating dog. I promise.

#45.  Eating dog is popular with older gentlemen for its supposed power to enhance stamina and virility.  Dog  is apparantly the Korean viagra.

In Korea some people eat dog.  I live in Korea.  I ate dog. It's part of the culture that I now live in so I bit the bullet and did it.  When in Korea do as Koreans do.  I went with 5 other teachers to a hole in the wall restaurant called "Sunni's Dog House." Really?!  They couldn't think up anything more original than "dog house?"  Clearly I only eat dog at the classy places.

We brought our Korean friend Allan to do the ordering.  He ordered  5 bowls of dog soup, 1 bowl of chicken soup for himself (he is part of the Korean community who refuses to eat dog), 6 bowls of rice, dozens of little side dishes and all kinds of pastes and sauces that i'm sure made the dog more..cough..delicious..and plenty of beer to wash it all down.   All for less than $10 per person. What we didn't know when we ordered it is that we had two courses of dog with the soup.  Freaking fantastic.  Now I have to feel even more guilty.  Not only am I eating dog but i'm eating two courses of dog. 

Out comes a platter of dog skin.  Yup.  It was just as disgusting as it sounds.  Now it didn't have any hair on it and didn't straight up look like dog but it was definitely unique looking.  I tried one little piece and barely got it down.  I won't gross you out with the specific details but let's just say that it tasted a bit like roast beef that had been siting out for a few days in a warm kitchen.

The next course was the actual soup.  Now as dog goes this actually wasn't bad.  It was the dog meat mixed up with vegetables, itty bitty bones and huge pieces of fat.  Once you got around the bones and fat it just tasted like overcooked, gamy roast beef soup.  Or that's how I thought of it at least.  While you're eating dog you can't think of yourself eating dog.  Just trust me on that one. 

It's safe to say that the dog eating adventure was a once in a lifetime thing.  It's not a tasty meat and made me feel ridiculously guilty.  One thing that this little adventure did do was to start a new tradition for the rest of our Tuesdays here in Pohang.  Every Tuesday we are trying something new. 

On the agenda for next week?  Live octopus.  You read that correctly.  Live octopus.  Stay tuned.