One of my first nights in France I went out with the locals to a pretty fancy restaurant, and I ordered the "seafood platter." Several of the locals had a lot of experience in the USA and Texas, and so they had a good idea of what I was expecting, and of course that's not what I got, at all.
Of course none of it was fried, or blackened, or grilled, or anything else familiar. It came on a three tier dish, on the top was a whole crab on ice, eyes staring at me, claws hanging down in front. The next tier had some small whole fishes kinda like sardines, and some whole boiled langoustine. The bottom tier had some type of mollusks in their shell, but I didn't recognize them, they weren't clams or oysters or muscles or scallops. They were alive but slightly cracked open, and it was your job to finish killing them, separate them from the shell, and then eat them. And also on the bottom tier were some sea snails. Probably a couple of other things I'm forgetting because they were so unfamiliar.
Anyway, I had no problem with the langoustine, I've been peeling and eating shrimp and crawfish my whole life. I tried the sea snail and it was pretty bad, not nearly as tasty as escargot. The mollusks were actually quite good but it was a little weird killing them and watching them sort of jerk around and shrink a bit, in front of me. The sardine things didn't bother me but weren't my favorite.
But I struggled with the crab-- I really had no idea how to take it apart. It's just not something a middle-class Texan ever really sees. The locals were laughing at me when it was delivered, and happily devoured what I didn't eat. They were nice enough to give me some of the crab claw meat which was delicious.
Since then, of course, I've become much more open to foods, and nowadays wouldn't balk at a plate like that, at all. But at the time, as a 23-year-old wet-behind-the-ear kid, I really had no idea what I was doing.