Goodness Kristen!, go with someone who has some experience and eat.
The various cuisines of the world hold such wonderful tastes to explore.

Sushi is wonderful. You've got a chunk of fluffy, sticky, fragrant rice, often wrapped by a strip of seaweed with a chewy, salty flavor (and maybe a touch of crispness). Add a core of cool cucumber, soft, mellow avocado, seared tuna, or just about anything and it's a wonderful meal, both in flavor and texture.

I like to have a little dish of soy sauce for dipping and then stir in some wasabi for a little kick.

Go to a sushi bar with a couple of friends who like sushi. Blue C, for example, is great because you can try a lot of different kinds inexpensively. Start simple (cucumber rolls) to see how you like it, and then work your way up to more complex concoctions. Any kinds you don't like, just pawn them off on your friends.

I'm not a huge fan of raw fish just because I don't think it has much of a flavor to recommend it, but I think that can vary from fish to fish. I find that even searing it just a touch can really bring the flavors to life. But that's just me.

Try going to a conveyor-belt sushi place like Blue C in Fremont or U Village, with a friend who like sushi. Go at dinner time, rather than lunch, as there will be more of a selection. Watch the plates go by for a while before trying anything. Start with one of the veggie rolls to see if you like the general taste and texture of this kind of food. The veggie tempura roll is probably your best bet. It has the basic ingredients --rice and seaweed -- plus lightly breaded and fried asparagus and green beans. Dip it in a little soy sauce when you eat it.

After than you could try other veggie rolls, then get progressively more adventurous. If you like shrimp, try the shrimp sushi (it's cooked). This would introduce you to the standard fish-on-rice nigiri sushi, and includes a little wasabi horseradish, which is essential to the taste, but can come as a bit of a surprise.

The best sushi isn't really very "fishy" at all. The super-high quality tuna used in sushi is completely different from what you get in a can. That said, I like some of the more fishy stuff like mackerel. I also love the tiny salt-cured flying fish roe used in some rolls.

There's only one way to tell: go try some. If you don't like it, try it again. Repeat as necessary. Sushi is the greatest stuff in the world.

Raw fish feels a lot fleshier than cooked fish on your tongue. It might seem weird at first but if you eat slowly and concentrate on the flavor you get used to it.

I personally LOVE the oily fish, like mackerel, Spanish mackerel, and gizzard shad. Most sushi beginners wouldn't like these too much, though; better to start with tuna, which is very mild.

One of the biggest thrills is the wide range of flavors, some subtle, some not. That bowl of miso soup beforehand is essential. Different kinds of vegetables, like cold spinach salad as an appetizer, and of course the wonderful seaweed sheets that all the rolls are made out of. Texture is really important, too -- the soft fish, the perfectly chewy rice, the crisp seaweed, the little popping dots of flying fish roe, the smooshy paste of the sea urchin roe...(don't order that one, you won't like it).

The real centerpiece of a piece of sushi is the rice, not the fish. It's not just plain rice; it's a special, ultra-starchy kind that sticks together, and it's made with sweetish rice vinegar. I read in a sushi book that the purest test of a sushi chef, when they're training, is kappamaki -- cucumber roll. No fish. Just perfectly cut sticks of cucumber rolled in rice in seaweed and cut into rounds. It's a great introduction -- no weird fishiness, just crisp green perfection and rice.

Another popular kind of sushi for beginners is the various kinds of cooked ones -- unagi (freshwater eel) is cooked, and has a sweet sauce on it that's out of this world. Many rolls have tempura-fried fish in them, particularly shrimp or soft-shell crab. The only thing better than a soft-shell crab roll is a salmon-skin roll, with the skin seared over a flame to crispyness. Mmmm.

Sushi is fairly bland. Not a lot of flavor, and what flavor there is is pretty subtle. Rice and vegetable mostly. Sashimi is REALLY bland and flavorless. That is, unless you're eating at a crappy place, and then both will probably taste fishy.

Every place I've been to that serves sushi and/or sashimi gives you soy sauce and wasabi (a japanese hot horseradish) with it. Those are the only things that'll really give it any strong flavor. Most places have wasabi in a tube (like toothpaste. Wasabi has the same consistency as toothpaste) but really good places have it fresh. Fresh wasabi is not as harsh as tube wasabi, it's much more smooth and mellow. But it's still nose-running-spicy-horseradish no matter what.

If you don't like the taste of fish, avoid tuna, salmon, and mackerel sushi. Go for eel instead. Eel has almost no flavor at all.

I personally find sushi to be a waste of money. I like food with really bold flavors and sushi has none of that. Plus it's overpriced for what you get. It's just rice and vegetables and a tiny bit of meat. What you're paying for is the presentation and novelty and trendiness and popularity. But hey, if you've never had it, you might as well try it. It's good to explore and experiment.