09. 05. DINNER

순두부찌개: spicy soft tofu soup

So this is what I leave with, the tofu restaurant down the street. We ate out. I think it’s a fitting last supper for this summer vacation — something unassuming, something close to home. You know, I used to hate going home in high school. I used to wish fervently that I’d be allowed to stay in the dorms, when we were sent home once a month. But then, as soon as we moved, I stopped hating it. Maybe it was because our new house was more spacious, maybe we had more room in our hearts afterwards, but that can’t just be it. I think it’s because we used to live here, in this exact spot, and then we had to move five minutes down the road because they were rebuilding the apartments. It’s just five minutes’ distance, but I think that all along, I couldn’t really forget that one day we would move out and back to our old home. And I think that it’s the same for this town, or this city, or this country — there’s a feeling that some people say they got when they met the love of their lives. That they’d be together for a very, very long time. I think it’s something like that. And everywhere else is just somewhere to rest your feet, a pause along the way. The heart’s been left at home. But in the meanwhile — on the road — keep moving, because if you stop, then you’ll start thinking. And if you start thinking, you’ll start being sad. So keep moving; drown out the white noise one day at a time. There are people who love you, no matter what gets in your way, so forget about everything else and the thousand terrible moments ahead of you. This is for myself, the only person I’m qualified to give advice to. You have your duties and to stay strong is one of them. Clutch, love, and sometimes you can cry. But in the meanwhile remember the love — think of the food, it’s all the same. It’s all good memories so keep those the best you can, even if you have to drown out everything else being gone. Focus. Hold that chin up. It will all wait for you.

09. 04. LUNCH

갈치조림: hairtail stew

Again the word “jorim” strikes us. It’s still not a stew at all, but I’m still going with it. We met in a small group for the last time after the previous day’s seminar, and we climbed a mountain to get to the faculty restaurant where we battled moths and mosquitoes and enjoyed the breeze and fantastic food. I am not that bad at separating the bones from fish, but I am still working on perfection. I got some quality counseling too as an added bonus — it did help, but I think being able to come home made everything better. Wow, I can’t stop talking about that. I swear I’m not usually this mopey about going home, you know, but it’s just that this summer vacation has been great, with all its stupid health problems and yelling and sweaty subway rides and bad movies. And I love home. Whether that word is a building, a room or a country.

09. 03. DINNER

전어회: hickory shad sashimi

I’ve been using the name “hickory shad” frequently enough that it actually sounds valid now. Here it is, the star of early autumn, mercilessly butchered whole and fantastic all the way through. Seminar weekdays save my soul. We would have gone to the fish market, but we didn’t actually know what we’d be doing or exactly how to get there or how things go down in that land, so we decided to just go to some sashimi restaurant (establishment, rather) where they had hickory shad. Luckily it didn’t take us long to find one, and my life was that much more complete. It’s calcium on a plate, kids. God it’s so good.

광어회: flounder sashimi

And some flounder because everybody loves flounder. I felt responsible for the two plates of hickory shad, though, so I didn’t have much of this. It was pretty good from what I could tell, but is it ever really bad?

매운탕: spicy fish soup

This isn’t usually my favorite part of the meal, since it’s the last thing to be brought out and it’s no longer raw fish. But today it was really good and I learned how to make it taste even better, so my fondness for it has skyrocketed. What you do is you add the bean paste, the garlic, and the leftover perilla leaves while it’s boiling. The bean paste apparently takes care of the fishy sensation, and everything else just tastes good. The more you know!

assorted cakes and ice cream

Yoghurt ice cream with espresso and green tea toppings, tiramisu, sweet potato and cheesecakes. We went down to 예술의 전당 on a whim after the meal, because the scenery there is amazing even when you can’t see it and the place makes you feel like you’re absorbing culture just by standing there. The cafe was called Mozart, how adorable is that. We walked a long while and talked and I’m really going to miss these meetings, but okay, enough of that, I’ll be back for the winter. Three weeks of it. In the meanwhile, I’ll look at pictures and salivate.

09. 02. DINNER

eel and rice on a perilla leaf (깻잎)

Perilla leaves always look so pretty in pictures. Here’s the marinated eel that we have had an oddly few times (does that even make any sense at all) this summer. I maintain that the grilled kind is better, but this was pretty good too after not having had it for a while. I feel just a bit useless — it’s nearly eleven in the morning, I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m sitting in bed making backlogged entries. I should be packing, or doing the laundry, or a milion other things, but honestly if I start, it’ll just feel like leaving, won’t it. Well. At least I’m coming home for winter break. Four months isn’t torture, and fall semester has lots of little breaks. Four months, it’ll be fine. I should get these entries out of the way.

09. 02. BREAKFAST

tofu with soy sauce

Not the same kind of tofu that I usually get, this is harder and has a different purpose, but the portion is much smaller so it’s better to have for breakfast when you decide that the bread isn’t quite good enough to have two days in a row without inciting some sort of negativity from you. Completly unrelated to this (I hope), we’ve been reading 20th Century Boys to prepare for the upcoming film. So far we’ve been ashamed for knowing not much more about it than the word FRIEND and THE END OF THE WORLD. But Jesus God it is so epic. It’s got some flaws, or at least some elements that make me react in something less than awe, but the scale of the story is mindblowing and it’s genuinely emotional sometimes, and also it’s just ridiculously cool. It almost nearly makes me want to read Monster. TOMODACHI TOMODACHI, suckers.

09. 01. BREAKFAST

garlic bread with cream cheese

If the bread’s got garlic in it, that makes it garlic bread, right? We accidentally bought a thing of cream cheese that didn’t come in a sealable container, but was packaged like butter. So we felt that the cream cheese was in dire need of being eaten. Needless to say, this urgency wore off in a day or two and currently the rest of the cream cheese is sitting in a separate sealable container in the fridge. It’s okay bread, though, even if it doesn’t actually taste anything like garlic.

08. 31. DINNER

conveyor belt sushi

Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, et cetera. I would have thrown a fit if we left without having gone here at least once, so I dragged my brother out randomly for dinner just so that I could satisfy my raging gluttony. It’s about ten minutes from our house, Sushihiroba, and god I love it to pieces. Everything’s always so bright and fresh and they’re really nice there and usually there’s room and it’s just so great. We didn’t get the best seat for this meal, it was at the bar the furthest from the door, but then again we couldn’t have been sitting at a table and it wasn’t like we were getting less of anything. I would have taken pictures of every single dish but that would have impeded my eating greatly and also looked pretty abysmally silly. But we had a bunch of awesome things, snapper (again, bream?), some semi-awesome part of red tuna, mackerel, a lot of other stuff that looked and tasted amazing but the names of which were unknown to us. We racked up quite a bill.

전어초밥: hickory shad sushi

And lo and behold, for here is the hickory shad, reigning champion of my recent dreams. When I was raving about them I had in mind the sashimi, complete with crunchy bone, but actually this way might be superior. For one thing there’s a lot more of the fish you’re eating in one bite, since the sashimi has to be sliced thin enough for the bones to be edible, and also that’s more of the skin, which is terrifyingly good. This was fantastic. I saw on the menu that they had the hickory shads in special since they were in season, so I decided to order a plate. We had one each, and even my brother agreed that we should go against custom and order another two. I’ve never had fish quite this fresh, it was definitely different from — and much better than — well, pretty much everything else out there. I can’t really say much about it except that you’ll know instinctively what I mean by fresh. Just the right amount of chewy, the still-wet feeling of that skin, and seriously the flavor is insane. You can get, what, five kinds of fish in the Princeton area? Tuna, salmon, yellowtail, mackerel and flounder? Psh. This is where it’s at. Seasonal fish. Sure, flounder, rockfish, steady-sellers, but you get so bored of them. Mmm. Fresh seasonal fish. I’m marrying into a seaside village.

08. 31. BREAKFAST

plain yoghurt and scrambled eggs with sausage

This time we did have milk in the house so I was able to make scrambled eggs. The sausages were not being et so I decided to take care of them — wait, deja vu, have I mentioned that before? So I am still the maker of best eggs that I know. Granted the scrambled eggs are a little different every time I try them because I don’t exactly know when to stop, but still they are excellent. I just undermined myself. Anyway here is a crapload of pepper and some parsley that’s been expired for over two years now but is fine because it’s just some dried flakes of grass, nothing bad will happen to it that you won’t notice. It’s okay! You’re safe! WAR IS OVER

08. 30. DINNER

grilled clams

As usual, seminar weekdays consist of a bit of agonized venting over the untranslatability of particularly sexy phrases and a whole lot of musing over what we will eat after the agony is over. Today we were scheduled to go to a traditional fish market because them hickory shads is in season and I’ve been going on about them for ages. Unfortunately we spent a little too much time agonizing and by the time we decided it was enough, we were too tired and hungry to put in the effort to pick out fish at a market. So we put that off for another day — which we didn’t actually end up doing, but that was fine the way it was, as shall be seen in a later post. Anyway, instead we suggested grilled clams, which you usually have near the sea, of course, but the other girls in the seminar are angels and since they know the neighborhood, they mentioned a place very close by called “Auntie’s Clams” or somesuch. Snicker, snicker, yes, but honestly, it was so great. Maybe “clams” isn’t right because you also get a couple mussels and conches along the line, but hey, bivalves or not, it was all equal in excellence.

바지락칼국수: handmade noodles with clams

Jesus God this was legendary. The general consensus was that this was even better than the grilled clams. I won’t go that far because I am passionately in love with grilled clams, but whereas those are usually excellent, this is definitely the best 바지락칼국수 I have ever had. The restaurant our family used to love a couple years back that closed down while we were abroad, that was good, but this was unbelievable. It’s got so many clams in it, and the broth is phenomenal, so rich and inexplicably complicated and just perfect. Also it comes in a ridiculously huge bowl as evidenced by its contrast in size with the top of a bottle of soju. Ugh seriously, Auntie. You go girl.

assorted fruits

The fruits are self-evident so I won’t caption them. This is a bit of a famous place in this college area, apparently, it’s a tiny fruit store that lets you order as little of the fruit as you like, then they cut it up for you and you can take it home if you like. What a stupidly good idea for a college town. Also the fruit was amazing, you wouldn’t think it would be anything so special but everything was so sweet and we were all so full from the clams but we couldn’t resist polishing off half of what is pictured above. Still we felt a little ashamed about not being able to demolish the entire load. I love this seminar.

08. 30. LUNCH

a super supreme pizza from god knows where

Or I’d have known if I’d paid any attention at all, but I was in my room doing something while my brother ordered the pizza. I’m not trying to be vague, but honestly I’m sure I was doing something besides staring out the window or spinning in my spinny chair. I just can’t remember. Eh, it was probably ONTD or rewatching early episodes of Flying Circus. Anyway we like getting the super supreme pizza because most pizza places have something of that name and it usually tastes the same. I’m at least sometimes willing to look up the menu online to see if there is something more appetizing, but my father and my brother are all about either delegating the duty of talking to a salesperson or just getting whatever the super supreme might be. I also hate talking to salespeople, I’ll have you know. I just figure that they won’t even remember me no matter how big a fool I accidentally make of myself, and even if they do, I won’t see them again, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it, huh? Yeah. Anyway I remember that I had to leave for the translation seminar, so I stuffed a couple slices in, inhaled, brushed my teeth, then sped out the door. Still I was half an hour late, but aren’t I always.