Seoul Kitchen

South Korea is the penis of the world.  Uruguay is its vagina.  We don't just make this stuff up.  Chop dated a Hangug-eo in college.  So we still think of ourselves as Korean at heart.

One of the best experience we can remember of visiting South Korea is the Jimjilbong.  The locker rooms, hot tubs and wet saunas are separated for men and women and you don' wear your clothes until you come up top to the unisex dry saunas.  One dry sauna in particular has a small wooden door leading to a mud lined dome with a coal fire in the corner.  You have to literally crawl into this sauna, and it's one of the hottest.

Another memory we have is taking the midnight train to Hwanseon Caves in Gangwon-do to watch the sunrise.  It was dead of winter and we traveled through the night to reach our location.  Yet, we still had to wait a few hours before sunrise.  It was so intensely cold that we crowded into the train station with everyone else, and we all huddled around the single heater in the middle of the room.  Here we waited for hours.  One old man rolled his hard boiled egg around the top of the heater to warm it before he ate.  We so much wanted this man's egg.  And he rolled it around and around, warming it on all sides, knowing that he was closest to the heater, and he was the owner of the object of everyone's desire.

Seoul Kitchen could make up the distance between the dome shaped, coal fire sauna and that man's hard boiled egg.  You have the old woman sitting with her eyes closed in the corner.  You have the crowds gathered around one another at the tables.  You wait for the sunrise of your meal.  And with every passing dish, you patiently covet your neighbor's food.  Then the hot food comes and you burn your mouth in haste.

karat