put it in your pocket and take it with you

FLORENCE

Overwhelming beauty in Florence. Every facet, every gilded rafter and crumbling cobblestone speaks. All they say, though, is, “eat something. Drink something. Look at this, look at that. Life goes on, and in what fine style.”

Richness and movement in stone. Intensity and passion held static but forcing the eye to movement. Emotional investment in the content is palpable. The Duomo! How much detail in color, in texture, in composition can you pack into and onto the exterior of one structure? Every other square made me reevaluate my answer.

Man do I love me some pointy pines. (I now can identify these as cypresses. They are THE tree of the Mediterranean countryside.)

How can people live in such a beautiful place?! How does anything ever get done? I would just walk and stare and eat and stare and smile, never writing, never asking for anything more than what I had.

We had. The most. Incredible. Gelato. Ever. Rich, light, smooth, with one delightfully crunchy bite of coffee bean.

I was bored of shopping until I touched the buttery leather we had talked so much about. My mother wanted a jacket, a jacket, a jacket from Florence, so we were on a mission.

Apparently there’s a 10,000 euro fine for buying fake designer purses off the street. It sounds crazy to fine the customers rather than just the sellers but after spending a little time in this leather market I’m pretty in favor of the fine.

The Italian government is serious about protecting their artisans and their manufacturers. They know they have a treasure, and they’re not down to let Chinese bootleggers destroy that market. Even though the fine is mostly about protecting the big brands like Prada and Gucci, small manufacturers benefit too because if you can’t get a fake Gucci you’re totally happy with a real leather no-name bag or wallet or coat from one of them.

My bag just broke and I started using the one I bought in Florence yesterday. Wow. It’s awesome and so beautiful. Thank you, Italian government, for protecting the leather industry!

There wasn’t much time, but there was no way I was going to miss Santa Croce. I stood before the tombs of Galileo and Leonardo DaVinci and Dante. I wish there had been more time. Contemplation of greatness can’t be done in a 20 minute dash.

There are many holes in the wall serving decadent-looking sandwiches and little glasses of wine. Two patrons can stand at the counter at once; we breezed pass many pairs like this, always in the shade.

We had no time to eat ourselves, or even to pause for a picture. How opposite we were than the diners, deciding spontaneously to feast on the street because there was nothing else they needed to do. Their only aim was enjoy each other and some food and wine for a moment before ambling on in their beautiful, beautiful city.

PISA

The leaning tower is a fabulous stage prop.

We had pizza in Pisa and life was absolutely grand. It was good to relax, to sit back after a full day of running around to enjoy some deliciousness that could really make us feel like we had arrived.

on Barcelona, the first time

first meal was paella! nom nom nom

A little twist in biases of Spanish as a blue collar language. To hear white people speaking snobby Spanish made Amanda and I raise our eyebrows at each other and say, “Ahhh, but of course.” And they were speaking it right to us, without fail, because we could easily be one of them.

The crowded bus was full of smiling, quiet people. They were mostly beautiful, even those with paunchy faces sloping to pop in exaggerated chins and noses. 

A pale, skinny girl in a dirty white dress was hanging off her father like swinging from a lamppost in the rain. Her dark and taciturn companion didn’t touch her own father at all.

The old women don’t look innocent here. They look like repositories of wisdom and scandal, beyond the possibility of shock or surprise. 

The “x” in Catalan is a lock to which I desperately want to key. 

Everything is lovely, lovely lovely lovely in every direction. Thrillingly gorgeous buildings with old plaster facades and curling wrought-iron balconies, the fantastic architectural genius of Gaudi, the way light moves across the rooftops.

I want to do more than take a picture, I want more than beauty. How can I crawl inside of this, this feeling of peace and chill and joy and vibrating excitement at once, to be alive? To see these things? To be with my beloved family at the same time?

Why are there no scrambled eggs here? All we wanted were egg sandwiches!

Why does it take a half hour of charades and pictionary to STILL only end up with four well-done sunnyside up eggs and some bread soaked in vinegar and salad dressing? 

#10/30 "Now, Everyone Knows Your Name"

Unsure of what it was,

we scratched it with our finger nails.

Tasted it. It melted at the edges

and multiplied under a microscope:

a fractal sponge scooped

out of strawberry ice cream.

Emptier and emptier it expanded,

wide caverns of paper milk

spun into suggestion’s opposites.

We shrank to slide inside,

to slick our skins on sugar membranes

and dig toes into the ebb tide

of melted cream, falling away.

We shivered to the pulse that marked

each hollow exponent’s explosion.

I ate my heart and wondered

if you’d wish on us enormity,

to fill the grottos

with opposition for entertainment.

I’d never been so happy

as when I was small and sugar

-slicked beside you

in all that waxing emptiness.

I ached to stay,

our toes sole landmarks

in a wide, delicious country.

But you were a lush, indelicate girl.

You dairy-stank and swelled, fast,

merciless as a guillotine; you

leaked from fractal windows.

I clung to you; first a child,

then a tick or trace of pollen.

I was a single cell before

your skin opened

permeable and I

slipped into you.

Imagine my surprise

to find your cell walls

scrumptious, studded with

frozen fruit, expanding

ever lonelier in runny

fractal sponges

of strawberry ice cream.

#8/30 "What do you say?"

We could be sun-drenched emperors

eating the month on fine china

in certain swank hotels,

where the waitresses make

more than professors

for their deference

and shiny, white teeth.

Shall we exile ourselves?

#6/30 "Geumgang"

Air breathes easy off the gold river.

Dusted mountains hulk indifferent to us

fools in the valley below, killing

time at a rest stop on stilts

bestride a riverbank.

Cheerful enough,

an ajumma hums a wordless tune.

Her plastic tent and lawn chairs,

red-bitten-pink, sport Coke ads and

that dignity acquired in bald thrift.

She slaps the tent flap open,

swats hair (dyed black and permed tight

in the patriotic style of women her age)

from her forehead with a hand

like a brown spade.

Curious and cityslick,

biology animates me like a child.

I kneel before her tank of uninteresting fish

whispering “hello, pretty,”

to their gapemouthed, stupid faces.

Humming still, our proprietress gathers

baskets and a net. A small, sharp knife

flashes in her spade. It gleams an ode

to brute utility. She corners her catch:

three fat fluorescent Yellows

and a slippery, darting Black.

She lays the first electric Yellow

on a wooden plank.

Her indelicate but practiced spade

slices two rough cuts and takes

a wide triangle from the fish’s belly.

Guileless, I stand transfixed

before the pastoral carnage.

The fish flaps. Digging, she scrapes

wet organs from the gaping wound. Again,

and again; the disembowelment

of Yellows is inexact; half

a ruptured heart left in one,

much billowing white intestine in another.

Black puts up a fight.

In a gesture nearly sweet, the ajumma

slaps it weakly on the head

with the handle of the knife.

No luck. Un-stunned, it’s likewise gutted

and thrown into the basket

From a hose at her feet,

she rinses the blade

before her hands.

Passed under water,

the eviscerated fish

heave for a last wet breath.

I wonder at this organless lost cause.

She tips the basket into a metal pan and

fills it with scalding broth.

One fat Yellow squirms in vivid agony.

She clucks at it once as if to say,

“Be still now, empty thing.

Die as you are meant to.”

When the pan quiets,

she takes up her song again.

여기오! part 1

녹차떡

"nok cha dduk"

("nok cha" = green tea. "dduk" = the kind of donut it is. Thus, this is a green tea donut-ish deliciousness filled with melty sugary yum.)

전주 반찬

"Jeonju banchan"

(banchan = side dishes. Jeonju = the city where my host family lives, totally famous for food. This is a quarter of the number of plates there were at a meal for four adults. They cleared the table three times before this.)

김밥

"kim bap"

("kim" = salty, dried seaweed. "bap" = rice. There's some other stuff in there too, veggies and crab meat and egg, etc. The yellow stuff on the side is 단무지 ["danmooji," or pickled radish.] This is the best kimbap I ever had, in a street booth across the street from the Nanta theater.)

This post is called "yo-gi-o!" ~ the word you are completely allowed to yell in a restaurant to get a waiter's attention. At the top of your lungs, if the place is crowded. For all things; water, adding more food to your order, to ask for the check.... I'm just getting the hang of this, it seems completely rude by American standards but hey, when in Rome.

Food culture is huge everywhere, right, but it seems particularly important in Korea, and it's one of the things I like the best about this place. Coming home, the first thing I miss is the food and upon arrival, the first thing I always want to do is eat.

I. Hasukjip eats.

So... my rent is about $400 a month and I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner included. The food is made fresh every meal,  by a really sweet ajumma who's worried I'm going to starve if I don't eat two helpings of everything. Possibly she thinks foreigners need to eat more than Koreans because I don't hear her pushing my housemates the way she pushes me, but either way she's very concerned about my nutrition, and it's nice.

The food's a little bit monotonous, but always good - rice, kim, kimchee, a rotating assortment of veggie side dishes, some kind of soup (usually sundubu jjigae, or tofu stew with kimchee and beef. a big fave.) Eggs in the morning, some kind of entree like curry rice or fried something or other to go with dinner. 

For the most part, it's overwhelmingly nutritious and wholesome, besides the fried stuff. I've already lost about five pounds, just from eating habit changes. I like eating in the house because a) it's essentially free and b) I feel like I can actually eat a ton of food, be full, and not feel bad about it.

This is really important to me, because I've struggled with eating issues and disordered eating thought for a long time. To feel full and not guilty is so refreshing and different than the way I usually feel at home. I'll say more about this later.

II. Street food.

Street food is pretty much the greatest thing ever. Forget your shitty NY hotdogs that cost two dollars and taste like poop, forget the stale ass pretzels that never have enough salt. Korean street food is ubiquitous, mad delicious, and super cheep. 

Mostly I am obsessed with 떡볶이. ("ddukboki" - big fat rice noodles with a spicy red sauce, accompanied sometimes by fish cakeish things soaking in broth, or pig intestine, or some other weird grey meat I ate once, and have no interest in ever tasting again. Though, covered in ddukboki sauce, pretty much anything is a lot more delicious than it was before.)

If I can make up an excuse to have ddukboki for dinner, I do. I've been better about it this time because the hasuk food is so good, but over the summer I became a regular at a few tents by the 24 hour coffee shop I lived in.

III. Sweets, etc.

I have a love-hate relationship with this category. Love because it's my favorite, hate because it undoes all the healthy stuff I was talking about before. There are an incredibly diverse number of options here for mad delicious sweets that I really, really like. At home, I enjoy chocolate, but I don't like... fantasize about buying candy bars. I definitely zone out it class thinking about sweet breads, or dduk, or waffles. Another sneaky thing about this is that it overlaps with street food - meaning its everywhere, in front of me as I walk down the street, and so cheep its practically being given away.

밭, or "pat" is a Korean specialty that I often get down with. It's going to sound weird, but pat is sweet red bean paste, used for loads of delicious things like patbingsoo (icrecream, fruit, cornflakes, and pat...zomg summer means patbingsoo in my mind.) pastries, and breads. Apparently it's an acquired taste (I have a western friend who hates the stuff) but I think it's the bomb. Anything with pat in it I'm probably going to buy, and eat.

There are a million delicious snacks too, available at the jillion convenience stores studding every street for less than a dollar each. choco-nut pretzel sticks, tiny cookies, chocopie!, snack bars, little mushroom shaped crackers dipped in chocolate... I don't even know, tons of stuff. I'm more into the hot sweets from the street vendors, but yeah. I can get down with these too.

 IV. Restaurants

Eating out is super easy here, and everyone seems to do it quite often. If Seoul is an expensive city, the one thing that's cheep is the food. I'm going to write about restaurants more in part 2, but I just want to talk about 고기집's for a second. 

A gogijip is a meat restaurant. There is a grill set in the middle of the table. You order a type of meat and a number of servings, and the waiter brings a plate full of raw meat the the table, along with a bunch of random banchan, as well as lettuce, sesame oil and salt, a red paste called gochujang, big chunks of garlic, and some onions soaking in marinade, etc.  

He lights the grill, and then (depending on the place) you're on your own. One person (I'm not sure who it's supposed to be age- or gender-wise, culturally, but every group of friends seems to have it's own grill master/mistress who really likes to be the one who tends the meat.) You flip it over until its done, and then, using tongs, you hold the strip of grilled meat up and cut it into manageable squares that can be picked up using chopsticks.

Tyler, demonstrating tong-technique over the summer ㅋㅋㅋ

Now it's time to make lettuce packets. Put a leaf of lettuce in one hand, then using the chopsticks make a little pile on the lettuce of meat (possibly dipped in the sesame salt, I don't get down like that but everyone else seems to) gochujang, garlic, etc... fold up the pile using the lettuce as a little envelope and pop that in your mouth, whole. 

Chew for a long time. Repeat. Yes. This is how meat was meant to be eaten. I don't even like meat but I love this. More than the food I like the process, I like the procedure and the friendship and the sharing out of banchan dishes and not caring about double dipping or anything of the short.

I'll get more into this, and my feelings in general about eating culture in Korea, in part 2.

V. Gross things.

번데기

"beondegi"

("beondegi" - boiled silkworm larvae. Never eat this. Not that you were thinking about it... I'm just saying. Grossest thing I've eaten in Korea.)

개

"kae"

("kae" - dog. Don't eat it, mannnn. I haven't (yet?!) and I would really like to try not to. It's not very popular at all so it's not like it's hard to avoid... I don't know I don't know. Dog?! I can eat raw, wriggling squid, still sort of alive... but I can't get down like that.)