Christmas

Christmas Day was one of low expectation met. Most of my friends had either escaped Tongyeong for the break or otherwise opted for the closest of possible substitutes for the traditional familial wholesomeness expected of the holiday, a quiet day spent alone with the significant other. And so with very little to do, I decided to do just that, with the added satisfaction of doing it on a Friday.

But because it seemed too pitiful even for me to eat nothing but fried rice and bowl after lonely bowl of cereal for my Christmas dinner, I decided to venture out with the onset of night and find what I had only learned the night before is the quintessential Tongyeong cheap eat. Called Chungmu kimbap (Chungmu being the original name for the town centered around the harbor before all of the surrounding villages were incorporated into the City of Tongyeong a few decades ago), like chowder in Boston, it seems to be the obligatory nosh for tourists, since almost every restaurant in Culture plaza, the street that horseshoes the harbor, claim to offer Tongyeong's authentic chungmu kimbap experience. After nearly forty-five minutes of unnecessary and increasingly numb hand-wringing (low blood sugar making it that much more difficult for me to walk into a restaurant, almost entirely unable to speak the language and conspicuously foreign), I finally decided upon the most popular place by headcount.

The meal is an exercise in palatal purity. On the one hand there is the kimbap portion. While the term "kimbap" itself is simply the compound of the Korean words for seaweed (kim) and rice (bap), it is usually implied that other more flavorful ingredients will be included--egg, spinach, radish, maybe fish. Chungmu kimbap on the other hand offers a much more literal interpretation. Approaching the counter with a few bills outstretched and an embarrassed smile, eight such rolls, "kim" and "bap" and nothing else, where put on one side of my plate. On the other side, the chili-infused yang to the kimbap's flavorless ying and scooped from two trays behind the counter, chopped octopus and radish were placed clearly separated from the rice rolls. With a glass of water, I took my meal back to my table and began watching the other customers, looking for hints as to whether there was a wrong way to go about eating it.

I don't think that there is. There is nothing spectacular about chungmu kimbap except that it is spectacularly simple. Two flavors impress themselves upon the tongue to exclusion of all others: the rice and laver are plain, without salt, while the radish and squid have only the searing spice of red chillies to offer. And while rice and chili are certainly not unwelcome flavors to me, it is the texture that makes chungmu kimbap worth those four-thousand won. The slight chewiness of the octopus is complimented by the crunch of the radish and then entirely offset by the sticky and mercifully spice-blotting kimbap. Overall, I can't say that I was bowled over by Tongyeong's fast-food specialty, but as a at that time still to be paid teacher's cheap substitute for a Christmas Turkey (which I don't like that much anyway), or if I'm with my mother, take-out Chinese, I left the restaurant happy enough.

Taking the bus back to my apartment to watch a movie on my computer in bed, I preempted any feelings of disappointment I might have with the reminder that Christmas doesn't really start back home where Christmas might actually count for something until the next day. And anyway, warranted by the time-change or not, it was the next night that my friend David would be arriving by bus. As we had it planned, he would be staying on my floor until Wednesday morning when we would take the bus to Seoul, where we would be spending the New Years. In other words, Christmas could wait until the 26th.