Comfort Food

Day three of the flu, it was 29 degrees outside and the only thing I had left to eat was cereal.

I went over my options: Korean takeout, Korean delivery, the Korean grocery store.

All I wanted was chicken noodle soup.

I thought back to Saturday morning when I tried to make oatmeal pancakes for the roommates… I had talked about my “famous” pancakes for more than a month, and Chris, Kyle and Adam were excited for a taste from home.

I ended up making the pancakes, but not the pancakes that had me drooling down the front of my PJ’s. I was missing the buttermilk, the whole-wheat pastry flour, the baking soda, the long-cooking oats and the maple syrup.

Breakfast ended up tasting like something out of a Bisquick box, topped with the generic equivalent of Aunt Jemima sugar water. The boys loved it.

But I wasn’t interested in a Campbell’s condensed soup version of my mother’s beloved chicken noodle. Nor was I interested in starring in another episode of Cooking American Food in Seoul, 101.

So, I gave in. I ordered takeout from the gimbap shop down the road.

And while there were no noodles, carrots or celery in the duk juk the owners made for me, the warm rice porridge ended up being all the comfort I needed.

Does this Country make me Look Fat?

“You are very beautiful, Jennifer teacher, but you are fat.”

I wanted to end class then and there. I wanted to run home, bury my face in my pillow and cry. But the tears wouldn’t wait. I dropped my scissors, put down the construction paper turkey and cried.

I suddenly missed America—the land where a size six was normal—a place where every retail store sold clothes and shoes to fit my body. But alas, I live in Korea, where normal is a size 0 and a 6 is, well, apparently fat.

Last weekend I finally visited a jjimjilbang, or a public bathhouse. For two months I had heard nothing but amazing things about these hot spots—how the large baths contained healing ingredients like ginseng, green tea and clay, how some of the saunas reached up to 160 degrees. One of my Korean friends even told me about a special kind of egg you could only get at one of these places.

I couldn’t wait to rip off my clothes and relax.

But it’s hard to relax when hundreds of chopstick-thin women are eyeballing your naked body—watching your thighs rub together with every step.

It was humiliating.

There was, however, a bright spot…like a moth to a flame, a heavy-set American woman swam up to me as I was cowering in the corner of the carbonic acid pool. “I hated my first jjimjilbang experience,” she said. “But now I can’t get enough. Trust me, you’ll get over the whole being naked thing and learn to love it.”

She shot me a reassuring smile and walked toward the green tea hot tub.

Her butt jiggled the whole way.