meat festival

The boss was inspired to take a walk over to the SETEC complex again since there was a "meat festival" going on. The complex, a convention/exhibition space that's always booked with events, is only a long block or so away from where we work, so we ate our boeuf bourguignon and walked over together in the oppressive summer heat (it's 92°F/33°C out today), with yours truly warning the boss and coworker that I'd have to stop a few minutes into the walk, rest a bit, then keep on going (since that seems to be the pattern from now until I kick off). Here are two photos of the most impressive booth I saw while at SETEC:

The booth advertises traditional Korean pork and beef.

This booth wasn't fucking around. They had tomahawk steaks, T-bones, and other cuts familiar to Westerners. This booth also dwarfed most of the other booths in the exhibition, and they were handing out free goodie bags to anyone who swooped by. Aggressive marketing. Off to the side, they had packages of some of the biggest slices of shabu beef that I've ever seen; the shabu is normally a ribeye cut, and American ribeye, while nice, often has a thick line of fat running through it (which is one reason why I'm never that impressed with overly fatty steaks: the thick intramuscular fat isn't pleasant to eat, and it seems like a waste of money since you're paying for something that's inedible as is*). The shabu cut that I saw, though, was solid muscle, with only a bit of fat around the edges. Very impressive.

Still winded even after resting outside, I sat down and chilled inside the exhibition space as well; the boss and coworker walked around. They later told me they'd encountered a Frenchman who was there helping to sell heavy-duty mesh gloves and aprons (for barbecue pitmasters, I presume). The boss told he'd tried to joke in English with the Frenchman, saying he needed some chain mail for a jousting tournament. The joke fell flat: the Frenchman spoke English well, but medieval terms taxed the limits of his vocabulary.

I also couldn't help noting that there were a lot of cute women parading around. One fine specimen floated in front of me, ignoring me completely as she used her phone to take pics of her surroundings. Evolutionary psychology suggests that men and women are both attracted to signs of reproductive vigor, which explains why the lady spared me nary a glance, weak and flaccid and sweaty as I was. I, meanwhile, took in her decidedly unusual-for-a-Korean curves.

Soon enough, it was time to go back to the office. The boss and coworker had both bought some small items to take home. Ironically, these were non-meat items: noodles for the boss and dried kelp for my coworker. As we walked out, the boss remarked that he never liked to pay an entry fee (W5,000/person in our case), then leave with nothing.

It was an interesting diversion from what would otherwise have been a routine day.

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*I say "as is" because, when it's ground up as a component of ground beef, that's a different story. For ground beef, the fattier, the better.