lunch, and the hot water is officially back

My ex-boss and ex-coworker left an hour ago. We ate lunch at the charcoal-galbi place in my building's lobby (surprisingly good, and my first time ever going there after all of these years of living in this building), then adjourned to my place to enjoy rum cake and keto-ish cookies. My boss loved the rum cake, which he polished off pretty fast, but my Korean coworker, true to his nature, couldn't take the rummy taste, so he left most of the cake on his plate (I think the cake's sugariness may have played a role as well; he doesn't have a sweet tooth). The boss took most of the rest of the rum cake home with him, and I've got enough for two more pieces for myself. My Korean coworker refused my offer of cookies to make up for his disliking the rum cake, so he departed on a bit of a down note. Still nothing definite from the boss re: his startup. He tells us not to give up, but it all sounds kind of hollow, and he has nothing definite to tell us about timelines or anything else. If anything, he's gotten a part-time job doing English-fluency interviews for international jobs. I've given up hope about the startup and am motoring ahead on my own as I figure my future out. Meanwhile, for your delectation, here are two cross-section shots of the unrepentantly sugary rum cake:

You can see how much better and more evenly the almonds coated the cake's exterior. Yay, butter!

You can also see where the rum soaked into the crumb.

Using butter in the cake pan improved the cake's flavor a thousand percent. I will never make the mistake of using soybean oil to coat the cake pan ever again. Meanwhile, the boss ate a single keto-ish cookie but made no comment about it.

For me, the highlight of the day might have been lunch at the 숫불갈비집/sutbul-galbijip/charcoal-pork galbi (ribs) house. Very good smoked flavor, a decent spread of 반찬/banchan (side dishes), and reasonable prices. As usual, I left feeling that I hadn't eaten enough, but that's just because I'm a big eater. And the restaurant, which was recently renovated, produced that weird effect of seeming much bigger on the inside than you'd think from seeing the outside. Kind of cool.

To add joy upon joy, yes—hot water has been restored two days earlier than scheduled. My kitchen and bathroom sinks both run at full force when I turn on the hot water. A bit after 4 p.m. today, there was another announcement about how the hot-water pipes had been fixed, but 4 p.m. was still too early to catch all the residents coming home from work. I suspect there'll be one or two more announcements this evening.

At present, I am all lunched and sugared up, so I won't be walking tonight, but since we have a string of October holidays running from later this week (Gaecheon-jeol/National Founding Day), through most of next week (추석/Chuseok goes from Sunday through Wednesday) and even after Chuseok later next week (Hangeullal/Hangeul Day on Thursday—Korea celebrates the invention of its alphabet), I'm going to try doing a multi-day practice walk to see whether I really should cancel the upcoming long walk. I know it's not logical, but considering my delicate health, I'd rather stick to paths I know instead of daring unfamiliar paths, so my route will be four days along the 120K path from Incheon to Yangpyeong—essentially, the first segments, for walkers, of the Four Rivers trail.

More on all of this later.