Tuesday afternoon/evening

Spring has sprung. While I waited for a taxi to ferry me over to the Seoul National University neighborhood, I took a few pics of the cherry blossoms on my street:

I met my buddy Charles and his wife for burgers at a place called Daily Fix. My smash-style double burger was good. Charles got some sort of truffle burger with thick-cut steakhouse fries; I got regular fries, and the Missus shared Charles's fries and drink. I had a Coke all to myself. It was a good meal. We talked about Project Hail Mary. 

burger and fries

burger, side view

fries (which had a little onion dust on them)

Charles's steakhouse fries

The Missus left us to keep working on a bespoke couch the couple had purchased. Charles and I headed elsewhere for dessert. There was a quiet, little place along Shyarosu-gil, a system of back streets lined with shops and eateries not far from SNU campus. We settled in; Charles ordered a minuscule tart and a fruit-themed tea: I got a frothy hot chocolate that was surprisingly excellent and a slice of Basque cheesecake, which was good but which also tasted a wee bit of the refrigerator it had been sitting in—which can be a problem when you sell desserts by the slice (although, frankly, I didn't see how the cheesecake was being stored).

the "ba-chi-ke," Korean abbreviation for Basque cheesecake

Charles is the one who taught me ba-chi-ke.

Along with the East Asian tendency to take Western words and chop off phonemes and syllables to "Koreanize" or "Sinify" or "Japanify" them (e.g., rimokon/리모콘 for "remote control"), Koreans also tend to run words through something like a polysynthesis filter, reducing them to abbreviated forms by retaining only key syllables, thus making the words easier to remember and handle. Think of meokbang, for example, which I think comes from meongneun/먹는 (eating) and bangsong/방송 (broadcast). Take the meok/먹 from meongneun/먹는 and the bang/방 from bangsong/방송, and voilà: meokbang/먹방 (often badly romanized* as mukbang in the West).

I ended up liking the hot chocolate a lot more.

It was good to sit down with Charles, whom I see only a few times per year. All told, today's meet-up went for about two-and-a-half hours. So my "eating day" changed from Wednesday to Tuesday, which means I get to fast for three days until the weekend! Yay!

__________

*"Badly romanized" because of that damn u. Damn you, u! If a girl is named Sunhee, the u is an American short u (i.e., it's an "uh"), rhyming with the English word sun. But in the famous admiral's name Yi Sun-shin, the u is an "ooh" sound, as in food. This inherent vagueness makes it hard for an anglophone Westerner to know how to pronounce mukbang: is it "mawk-bahng"/"muhk-bahng," or is it "moohk-bahng"? The proper romanization for the Korean vowel "ㅓ" is eo, which is something like the eo in George (says my old boss).