Even the Sea Grows Stale
And so went a few more days in Sokcho.
Children tire of things quickly. A toy they played with happily only yesterday can suddenly lose all its appeal, or their interest can jump without warning to some shiny new thing that happens to catch their eye. Of course, some kids stick to one toy with stubborn devotion. But even the most single-minded child will get sick of the ocean if you dump them in it day after day. That much is only natural.
Yes. That was Siyeon and me right now.
“I’m bored….”
“Same.”
I agreed with Siyeon’s complaint and sprawled out on the villa’s cool floor, counting down the days until we could go home. Honestly, the ocean had lost its charm around day four. Splashing around was fun for a day or two, but with only one kid her age to play with, no amount of enthusiasm could stretch a single stretch of water into two full weeks of entertainment.
So our second hope turned to food. Everything we’d eaten so far in Sokcho had been instant meals from the fridge and fried chicken. Coming all the way out here just to eat the same chicken and convenience food you could get anywhere? That felt like a waste, so we decided to go check out the market.
Official mission: expand Siyeon’s culinary horizons. We couldn’t live on delivery forever, and with the whole world of food out there, rotating endlessly through chicken, pizza, jjajangmyeon, and burgers just wouldn’t cut it. If we could introduce her to raw fish on this trip, it might even open the door to ordering sushi at home later….
I piled on excuse after excuse in my head, rationalizing the whole outing. The truth was simpler. I just wanted something good to eat.
And if it happens to solve Siyeon’s meals at the same time, even better….
We even took a taxi to one of Sokcho’s markets. After serving my military term in some godforsaken corner of Gangwon Province, I’d never once bothered to visit Sokcho’s market for myself. True to a market that swallowed every soldier’s desperate wish to be stationed near home, spinach-green uniforms dotted the crowd here and there. Seeing them out in the middle of a weekday afternoon, it didn’t look like an overnight pass or a late-day weekday leave. Nobody heading out on vacation would still be stuck in Gangwon at this hour….
Best-case scenario, last day of leave before reporting back?
That was the only option left. I clicked my tongue and shook my head, feeling a pity I had no right to feel for a situation that no longer applied to me. Siyeon’s gaze followed mine; her small finger pointed at the soldier I’d just been watching.
“Oh! A soldier uncle!”
So he looks like an uncle to her too.
The moment a man stops being called “uncle” ends, unless he’s exceptionally handsome, right around high school. The second he steps out of a school uniform’s protective frame, even a pure-hearted child’s honest eyes ruthlessly slap the “uncle” label on him. Then again, people in the same unit called each other uncle all the time, so whatever.
Once the soldier passed, the market’s endless food filled our view again. Squid sundae, mulhoe, fried chicken—the things those two civil servants had mentioned. And true to a Gangwon coastal city, shrimp, crab, and every kind of seafood. Then the market staples you find anywhere: glutinous rice doughnuts, twisted doughnuts. Beyond that, potato pancakes and steamed bread for reasons I understood, and… honeycomb ice cream?
Potato pancakes and steamed bread I could accept. But honeycomb ice cream? I had no idea why that was here.
“See anything you want?”
“Those shrimp!”
“Where? Ah, over there.”
Siyeon’s pick was safely ordinary: fried shrimp. The puffed-up batter alone was big enough to cover about two-thirds of her thin little forearm. Ten of those shrimp for ten thousand won. The market’s merciless refusal to sell them individually left me speechless, so instead of a pure shrimp binge I mixed in something called fried red snow crab—five of each.
Bodies like ours weren’t built for walking and eating at the same time, so we went inside and sat down. Siyeon perched on a backless plastic chair and kicked her legs while we waited. Before long, a plastic colander-like basket arrived lined with paper and loaded with fries. White steam still rising like they’d just leapt from the oil, batter gleaming with a glossy sheen, and that unmistakable fried aroma that wakes up the appetite.
“Enjoy—”
“Okay!”
Fried shrimp I knew. This red snow crab fry, though—I picked one up with chopsticks under a cloud of suspicion. It was fried into a stick shape, so I’d half expected them to just glue a crab shell on the end of some imitation crab stick and call it red snow crab….
Ohhh…?
The bony little core of a real crab leg caught between my teeth and melted that doubt away. How to describe the taste…? Extremely fancy imitation crab. A cheap take, sure, but it was still delicious.
Siyeon, who preferred shrimp, took three shrimp and two crab. I took three crab and two shrimp. After packing that slightly excessive snack into our stomachs, we wandered the market again, eyes roaming everywhere.
“Fishies!”
Siyeon was just as excited by the unfamiliar sights; she pointed at the seafood tanks outside a raw-fish restaurant.
“Oh, a striped beakfish.”
Even if you don’t know fish, you know that one. Prison-uniform stripes of black and white. More famous from those internet photos of people asking, “You’re making fish cutlets out of that precious striped beakfish?” than from actual dinner tables. With Siyeon’s curiosity in tow, we stopped in front of the tanks for a moment.
“What’s that?”
“Sea pineapple.”
“And that?”
“Flounder. Want to try some?”
I named whatever I could remember as her finger moved from tank to tank, answering her questions one by one. Flounder is about the gentlest entry point for raw-fish beginners, so I put the question to her directly. When I asked if she wanted to eat flounder, her eyes turned into a You’re going to eat that? stare, and she yanked her pointing finger back.
Still looking at fish as sightseeing, not food. If she saw thick-sliced flounder dipped in vinegar-chili sauce or soy sauce, that “just for looking” view wouldn’t last. A shame—looked like sushi at home was off the table for a while yet.
If I hadn’t already fed her fried food and had dragged her into a raw-fish place promising something delicious, would the result have been different? In the end I failed to pioneer raw eating for her. We settled for the safe choices—squid sundae and Abai sundae—plus a slice of potato pancake sold by the piece, and only after we were full did I ask again.
“Anything else you want?”
“Ice cream.”
“That one?”
“Mhm.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I cursed silently at tourist-trap pricing that treated a conscience like garbage to throw away. Just take plain vanilla ice cream, slap the shell of “pure ice cream” on it, and run this scam? Truly impressive.
Anyway, the honeycomb something-or-other that had once set the internet on fire. We sampled a trend that had long since gone cold, and savored a sweetness so intense it made our tongues go numb. Vanilla ice cream was already plenty sweet. Drown it in syrupy honey, then drop a full chunk of honeycomb still loaded with honey on top… and there you had it: a six-thousand-won one-way ticket to the ER for diabetics that even tanghulu would wave off in terror.
Ice cream for two: twelve thousand won total. The price of half a chicken vaporized on dessert alone left me speechless, but Siyeon’s delighted face and a body that still accepted sugar without protest decided it. To hell with health—time to fully enjoy this young flesh.
Walking out of the market, scooping ice cream from a plastic coffee cup with a plastic spoon, a sharp, aggressive, artificial sweetness wrapped around my mouth.
Sweet.
“Mari, Mari! Is this real honeycomb?”
Maybe she thought it was too pretty to eat. Siyeon asked before she’d even taken her first spoonful. I nodded and added an explanation so her excitement wouldn’t turn into a mistake.
“Yeah. Beehive. You suck the honey out of the comb and spit the rest out, okay? Don’t swallow it.”
I said that after we left the market and sat on a nearby bench. Honey from the comb was fine, but the comb itself was just beeswax. Not that you absolutely couldn’t eat it—but there wasn’t much point in trying, either.
After days of hunting down every tourist spot and every bite of food Sokcho had to offer, on one easy afternoon with no monsters and full stomachs, an unfamiliar knock sounded at the villa door. I got up from the sofa. Siyeon, mid-summer homework at the desk, lifted her head sharply, wondering what the noise was.
“Who is it?”
I’d poked at everything enough by now to know the villa intercom. Outside the door stood two women: a short black bob that looked about middle-school age, and a woman with long hair….
This person….
I thought I’d seen her somewhere. It was Venus. I hurried to the villa door with my short little strides and opened it for them.
“Welcome.”
“Hi~”
I opened the door and greeted them first; what came back was a warmer, livelier welcome from Venus than I’d expected. Hard to believe this was the same person who had dropped the friendly mood of that previous meeting straight into hell.
In contrast to her, the girl beside her hesitated, carefully setting foot into the villa.
“Ah… h-hello.”
Thick-rimmed glasses, classic overachiever middle-schooler type.