inside a narrow gukbap counter-shop in Choryang, three steel ladles hanging above a gas range, tiled walls sweating condensation, fluorescent strip light overhead, the counter a laminate shelf barely wide enough for two bowls — standing at the wall counter, spoon lowered into broth, watching the oil-skin on the surface shift — the ladle has just struck the basin behind her
The gukbap was ready before I found a stool.
All of them taken — men in padded vests and work clothes, no one looking up — so I stood at the narrow counter along the wall and the woman set the bowl in front of me without comment. White broth, pork, a skin of oil moving slowly on the surface. Rice already half-dissolved at the bottom. I ate standing. The spoon was the heavy kind, the bowl very hot through the rim.
Bowl of Busan dwaeji gukbap — white pork-bone broth, sliced pork, skin of oil moving on the surface, rice dissolving at the bottom
The smell was sesame oil and diesel and I had smelled exactly this on the first morning, coming up the hill with the bag on my back, not knowing yet what any of it would become. Seven days, and here it still was. Someone behind the counter dropped a ladle into a steel basin and the sound rang out and nobody moved.
I stood in the same clothes I'd slept in. The fabric sat loose at my shoulders. My feet were already warm in the shoes before I'd finished eating.
Outside the air was overcast-warm — flat September light, even across everything. The city looked like itself. Not better. Not worse. The colour of the crosswalk paint, the particular mud-beige of the lower-floor shutters, the alley between the two buildings I'd walked past every day without turning into.
at the mouth of a dead-end alley between two mid-century concrete buildings in Choryang, ground stained with oil runoff and old rain, a corrugated metal gate at the far end, a single compact car parked nose-in against the back wall — having just stopped at the alley's end — the cat is on the bonnet of the car watching her; she has not moved yet, deciding nothing
I turned into it today. It ended in someone's parking space and a cat.
I put the jacket on at the corner where the port smell gives out and the taxi lane begins. After that it was just walking to the station, bag on, the hill doing what hills do when you're going down.
on a Choryang street corner where the port-smell gives out — a taxi lane beginning on the right, a low concrete wall on the left, a kitchen exhaust fan mounted above a shuttered shutter-door at mud-beige height, its grille rusted at the corners — one arm threaded into the jacket sleeve, the other mid-air — she has stopped because the sesame smell has come back from the exhaust fan above the shutter
The sesame came back once more near the bottom. Someone's exhaust fan, a kitchen already working.
Busan Station concourse facade and its Korean-script signage — 부산역 — framed at the end of the descending street, the hill flattening into the taxi lane
At the station I didn't change. The train came. Then I was somewhere else.
What she wore
day7-scene1
I ate standing up in the same clothes I'd sleep in, and I didn't feel underdressed — I felt exactly right.
day7-scene2
I put the jacket on at the corner where the port smell gives out and the taxi lane begins — it felt like a punctuation mark.
day7-scene3
I didn't change before the airport — it felt dishonest to Choryang to show up somewhere else looking different.