American Breakdown

I think I had my first food craving breakdown yesterday. For most of the last... how long has it been now, six weeks?... I've been doing pretty well eating mostly Korean meals at home and around town. I've even acquired a taste for eating lettuce rice wraps, called 쌈, for dinner. But something got to me yesterday. Maybe it's the oppressive heat and humidity. I'd been bugging Nissa to go with me to the local Costco so we could see what kind of foods they had to offer. I'd never been to a Costco, which is in my mind, right up there with Wal-Mart and McDonald's on my list of full-on, American-blooded ventures into the insatiable hunger of man, as well as the vastness of his pocketbook. In other words, it was my duty to visit one.

We wandered around an area of Seoul just south of the Han River for about an hour, trying to track down this elusive Korean Costco. After asking a sweaty man for directions and consulting a large map (on which Nissa spotted the Hangul letters that spelled out "Cos-tuh-co") we found the red, blue and beige warehouse. It was swimming with people, cars parked literally around the block. We walked around to the front and entered the building through the sliding glass doors with what seemed like a swarm of Koreans. The inside was complete madness. This was actually a two-story Costco, with household-type goods on the first floor and groceries in the basement. We weaved through the crowd of families and shopping carts, watching the hordes collecting mega-sized boxes of cookies, clamoring for free samples of sausage and candy, and digging through piles of marked-down clothing.

It was all a bit too much to handle.

Before this visit, I had imagined Costco to be a kind of American grocery utopia. Piles of fresh ground beef, aisle upon aisle of cereal and condiments, wide-open lanes. Instead we found a shopping zoo. We got back on the subway to head home, but I still had a hankering for a hamburger -- a good old-fashioned, 1/3 pound patty with lettuce, tomato, and onions on a fluffy, yellow roll, slathered in ketchup, served alongside a batch of hot, greasy french fries. Maybe even with a miniature American flag stuck on top with a toothpick. So we headed to Itaewon, a.k.a. the foreigners area of Seoul. I'd never been there before either.

One transfer and seven stops later, we exited the subway and came across a Canadian bar. It was rustic lodge-themed on the inside, with Gwen Stefani playing on the stereo and a neon marker board with things like "Wii night" scrawled on it. My hopes lifted. We ordered a couple burgers and waited... Ten minutes later, we were greeted by a pair of thin and flat patties, each served on a hard ciabatta roll with a too-ripe tomato, a slice of onion, and Korean-tasting ketchup, mustard, and mayo squirted on the bottom bun. To top it all off, chips. Not fries. I grudgingly ate the bastard while vowing to make my own hamburgers from now on. Then I ate Nissa's last chip.