Day: September 2, 2019

Update: It turns out Ahorita doesn’t open up on Mondays at all.

Bummer.

At present, I am sitting in one of the 10,000 MegaCoffees in Gwangju, which is itself one of only about 100,000 coffee shops in the city, looking out a dingy back alley, with a solid walk in the rain and an hour-long bus ride between me and home. Why am I here, you ask? Because there’s a Mexican restaurant down the street, it’s currently closed, and I want a burrito, dammit.

Let’s back up.

One of the hardest parts of coming to Korea, I always knew, would be giving up certain staples of food that I have grown to love over the years. Not to say Korean food is bad – far from it! – but there’s only so much squid and crab soup a man can stomach before he craves a thick, juicy cheeseburger. Or, in my case, a burrito.

To my mind, burritos and their cousins, including tacos and quesadillas,* approach perfection as meals. The warm, soft flour tortilla is far handier than a slice of bread or a bun for corralling ingredients, and those ingredients can include all manner of vegetables and delightfully prepared meats, with a generous slathering of cheese and various other sauces like salsa, guacamole, and sour cream.

But in Korea, they don’t really do that. For one, have you noticed that there’s no cheese? It’s true! No one in this entire damned half of the world eats cheese, it seems. When’s the last time you had cheese in your Chinese, or with your sushi, or on your Pad Thai? Not counting you jokers out there, it’s never.

For another, tortillas! How I took them for granted in the United States! But, while bread is fairly simple to come by (I estimate the bakery:coffee shop ratio in Gwangju at something like 1:1000, which means there are 47 bakeries within a mile radius of my apartment), tortillas are a bit thin on the ground.**

To make matters worse, not only can I not prepare my own burritos, I cannot find any either. I looked for Mexican restaurants – believe me, it was one of the first thing I looked up. But I found only a handful in the city, most more than an hour away, and the reviews were usually “subpar, especially if you like Mexican.” And it’s not like Chipotle or even Taco Bell (I’m desperate) are things here.

So then I got a lead on Ahoritas, a little Mexican place a friend of mine found. She raved about it and said the owner is from Mexico. That’s a double bonus, since not only will the food probably be authentic but I’ll also be able to converse in something besides Korean! It was, of course, a hike (more than an hour), but I resolved to give it a shot my first chance.

Today I had my chance. I needed to be downtown anyway, to get my Alien Registration Card – my Korean ID for the next year. That entailed leaving school early and boarding a bus for only the second time in my life, then rattling down through the city to downtown. I managed without embarrassing myself, then took a walk of a half-mile through some suspiciously twisty back alleys, praising God and Lona’s parents for the umbrella they gifted me last year, and found Immigration.

[Above: The river research is apparently going swimmingly. Note the water being pushed out the door of the institute. ]

The ARC process went smoothly, everyone was very friendly and helpful and more or less spoke English, so I decided to take my shot.

I headed further south from the office, then realized my phone was directing me onto the subway. :O Now, I have never ridden a subway in my life, so it was with a fair bit of trepidation that I descended into the maw of the pavement and wound my way into the labyrinthian dungeon of Gwangju’s metro system.

Actually, it proved to be relatively simple to navigate, especially since there’s only one line and the signs are all in Korean & English. I boarded the bright, clean subway car, packed full of Koreans very carefully not saying a word to each other, and imitated everyone as best I could.

Thirty minutes later, I popped out, promptly got lost in the Asian Culture Center –

-then found my way and set off through more twisty alleys until, at last, I stood before my goal, like Frodo at the base of Mount Doom.

To find that in this case, Mount Doom was closed.

Apparently they don’t open restaurants at weird times like 3:45 pm here.

Well, hell, I thought, I came all this way, I’m not giving up now. So I glanced around a bit and saw this MegaCoffee down the street. I got myself a peach tea, a comfortable bench, and resolved to do a bit of writing until 5:00, when surely dinner will be served. Writing this only seems to have taken 30 minutes, so I still have 45 to go. Well, I only have the entire Internet at my fingertips – I’m sure I’ll find some way to pass the time.

*I may have eaten homemade chicken quesadillas for dinner at home more frequently than I care to admit in a public forum.

** Get it? 😀