Author: streambis@gmail.com

People ask me sometimes, well, not people, mostly it’s just me imagining someone asking, what is Cheonan like to live, and honestly my first answer is nobody asks that. Nobody asks because almost nobody comes here on purpose. You come here because a factory needs you, or because Seoul got too expensive, or you married someone from around here. That’s about it, I can’t really think of a fourth reason but maybe there is one, I just haven’t met that person yet.

I’ve been in the same apartment since it was new, well it was built in 2007 so by Korean standard that’s already kind of old now, apartments here get judged fast. But I’ve lived here long enough that it just feels like living, not some experience I’m having. I don’t really know how to explain that better than just saying it plain.

What’s actually here

Cheonan is close to an hour from Seoul on the regular train, and I think the KTX cuts that down to more like 30-something minutes, though honestly I take the slower one more often because it’s cheaper and I’m not in a hurry to get anywhere. There’s also subway Line 1 that comes all the way down here from Seoul, which people in Seoul don’t really think about, they just see the map end somewhere south and don’t wonder what’s actually down there.

What’s down there is factories. A lot of them. Samsung Display has a plant here I think, that name gets recognized outside Korea sometimes. There’s also smaller places, metal processing, auto parts. I’m at a metal fabrication place myself. Outside of rush hour it takes about 25 minutes by car to get there. During rush hour it’s over an hour. Same road. Same distance. Everyone’s just leaving at the same time, that’s the whole difference.

There’s a university area too, a few colleges, so downtown has this younger crowd that doesn’t overlap with people like me much. Different bars, different hours. And there’s Independence Hall, the big museum about the independence movement, that’s basically the one thing tour buses stop for here. One museum, and a train that passes through on its way somewhere else. That’s the tourist side of Cheonan, pretty much.

The apartment thing

I should say how apartment life works here because it’s not what people picture when they hear “apartment” in English. Mine isn’t fancy. 2007 means it’s got that early-2000s layout, long hallway, small balcony that’s mostly for drying laundry and keeping kimchi containers out of the kitchen. I’m on a high floor, top of the building basically, so I get good light, but when the elevator’s out of service I really feel it in my knees walking all the way down.

Complexes like mine are everywhere here, whole neighborhoods are just these blocks with numbers instead of names, and this is what most of Korea outside Seoul actually looks like if you’re being honest. Not glass towers. Not hanok villages. Gray and beige blocks from the 2000s, a mart on the ground floor of one building, a hair salon in another, playgrounds squeezed in between.

I’m not totally sure on the exact numbers but a place like mine, similar size, similar age, I’d guess goes for somewhere around 250 to 300 million won to buy, maybe 800,000 won to a million a month if you’re renting with a deposit. That’s roughly 190 to 230 thousand dollars, or 600 to 750 a month, don’t hold me to the exact figure, prices move. In Seoul that same money gets you a studio an hour outside downtown if you’re lucky. That’s why people close to retirement, or people who don’t need to be in Seoul for work, end up here quietly.

Weekends, or the lack of them

Here’s the part that probably sounds strange. I almost never leave the city on weekends. I could count on my fingers how many times a year I go outside Cheonan on a Saturday or Sunday. It’s not because there’s nothing else, Seoul is an hour away, I could go if I wanted. I just don’t. I do my home workout, pull ups, ab roll out, push ups, nothing fancy, no gym membership, just stuff in the living room. I grind coffee beans by hand every morning, pour over, that’s the one thing in my day that doesn’t change no matter what. And then the rest of the weekend is just, I don’t know, being in the apartment. Writing this now is kind of part of that too, another thing I do at home instead of going anywhere.

I’m not saying this to complain. If you’re picturing Korean weekend life as café hopping and hiking groups in matching outfits, sure, that happens, that’s real. But there’s also a lot of people who just stay in. My son is around too when he’s not out with friends, he’ll be off to the army before long and honestly I think about that more on weekends than I used to, when the apartment’s quiet and I’ve got nothing else pulling my attention.

The English thing

I’ve been doing something a little obsessive for a while, training my English listening. Not classes, not really apps, just podcasts, hours and hours, most of it playing in the background while I do something else, some of it me actually paying attention to a video. I’m past 12,000 hours at this point, aiming for 15,000 sometime around next October. Used to be 12 hours a day easy. Lately it’s down to 3 or 4 hours, because of some trouble at work — I made mistakes before, and now even small things I do get looked at through that old lens, so I’ve been more careful, more tired, less able to just relax and put a podcast on during the day like I used to. I listen more at night now instead.

My speaking is still way behind my listening. My writing has its own rough edges, you’re reading them right now. But the point is, Cheonan isn’t a place where you bump into English speakers to practice with. No expat street like Itaewon. If a foreigner comes here for work, mostly for the plants, they won’t be surrounded by English. They’ll need Korean, or patience, or coworkers willing to slow down. There’s no scene here you plug into by just showing up. You kind of build it yourself, same as with anything else here.

Prices, food, the normal stuff

A bowl of gukbap here is maybe 8,000 to 9,000 won, so around 6 to 7 dollars, I think, exchange rate moves around. Coffee at a local place, not the chains, maybe 4,500 won. Samgyeopsal for two with drinks, somewhere around 40,000 to 50,000 won total, so maybe 35 dollars, could be a bit more depending on the place. None of this should shock anyone who’s already spent time in Korea, but compared to Seoul it’s noticeably cheaper across the board, except imported stuff, that costs about the same no matter where you are since it ships the same distance either way.

For groceries there’s Lotte Mart and Homeplus both here, and then the smaller local markets, which have better produce for less if you know which stall to trust. That part takes time. Nobody can just hand you that, you learn which ajumma sells the good stuff and which one doesn’t, the same way anyone learns anything here, slowly, by paying attention.

If you actually wanted to come

If anyone reading this ever seriously wanted to see this part of Korea, the part that isn’t in guidebooks, I’d walk you around on a weekend. Doesn’t matter who, man, woman, older person, whoever. I barely go out myself so honestly it’d probably do me some good too, force me to actually use this city instead of just commuting through it. I know a gukbap place with no sign in English, barely one in Korean either. I know which platform to stand on so you’re not running for the escalator. Small stuff, but it’s the stuff that makes a place feel a little less foreign after two hours instead of two years.

I’m not saying Cheonan competes with Seoul for excitement. It doesn’t, and it’s not trying to. But if you already did Gyeongbokgung and Myeongdong and want to see what regular Korean city life runs like day to day, the commute, the apartment block, the same coffee every morning, this is closer to how most people actually live than the postcard version. It repeats a lot, I won’t pretend otherwise. But it’s cheap, and people mostly mind their own business, which some days I need more than I’d like to admit.

Bank union people going on strike again. My first feeling about that is not “good for them.” My first feeling is confusion. Like, wait, you guys can actually do that? Because where I work, in a metal processing company, this word “strike” doesn’t even connect to anything real. Nobody here would ever think about it. Not because we don’t have complaints. We have plenty.

I’ve changed company three times now, so I’ve seen a few versions of factory floor already, and honestly it’s the same story everywhere, just different faces yelling or not yelling. When bank union negotiate their pay or their hours and it makes the news, part of me is almost jealous, and part of me thinks, those people don’t know how lucky they are just to have a union that can say no to something.

Being watched forever, that’s the real problem

I made mistakes at work before. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t — I did, and it wasn’t small stuff either. I’m trying to fix myself now, actually working hard on being on time, not cutting corners, doing the boring stuff right every day. But here’s the problem. Once you mess up here, you don’t get a clean page again. Ever. My boss and my coworkers, they remember. Every small mistake I make now, even a tiny one, gets connected back in their head to what I did before. It’s like nothing ever gets deleted from the file.

So if I’m five minutes late setting up a machine, it’s not “oh he was late today.” It’s “this is just like him, remember last time.” The old mistake becomes the lens for everything new I do. I feel this almost every day now and it’s a little scary, a little annoying too, and some days I honestly don’t know which one is bigger. I still haven’t told the whole story here about what I actually did — maybe later, it’s not something I want to type out yet — but it was bad enough that even now, years later, if I forget to log a part number or leave a setting wrong on the press, somebody’s eyebrow goes up like, here we go again.

Why factory is not the same as bank office

A bank union going on strike is unusual news precisely because most unions here, especially in manufacturing, don’t have real teeth compared to what people probably imagine when they hear the word “union.” In a small-to-mid metal shop like mine I don’t even know if we have a proper union on paper, and if we do, it sure doesn’t act like the ones at the big carmakers you hear about. Banks are office workers with degrees, people expect them to negotiate like professionals. A metal shop guy complaining about conditions doesn’t get that same social permission. If I said out loud “I want better pay, better hours,” the reaction from people around me wouldn’t be support. It would be more like, be grateful you have a job at all.

My commute tells you something about how little control we actually have over our own time. Outside of rush hour it’s maybe 25 minutes by car. During real commute time it becomes over an hour, easy, same road, same distance. And there’s no negotiating that, no company shuttle talk, no “let’s do flexible starting time.” You just leave earlier. You absorb it into your own morning instead of the company changing anything for you.

Nobody tells you this part

When people talk about tough workplace culture here, usually they mean the big dramatic stuff, long hours, boss yelling. But honestly the tiring part for me isn’t the yelling. Nobody yells at me really. It’s quieter than that, it’s just this feeling that everyone around you is quietly grading you, all the time, and once you got a bad grade once, it never goes back to zero. You’re just trying to build it back slowly, one boring normal day at a time, and one bad day can knock a lot of that back down again.

I think this connects to something bigger too, not just factory work. Your reputation at a company kind of becomes permanent record here, and switching companies doesn’t erase it either, because the industry is small enough that people know people. I’ve moved three times and each time, somehow, a little bit of the old story follows me anyway. Not the whole thing, but enough that I notice it in how careful people are around me for the first few months.

So who actually gets to push back

If I had to explain this to someone outside Korea, roughly it’s like this. Big companies, the large banks, big carmakers, public sector jobs like subway or rail workers — these groups have real union structures behind them, decades of it, and that’s why their strikes actually make news, because it’s rare and it moves something. Bank strikes get attention partly because banks are usually the quiet, well-behaved white collar world, so when even they push back, it stands out.

But under that layer there’s this huge number of small and mid-size manufacturing places, service jobs, contract jobs, where basically none of that protection exists in practice. We’re probably the majority of workers in this country honestly, not the minority, but we’re the ones with no leverage. If our company decided tomorrow to change the shift pattern or cut some benefit, there’s no real mechanism for us to say no as a group. You either accept it, or you quietly start looking somewhere else, which most people don’t even have the energy for because commuting and family and everything else already eats up the day.

I do my home training in the mornings — pull ups, ab roll out, push ups, that kind of thing — partly because it’s the only part of my day that’s fully mine. Nobody at work can judge that. Nobody connects it to old mistakes. It’s just me and the pull up bar in my living room before anyone else is even up. I think a lot of guys my age end up with some small private space like that, because the big public space, the company, doesn’t leave you room to just exist without somebody watching.

What I’d actually want, if anyone asked

If somebody asked me straight, would you ever join something like a strike, my honest answer is probably not, even if I secretly agreed with the reasons. Not because I don’t believe in it. Because for someone in my spot, someone who already has a mark against him, standing out costs too much. Bank workers have some buffer, some backup behind them. I don’t have that buffer. If I stood out even a little right now it would just prove what people already think — that I’m the guy who causes trouble.

That’s the sad part underneath a lot of this. People here do have opinions about fair pay and long hours, plenty of them, they just don’t say it out loud, because talking costs more than staying quiet does. And once you’ve already burned some trust once, you really can’t afford to burn more of it.

Anyway I still read about the bank strikes with interest every time. Feels almost like a different country, even though it’s maybe two hours away by train. Different rules over there. I just don’t happen to work in that part of Korea.

7,000 hours in June. Now I’m coming up on 15,000. Not this month, not by some deadline I set, just… it’s getting there, slowly, the way everything with this gets there. I count it in hours because “I studied English for 3 years” doesn’t mean anything to me. Years can go by and you did nothing. Hours you actually did the thing.

And I still catch myself thinking, wait, shouldn’t I be fluent by now. That thought comes almost every week. Sometimes twice a week. Every morning before anything else I grind beans by hand and pour hot water over them slow, and while I’m doing that there’s a podcast running. Coffee first, then podcast, that’s just how the morning starts, has for years. Drive to work, podcast keeps going in the car too. Normal days it’s 25 minutes each way. Rush hour it’s over an hour, so more podcast, not less, which sounds like a plus except I’m usually late either way. The whole thing runs on a loop honestly, kind of like the factory line I work at, and I started this blog the same way — just another loop I added on top.

the number itself

15,000 hours sounds made up, I know it does. But if you listen 4 hours a day for 10 years that’s about 14,600, so the math isn’t crazy, it’s just a lot of years stacked with a lot of hours. Mine wasn’t a clean 4 hours a day though. Some days 3, some days 8, depends on the day, depends what’s happening at work, depends how tired I am. About 90% of it is podcast running in the background while I do something else — driving, eating, doing the dishes, standing at a machine that doesn’t need my whole brain every second. The other 10% is me actually sitting and watching something with full attention, pausing it, rewinding the same sentence two or three times until it clicks.

When an episode is too hard, I don’t force it. I just switch to something easier and come back to the hard one later, sometimes weeks later, and it’s strange but it usually makes more sense the second time even though nothing about my English changed in between. I don’t fully understand why that works but it does.

I didn’t know there was a name for this when I started. I just thought about how I learned Korean — nobody sat me down with a grammar book as a baby, I just heard it for years from people around me until one day it was just there. So I thought, fine, let’s try that with English. Forget textbooks, just put it in my ears for as many hours as I can stand, every day, for years, and see what happens. I heard later there’s a whole theory about this, people call it input based learning, the idea being if you get enough of the language coming in your brain builds the grammar by itself without you ever sitting down to study a rule. I don’t know if that’s proven or just something people who like this method say to each other. I’m not a scientist, I’m a guy grinding coffee at 6am with earbuds in, running my own experiment on myself basically, except I’m in my 50s doing it, not 5 years old.

comparing myself to a baby is depressing

Here’s the thing that actually keeps me up some nights. Most babies start talking around 1, putting real sentences together by 2 or 3. Even a slow one is usually talking fine well before school age. And here I am past 14,000 hours of listening — way more raw hours than any kid gets by the time they’re forming full sentences — and I still freeze up when English comes at me from a direction I didn’t expect. A word said fast, an accent I haven’t heard much, someone talking over someone else. My brain just stalls for a second before it catches up.

Part of the problem is I basically never get to use it. Three business trips to China for work, that’s the whole of my time outside Korea, and none of that was English at all, it was all handled in Korean or through someone else. So my listening hours are enormous and my actual speaking practice is close to zero. It’s lopsided. I don’t think that’s how the ears-first method is supposed to go — supposedly the speaking shows up on its own eventually if you put in enough input — but I honestly don’t know if “eventually” means 15,000 hours or 30,000 or never, for someone in my situation.

I wrote in my own notes not long ago — even a slow baby manages it by 7, and here I am getting more impatient the older I get, ha. That’s exactly it. It’s not that I think the method is wrong. Comprehension really did get better, I’m fairly sure of that even if I can’t put an exact number on it — a podcast episode about something I know nothing about, history, some true crime case, whatever, I follow most of it now without needing subtitles or a transcript. Years ago I’d have lost the thread in five minutes. So something is clearly working on the input side. But opening my mouth and having the right English come out at the right speed, that part just isn’t catching up at the same pace, and nobody selling an app or a method ever wants to talk about that gap.

losing hours because of my own mistake

This part is hard to write but I said I’d be honest here. I made mistakes at work before, the kind that stick to you, not one big blow-up but a pattern that built a reputation, and now even a small slip gets read through that old lens by my boss and the guys around me. It’s not that they’re wrong to watch me more carefully. It’s more that every little thing now gets connected back to who I was, and there’s a kind of tension in the air now that wasn’t there before. Scary and annoying at the same time and some days I can’t tell which one is bigger.

Because of that I lost my listening time during work hours. Before, I’d run a podcast quiet through one earbud while working the machine, plenty of guys do that here, nobody thinks twice about it normally. Now I can’t do that comfortably anymore, not with eyes on me the way there are, so I just don’t try it. My hours dropped from something like 8 a day down to 3 or 4, and I moved what’s left to after work, at night, when I should probably just be sleeping instead.

It’s a specific kind of frustrating. Not mad at English. Mad that something I built for years, something that was going fine, got cut down because of something I did to myself before, and there’s nobody to be angry at except me, which somehow is worse.

what changed after all these hours

Nobody around me actually asks about this. My coworkers don’t know I do it. My mother doesn’t really get why a man past 50 spends his nights listening to Americans talk about, I don’t know, history or true crime or whatever it is that day. But if someone did ask, here’s what I’d say changed.

First, I stopped translating in my head. Took years, maybe 3,000 or 4,000 hours before it started happening without me trying. Early on I was translating every single sentence, English into Korean, in my head, which is slow and tiring and also just wrong half the time because the two languages don’t line up clean anyway. Somewhere past a few thousand hours the translating just stopped happening. I hear it, I understand it, in English, no detour through Korean. I remember noticing that the first time and feeling kind of proud of myself for it.

Second, my ear learned some accents way before others. American podcast hosts, the casual talking kind, I get almost everything now. Put on a British panel show, people talking over each other and joking fast, or someone from Scotland, and I still lose maybe 30% of it. That surprised me. I used to think English was just one thing and once you learned it you had it. It’s not, it’s like a bunch of different things that happen to use the same words, and you have to put in separate hours for each one.

Third, and this is the one that’s disappointing — speaking didn’t just show up on its own. I heard that with this method it’s supposed to eventually come out by itself, like a baby who’s finally heard enough just starts talking one day. Maybe that’s true and I just need more hours. Maybe I need actual speaking practice, which I basically get zero of, working in a factory in Cheonan where there’s no foreigners around and no reason for anyone to speak English to me. I don’t know. I’m not sure why it hasn’t shown up yet, and I’d rather just say that plainly than make up a theory to sound like I know.

why I keep doing it anyway

My son’s getting close to military service age, and honestly a big part of my head these days is just hoping he goes in safe and comes home safe, that worries me more than my own English most days if I’m being straight about it. But when I need something that’s just mine, something nobody at work can touch, something that has nothing to do with the mistakes I made there — it’s this. Coffee at 6am with a podcast going. Pull-ups and push-ups and ab rollouts in the living room with an episode playing in the background. It’s about the only part of my day that’s still fully mine to run.

There’s something about getting older wrapped up in this too, I don’t fully understand it but I notice it. Doing something this slowly and this stubbornly, at an age where a lot of people around me have stopped trying to learn anything new at all — it changes something in how I look at the rest of my life. I’m not sure what exactly. Maybe it’s just proof the brain still does something after 50, after a divorce, after messing up at a job I’ve had for years.

If anyone reading this is doing something similar — years into listening, still waiting for the speaking part to catch up, still comparing yourself badly to toddlers — I don’t really have advice, I’m not far enough along myself to be handing anything out. All I can tell you is the number keeps going up and something keeps shifting, slow, the kind of thing you only notice when you look back at where you were. Whether it ever turns into me actually holding a real conversation with a native speaker without freezing up, I honestly don’t know yet. Ask me again at 20,000.

The gamjatang I had this morning tasted a little off. Not spoiled exactly, just… wrong somehow. Like the broth was thinner than it should be, or maybe they didn’t boil the bones long enough, I don’t know. But I ate the whole bowl anyway. That’s just what I do. Sit down, eat what’s in front of me, get up, go to work. Didn’t even think about it being strange until I was at my desk already, chewing on the fact that I ate something that tasted wrong and just… said nothing about it. Not even to myself really, until later.

Gamjatang price is something I end up thinking about more than I probably should, because I eat it a lot, and lately every time I eat it I notice the number went up again. I work at a metal shop, shifts start early, and this is the kind of thing you eat before a long day standing at a machine. Not a treat. Just food that fills you up and is warm and doesn’t take long.

What’s in the bowl

Gamjatang is pork spine bone stew. The “gamja” confuses people because gamja means potato, and yes there’s usually potato chunks sitting in the red broth, but I’ve heard the name actually comes from an old butcher’s term for that part of the spine, gamjappyeo, not from the vegetable at all. I’m not totally sure that’s right, honestly, I heard it somewhere years ago and never checked it, so take it with a grain of salt. Most foreigners think they ordered potato soup and instead get a bowl of bones with meat stuck to them and don’t know what to do with it. You pick the bone up with your hands. Nobody looks at you weird for that. There’s usually a plastic glove in a little basket on the table, or just tissues, and you gnaw the meat off close to the bone because that part near the spine, the soft cartilage and the marrow, is the best part.

There’s also ppyeohaejangguk, which uses the same kind of bones and a very similar broth, and honestly a lot of small places just serve the same bowl under whichever name they feel like putting on the sign. Ppyeohaejangguk leans a little more toward “hangover soup,” the kind of thing guys eat the morning after drinking too much soju, while gamjatang is more the everyday version. But nobody sits you down and explains which is which. You just eat both enough times over the years and eventually you get a feel for it.

The bone marrow thing

This part actually surprises people more than the name mix-up does. The broth is dark red-brown, and there’s a paste-like stuff clinging inside some of the bones, and I’ve heard visitors think that’s blood or something gross and get scared off before they even try a spoonful. It’s not blood. It’s marrow, mostly, and also perilla seed powder, deulkkae, gets mixed into the broth itself and that’s what gives it that gritty, nutty thickness. A good bowl has a good amount of that grit. If the broth looks thin and kind of clear, something’s off — and that’s close to what bothered me this morning. The broth felt watery. Like they rushed it, or skipped the deulkkae, or just didn’t cook the bones long enough. I put extra perilla powder in from the little side dish they give you, trying to fix it myself at the table, but it didn’t really help. Still ate the whole thing.

I’m not a chef. I don’t know the technical reason a bowl comes out wrong. I just know what a good one feels like after eating this stuff most of my adult life, and this one wasn’t that. Habit made me finish it anyway. Taste didn’t really come into the decision.

What it costs

Okay, prices. Around Cheonan a regular one-person bowl runs somewhere around 9,000 to 11,000 won, so maybe 6 to 8 dollars, though the exchange rate moves around so don’t hold me to the exact number. I remember it being closer to 7,000 won a while back — I can’t tell you exactly which year, my memory’s not that precise, but it feels like it jumped in a couple of steps rather than slowly, and each jump lined up loosely with news about pork prices or fuel. The owner near me just changes the number on the laminated menu and says nothing about it. Doesn’t apologize, doesn’t explain. Just a new number taped over the old one sometimes, if they’re too lazy to reprint the whole thing.

The bigger pot, meant for two or three people, with a little burner underneath so it keeps cooking at the table, runs maybe 28,000 to 40,000 won depending on the place. That’s rough, I’m guessing based on what I remember paying, not something I checked recently. It usually comes with rice, and near the end they’ll ask if you want sari, which means noodles cooked in the leftover broth — ramen noodles or sometimes udon. Some places just throw it in free, some charge maybe 2,000 won more. That sari part, honestly, is sometimes better than the meal itself. By that point the broth’s been sitting on the burner so long it’s gone thick and a little smoky, and the noodles soak it all up. When people around here are finishing a meal like this, watching for the sari moment is basically watching for the end.

Not a special occasion food

This isn’t a “night out” kind of meal here. Nobody dresses up for gamjatang. It’s the thing you eat before or after physical work, when your body wants something heavy and hot and doesn’t cost too much. Guys at my company eat it. Construction guys eat it. I’ve seen night shift guys order it at six in the morning with a soju bottle next to the bowl, though I don’t really do that part myself anymore — the drinking, I mean, not the soup.

Nobody tells you this

The reason it got more expensive isn’t really about gamjatang as a dish, it’s about pork in general. Feed costs, fuel, imports, the same stuff that made a lot of things pricier the past while. But there’s another layer to it too — the spine bones used in this dish used to be a throwaway cut, the stuff butchers basically sold cheap because nobody wanted it for anything else. Now that this exact dish is popular, that “cheap cut” isn’t cheap the way it used to be. The whole point of the dish, historically, was that it used bones nobody else wanted. That part of its identity doesn’t really hold up as well anymore.

My mother still says something like this every time we order it — that it used to be nothing, that families used to stretch a little bit of meat across a big pot with this exact thing because it was the cheap option. She says some version of that basically every single time we eat it together, and then eats her whole bowl anyway because she genuinely likes it. I don’t remember the very first time I heard her say it. I just know I’ve heard it more times than I can count over the years.

Ordering it, if it’s new to you

There’s a place like this in basically every neighborhood, small town or big city, doesn’t matter. You sit, they bring water and usually raw onion with soybean paste, kimchi, maybe pickled radish. You tell them how many people, or say “il-in-bun” if it’s just you, meaning one-person size. Some places genuinely only do the shared big pot and won’t make a solo version — if that happens you either eat more than you planned or you go somewhere else, there’s no real trick around it, you kind of learn which places do solo bowls after going a few times.

They’ll bring it out on a little burner, still cooking. Don’t rush it. Perilla powder is usually on the table or they’ll bring extra if you ask — sprinkling more in if the broth feels thin is completely normal, not weird at all, I did exactly that this morning trying to save a bad bowl, and like I said, didn’t help too much but nobody at the table cares if you do it.

Eat the meat off the bone with your hands once it’s cool enough to touch. Nobody judges you for that, in fact if you don’t do it people might think you’re strange. And near the end, ask for sari if nobody’s offered yet. That’s basically the last stage of the meal.

If you’re ever actually in Cheonan

Cheonan isn’t really a stop on anyone’s Korea trip, most people just pass through on the KTX on the way to somewhere else. But if anyone reading this ever wants to see this area on a weekend, I’d go with you and show you where the honest bowls are, the places with plastic stools and a laminated menu and maybe one older lady running the whole thing by herself. Those are usually the fair-priced ones, closer to that 9,000 to 11,000 won range. I don’t leave my apartment much on weekends, maybe once or twice a year for something that isn’t errands, but I’d make the exception for this. Somebody’s got to warn you away from the tourist-priced bowl before you order it.

Anyway. That bowl this morning wasn’t great. But I finished it, same as always, and I’ll probably go back to that same place next week because it’s close and it’s what I do, and most days it’s actually fine. One bad morning doesn’t really change much. I’ll just go again and probably it’ll be normal next time.