Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Hut one, Hut two...

It's Tuesday in my second (and last) week back in Daegu. Each morning and evening, I've been picking my way through the side streets to go back and forth between the hotel (where, incidentally, I'm in the same room as last week) and the school. This has usually involved scaling one very steep incline.

Today I tried a different route and found that it was all flat. More amazingly, though, I passed a very familiar bright yellow sign: LOVING HUT. This is another outlet of the vegan buffet restaurant I've become familiar with in Seoul. It's so, so hard to eat veg in Korea. For example, yesterday Heeduk ordered pizzas and they failed to bring a plain cheese one and I picked off the bits of sausage. (Back home, that's something I would never do, but we only have 45 minutes' lunch and I've learned I have to compromise to a degree or I won't get to eat much.) I was halfway through my first slice when I discovered innumerable tiny bits of sausage spread about under the layer of cheese. Then I felt sick.

(It's a veghead thing; you wouldn't understand.)

So imagine my delight on stumbling upon a Loving Hut (one of three such storefronts in a city of 2.5 million people) completely by accident. The odds are incalculable.

Still, tomorrow I'm going to make one last trip to my old neighborhood in the absurd hope that poor Tiki, who's been scared, cold and hungry on the streets for seven months (if he's still alive), will inexplicably appear and let me take him home.

I'd rather have saved my Daegu miracle for that.

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