Soft spots: Kimchi pancake on a rainy night

Business travel takes all the fun out of travel...

Friends recommend eateries in Boston that I should try. In theory it should work. I shall plan my three meals a day around the recommendation list, but going on a culinary adventure during a conference really isn’t the best way to go. I just didn’t have any appetite. Now if I was to go on an extended hiking trip... but I was not.

Eating during a multi-day conference is certainly neither fun nor healthy. For breakfast we were treated with “Continental breakfast”, which really consists of a bunch of ultra-sweet pastries, orange juice, washed down coffee, and fruit trays that came and went like mad. I got my morning sugar fixes and it was enough to get me going for about two hours. When break time came, I stepped out to a hal lway full of the same thing, oh wait, now they had bagels too. I got refills for coffee (having way too much "conference" coffee is the primary reason I despise coffee), scraped remaining fruit pieces onto my plastic plate. Or if I felt extra forgiving to myself for the dinner I missed the night before, I went to get a blueberry muffin too. All the sugar was doing something strange to my body as I felt restless and irritated, secretly wishing the morning sessions would end soon.

By lunch time, I was all filled up with sugar, coffee, and a whole lot of unnecessary carbs with no appetite, but it’s a ritual, and besides what else was I to do in the 90-minute break? So I went off to some fast food place frequented by MIT students on a dash between classes. I got my extra "filling" greasy stuffed pizza, and washed it down with water or coke. And that’s that.

The afternoon sessions ran uneventfully similar to the affair in the morning. By dinner time I was once again full but not satisfied in the least. Traveling alone definitely has its perks, but dining alone in a restaurant is not one of them. I promised myself I would not go back to LA without trying the famous New England clam chowder, and while I was at it, the Lobster Bake as well. Fortunately there is a Legal Seafood next to the conference site. The waiter looked a bit puzzled as he tried to seat me, gasp(!), a lone person in a busy restaurant during dinner time. Finally I was seated in an awkward corner sort of tucked away, not to see or be seen. It suited me fine. I ordered the special, Lobster Bake, and wait for my food as middle-aged people in sizable groups walked by shooting pity-like looks my way. It’s really OK, I wanted to say. This particularly nice group next to my table, a family on vacation, was very concerned with my well being in dining alone. They tried to strike up a conversation and keep it flowing the whole time I was working on the Lobster. It was very nice of them, but it took considerable amounts of energy to bounce the ball back and forth. Sometimes a girl just wants to work on a challenging but delicious lobster in her own quiet time...

Ah, the only relief came as I reunited with a high school classmate whom I haven’t seen in eight years. We walked in drizzling rain to this Korean restaurant around the corner, which was not on the recommendation list. No matter. We had a lot of catching up to do, and all was done over a meal with laughter and tears. I had my best meal in days, kimchi pancake the chef specially made for us because “In Korea we always eat kimchi pancake when it rains”, tofu seafood stew and a hearty stone bowl of Bimbimbab with a nice crispy layer of crust stuck to the bottom. We cleaned our plates, even the pickled vegetables. Indeed, what’s better than eating Kimchi pancake with your friend on a rainy night?

Unclassified: Harvard Square

For a first time visitor to Harvard, the cobbled streets, winding alleys, and the red brick buildings all elicit a feeling of longing deep down, probably a sort of faint jealousy for anyone who did not get to go to an Ivy League college. Me. Unlike BU and MIT, Harvard has a distinctive feel of a campus. The old Harvard Yard and the new Harvard Yard are surrounded by red brick buildings, albeit all very similar looking. Even the Law School has its own yard. This enclosure and the security certainly brings bodies, minds and souls relatively close. I sat in Fellipe’s and watch students come and go, in giant sweatshirts, and alarmingly similar looking JanSport backpacks, cell phone in hand, and the kind of hair that’s easily recognizable for college students, messy and i-just-don't-care-how-i-look.

So here I was, in an Urban Outfitter store in Harvard Square, searching for a non allergy-causing belt for my rapidly shrinking waist as a result of bad food and irregular schedule. As expected, UO looks the same as the ones in Westwood Village and on Bancroft, nothing special to it, but I do want to comment that for some reason students here dress nicer than the ones I saw in California. Maybe it’s the weather, the blasting wind and unpredictable weather allowing a much varied expression of the layered look and cold-weather accessories. Very nicely put together, intelligent but not bookish, stylish but not too snobbish.

Anyway as I was looking for a belt, two girls in giant Harvard sweatshirts were talking behind me. One girl held up a maroon-color leather bag with an inquisitive look as if she was not sure what to do with it.

Her friend said, “You know what I do? I always ask myself, do I have to have this?”

Girl with bag replied quickly, “Yes! I got to have it.”

Her friend went on, “Does money mean absolutely nothing to you when it comes to owning that purse? If you answer yes, then get it.”

Girl with bag hesitated, swinging the bag this way and that. Her friend edged on, “OK, will you die if you don’t have this bag?”

“Probably not,” came the grudging reply from the girl now minus the bag. “You are right. I have so many bags already…”

It made me laugh. I used to have the exact same conversation with my roommate. It’s just so funny, and it made me miss her terribly. I wonder how she is doing in that middle-eastern conservative country, eating chicken and rice everyday, wearing head dresses and ankle-length long skirts and taking 6-hour bus rides to get her mail.