We're calling it the impossible slumber. It's the unavoidable fact that no matter how long your flight, and how little you slept, and how exhausted you get, and how tired you are, you will never, ever, get a decent nights sleep on your first day in Korea.
It's not the bed, stiff and unyielding to our American bodies. It's not the temperature which hangs hot and humid around us. It's not the chorus of frogs competing with the opera of cicadas. It's not not the empty giant mansion on the outskirts of town that they left you in. It's not your soul missing family or friends or your state or your country, because none of this matters when you spend ten hours on a plane, two hours at an airport, three hours in a car, three hours in restaurants and mini marts and department stores and random places you're too tired to remember. It's because your brain, as brilliant as it is, cannot comprehend the idea of a sudden, differing time zone.
You'll fall into bed with longing at 2am and instantly be asleep. Your entire being is so tired because it's actually 7am or 8am or 9am where you come from. The brain tells you that logically you'll sleep in, oversleep, due to your extreme exhaustion. But the brain tells itself that it's 7am or 8am or 9am, time to wake up, as usual, but after your nap.
So three or four or five hours later, your breaths will become softer, your body will stretch and your eyes will flutter open to see darkness. Pitch blackness. Empty nothingness. It doesn't make sense, you blame the pea under the bed, the humidity, the outdoor orchestra, the haunted mansion, homesickness. Except. Everyone else is awake, wandering the building like ghosts and zombies and insomniacs and foreigners. The mental alarm clock that no one ever sets has gone off and the snooze button is stuck. You have three hours until sunrise and three more before anyone drives into your giant empty lot to tell you what the schedule is for day two.
But staying up an additional day and going to bed a second night later, well, it teaches the brain a hard lesson. Because brains, as brilliant as they are, hurt more than you when it doesn't get sleep. So on the second day, it'll turn off that alarm clock only for itself, and in turn, you'll get to sleep past sunrise.
Sam gyop sal, the topic of interest tonight, begins as a pig that turns into flesh that would turn into bacon if it didn't turn into sam gyop sal first. The meat is thick and whole, but we remedy that with kawi, or scissors, to break it down to bite size. When fully cooked, the sam gyop sal can be dipped in a salt/oil mixture and wrapped in a lettuce leaf along with rice, garlic, vegetables, kim chee and gochujang sauce. It is then stuffed into your mouth the way you'd shove that last sock into a drawer: Forcefully. Desperately. Barely. Much like getting in and out of a vehicle, there is no elegant way to do this. Just stuff it, shut your lips and chew.
