We’ve taken to cooking in. Old favorites, the familiar sequence of meals all made from a source of staples easily retrieved from the local store. It’s a treat for him to cook again, and comfortable for me to move in my own kitchen.

We’ve been out seeing things. Streets. Lights. Drinking ginseng malch’a in Insadong. I’ve finally begun to buy a few things, mostly things for this household but a few for people back in Seattle. Don’t miss it much. Nice to have roots there though: A peculiar comfort, but maybe something that has been missing. Maybe the net below the wire.

I love our house, our things. I like the candles and oil lamp burning in the evening while we eat. Paraffin cylinder on a flat Korean ceramic plate or an old wooden one. Chinese chest red against the wall: Our house has color.

I took a long bus ride to Namsan, to the International Deli where I bought a bottle of champagne from the region of that name for more than the price of the new tea set I bought yesterday. I walked from there up the hill to the Hyatt Hotel to buy truffles. A rich Korean couple interrupted my ordering relationship with the staff person behind the counter. She stopped helping me to help them; I became angry, glared at the couple, and was thereafter curt with her. Class. But the truffles were inexpensive. I ran with the bottle tucked under my arm down the hill to a bus that did not wait for me. I sat alone on a bench in the chill waiting for the next one, which came soon enough. Candles, each one lit and no other source of light aiding sight. Truffles on the table in Mr. Shin’s serving dish. No champagne flutes, so made do with water cups -- also Mr. Shin’s. Chiffon. Ticking of the earth till midnight.

There was a failed pilgrimage to the tubuchongol restaurant downtown. Closed. So bitterly cold, unlike what I’ve experienced here in past winters. My ears ached from it deep to the center of my mind. Didn’t want to ride home, not all that way after just having made the same voyage. I suggested we dive into the Westin Chosun hotel, to see if O’Kim’s might have space. They did, so we ate and drank and warmed up. Smoke permeated our clothes and the Irish singers sang American songs requested by drunk Army consorts from Nashville, who were front audience. We watched Asian men enter in groups and sit with each other in silence, smoking. A Southeast Asian or Chinese guy with a woman half his age, affording love with money; we made up a story about them. The man was so unusual-looking, completely without chin as if he’d had it taken off surgically and then tried to patch it up plastically.

Particles comprising pollution oppressed to the floor by a leveling chill. Debris whisked up in whistles, in staccato pulses that sting cheeks and slip between slits of squinted eyes. Desert blue skies against which the city clarifies itself. It naked before me without foliage, without the shroud of filth. Even the wide shallow toxic Han is blue like a river. Orange trussed bridges, red ones too, true. Sunlight searing glass, metal, and the twinkle of my eyes -- I left my sunglasses under the thick cover of darkened snow clouds in Seattle. I have this feeling that this is a desert city and I have been incorrect all this time in thinking it otherwise. If I’d judged correctly at the outset, perhaps I would’ve acclimated much faster – it would’ve been much easier to accept. Desert existence is wrought with humility, a bit of trepidation and expectation of scarcity. Molded into a thick leathery skin.