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Aren’t they cute, those tiny train cars? That’s in Busan, on the southern coast of South Korea, where we spent three amazing, food-filled days last month on our South Korea and Japan Food Tour. I didn’t get a chance to ride that mini train line, just saw it from a walk in the hills above the city on a warm spring evening, before we all met up for dinner, one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten (more about that below) thanks to the excellent restaurant choices made by our guide, Michelle. But since I love anything tiny, anything miniaturized, I was totally charmed by those wee cars and their bright colors. It’s called the Capsule Train, and it runs along the coast to provide a view of the beautiful landscape and seascape, in one direction out, and then slowly back along the same route. It’s also there to take people to the beach, but it’s slow, and only two people can go in a single car, the poor solo travelers have to pay double to ride alone in a car! There’s also a regular train line that runs just below the elevated tracks, with all the seats considerately positioned facing the sea, in case you just want to get to the beach faster, and with the general public. The tiny capsule railway is more romantic, and definitely isn’t super efficient, but who cares? It just slowly crawls along the coast and back, admiring the view and taking its time. Sometimes, it’s just about being cute and going nowhere slowly. That’s my current mission, as I recover from jet-lag and Covid, and get ready to leave for Ireland in two weeks! Just be cute and go nowhere, slowly. It is enough! If I were a train, I’d be one of those capsule cars, one hundred percent.
I’ve always loved tiny things and miniatures, probably because I am one, myself. But isn’t everything just that much cuter, that much more charming when shrunk down in size? Well, ok, not everything—but you know what I’m saying. My childhood dollhouse, a simple, unfinished pine affair made by my father, was filled with handmade (by me) furnishings and tiny foods. There were no people, I had no interest in them, just lots of hand-crafted stuff. Analyze that as you wish, but mostly I just never got around to buying or making people, and it was really all about the furniture and food for me. Although I did have a felt alligator living in there for a while, and I did have a few treasured pieces from the dollhouse store in town, but I never had the spending money to go there and buy much, so I got very creative and made my own. Just this weekend I found a few of my handmade furniture pieces in a box, but I forgot to photograph them. I also forgot that I had saved them! It was a little wooden couch, covered with red and white polka-dot fabric and trimmed with lace foraged from my mom’s sewing corner of the basement (so not my taste now!) and a fireplace with a mantle, covered with faux bricks made from wooden coffee stirrer sticks that I painted different shades of red then cut down to brick length and applied.
—>No internet + only three TV channels=unbridled creativity←
I don’t have any of the old food anymore. The food was made from clay, or homemade play-doh, or carved from old crayons with an Exacto knife (basically a handled razor blade, a box cutter!). I had a huge bin of old, broken crayon stubs, something my father salvaged from a school where he taught. He was always liberating supplies from his employer, hence the full ceramics studio and woodshop in our basement. And I’d use that razor-sharp knife to carve the stubs into little lemons and apples, carrots and the like.
The clay stuff likely disintegrated decades ago, and most of my childhood stuff was thrown out when my mom packed up her house and moved to Florida. I was working as sous-chef at a hotel in Maine that summer and it was only luck that my sister went home to help out and salvaged a few of the dollhouse furnishings for me. And what was a seven-year-old doing with her own box cutter? Not to mention free reign and access to a shop full of woodworking tools and sewing supplies? Two words, my friends. Gen. X. Unsupervised was our middle name. Feral children. We survived.
I found the two pieces of furniture in a box up at Tiny Bungalow. For all my new subscribers this week from Instagram Tiny Bungalow is my summer cottage in an old (almost 100 years!) bungalow colony, of which there used to be many in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains but now we’re one of only a few that remain. It’s tiny, hence the name. Really, really tiny. And only liveable for three seasons, from April to October, basically. After that the community water is turned off and we have to leave due to the tax structure that we fall under (we’re basically considered a seasonal camp). The tiny couch and fireplace went right onto our shelves of decorative old stuff, that we’ve been collecting for the twenty-four years that we’ve owned the house. We actually spent the weekend purging and getting rid of a lot of the old stuff, because it’s gotten out of hand. Years of thrifting, trash picking, and tag sale-ing has caught up to us, and we both decided it was time to downsize, to Swedish Death Clean, to just get rid of it all. Adam and I both have the collector gene, and between us we have three houses (one apartment, one tiny bungalow, and one suburban ranch house. It’s complicated) and they’ve all gotten just a little too…decorated. We’re hoping to downsize and consolidate into one home soon, as soon as we can decide on A. where to live and B. where to live. Any suggestions?
The stuff flowed into our lives, and now the stuff is flowing out, and I’m fine with that. Too much stuff is making me feel anxious, claustrophobic, and overwhelmed. As I approach sixty (not yet, but in a few years) I see that the decades ahead are limited, and short, and nobody ever died thinking that what they really missed out on in life was finding more vintage Pyrex, so it’s all gotta go. And my one heir, my niece Soph, should not have to be the one to deal with all of our stuff, and her parents’ stuff, and all her own stuff! She should inherit empty, valuable real estate. Probate-free, listing-ready, ideally. So we slowly, steadily, are downsizing. What once moved in one direction, in, is now moving slowly out. Just like that tiny capsule train, slowly moving along the coast of Busan, taking in the beautiful view and then backing up to the beginning. Forward, and back, but emptier with every trip.
Now, about that dinner.
That same night as the discovery of the magical Capsule Train, our Korea trip group met up for dinner with our guide, as we did most nights. On my trips I try to strike a balance between group dinners and free nights, to give people a chance to explore. But Michelle, our guide, was so good at finding and booking incredible places that we’d never have found on our own as non-Korean speakers, that most nights we just met up as a group with her. Plus, we were a small crowd, and one that got along very well, so everyone was happy to join most nights. Michelle said she wanted us to try a place that served lamb, pretty unusual for Korea. Lamb skewers, specifically, although she pronounced it lamb skweers which made everyone giggle, including her. I am NOT AT ALL mocking her English skills; I speak about five words of Korean and she is nearly perfectly bilingual so please don’t make angry comments. She just had trouble saying skewers and skweers is a funny word. Michelle rocked, in many, many ways. We loved her and have already tentatively booked with her to do the Korea trip again in Sept of 2026…fyi… I can’t wait to go back!
The lamb skewers place was really more northern Chinese, or even Mongolian, than Korean, but if you look at the map, you’ll see that the northern border of (North) Korea is right up there against northern China and not far from Mongolia, so it’s not a surprise that the cuisines overlap. It’s just funny that we were in the southernmost part of South Korea when we ate there, but I wasn’t complaining. It was maybe one of the best meals overall that I’ve ever eaten. Ever. I love lamb, and in a beautifully poetic kind of mirroring of the day, we grilled the lamb skweers ourselves on the tabletop, suing this clever self powered device. Take a look. You also get a glimpse of the group.
The tabletop grill was so genius. The skewers had little cogs on their ends, and the cogs clicked into the grill’s frame. And as the frame moved back and forth, the cogs turned the skewers, ensuring even cooking. It was like the lamb version of the capsule train, the lamb went forward, and then it came back. And each time it passed it got slightly more cooked, more drippy with sizzling fat, more caramelized, more perfect.
Once the lamb was fully cooked, with crispy fat and nice browning, you’d move it to the upper level to keep warm while you made your way through the five or six other dishes. Brilliant. It was served with little plates of powdered spices and salts to dip it into; cumin, turmeric, chili, some kind of curry blend. And the requisite many banchan side dishes of course, as we were still in Korea. But then we had stir-fried eggplant and potatoes that made me almost fall over, with more cumin and ginger and garlic, and what seemed to me like mapo tofu, spicy and delicious, and then back to that lamb. Oh jeezus that lamb. I’m drooling just remembering it. I’m going back to Busan just to eat there again. And to ride the little train. I’m sorry I missed that. The train and the lamb, back and forth, flowing in, flowing out…what perfect symmetry for a perfect day.
So what’s next? Well, later this week I’ll have the regular video/recipe post for paid subscribers, as usual, and hopefully be back on the regular twice a week schedule until we get ready to head off to Ireland. The Ireland trip is the last one for the summer, until France in October. I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything else this summer, otherwise, except purge stuff and go swimming and grill and go hiking up at Tiny Bungalow. That’s my plan and I’m stickin’ with it.
Oh, but in the next few weeks, if you follow me on Instagram or TikTok you’ll notice that I’m not shooting my usual content from my home kitchen. That’s because a leak, that happened last September and damaged my bathroom and floors, is finally being repaired. And so on Wednesday of this week I am being packed up and moved out to a temporary rental apartment in the neighborhood, while my bathroom ceiling is replaced and I get new floors throughout the whole apartment. Thanks, insurance! Everything has to be packed up and moved, providing yet another opportunity to get rid of even more stuff, yay! So I’ll be shooting from various other places and kitchens, over the next six weeks or so. Stay tuned on the socials to see where!
E.
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