Breakfast. Its what's in you.

What you are looking at here is some of the last containers of Oatmeal I could find at the foreign market today. I’ve been to the foreign market about 4 times now and have probably bought a dozen canisters in that time. I noticed each time I went back that there was less and less available. I’m not saying that there are none left there but chances are when I need more I won’t be going there. I do take a little pride in cleaning the vendors out tough.

There are a few bodybuilding websites that I can order it off of, if I can get a native Korean speaker to help me out (sites are entirely in gobbledegook). Now I suppose another approach would be to just not eat oatmeal anymore. And I suppose that is a possibility that I may have to face. But it is a grim and fibreless one.

Korean breakfasts here mostly consist of rice. Processed breakfast cereals are proliferating however. Now as some of you may be aware processed breakfast cereals are not the healthiest things for everyone to have in the morning (I only eat them after workouts) and even the healthy looking ones your grandpa eats are loaded with sugar.

The Almond Flakes and Chex translate phonetically, the middle box says "Kon-Poo-Roast"

I also see that McDonalds is aggressively marketing breakfast as well. A popular ad I see shows a guy running into the subway with a McMuffin in hand, basically just introducing the concept of eating breakfast to busy professionals here that tend to skip it b/c it was never really classically that big a deal. It just seems to make sense however, that there is such a big push. Since Nescafe and Taster’s Choice instant coffee is so popular here it would suddenly require that you eat something substantial in the morning to get rid of the taste of your morning brew.

Now for those of you that just can’t get worked up over a bowl of rice and kimchi in the morning, and think that hitting Micky Dee’s every morning might not be in the best interests of the continued pumping of your heart there are other options. There are many little Toasta Bahngs (Toast rooms) shops that will serve little sandwiches of toast, pork and onions in various tempting combinations. Of course I’ve yet to see one that is actually open in the morning, but it does present the reality that a lot of those ingredients are readily available at home. Personally I like oatmeal beside my morning eggs, which is the impetus for this rant, but I don’t want to scare people off that there are no options. Bread, jam, peanut butter(no natural stuff), pancake mix, eggs, bran flakes… sure there are options. But there doesn’t seem to be any local cropland dedicated to oats. It is by no means Korea’s fault that I can’t find any at the grocery store- and frankly I’m happy that I do have options at all.

I’ve heard some people, I’m not sure if they were dieticians or nutritionists so I’ll just call them kooks, propose that you can eat anything for breakfast. I’ll admit the North American idea of there being certain meals for breakfast that you don’t eat at the rest of the day is a little subjective. You should be able to eat prime rib for breakfast they say, following the kooks line of thinking that would mean I could eat a BLT for dinner and have pancakes in the middle of the night. Sure there’s no real reason for having breakfast be so specific, but there’s no reason behind toy poodles, brushing your teeth and earrings but they are still institutions.

Now this whole quest for a meal to start my day with may seem a little obsessive. But I do think that the way we start our days says a lot about how the rest of the day is going to feel. I wake up three hours before I have to go to work so I can have a lazy start to my day, and during that time I could have a mosquito sting me in the eyeball and I think I would still smile on my way out the door provided that I got my solid breakfast and pot of coffee into me. Plus wouldn’t it be cool to wear an eye patch for a day?