붕어빵 is here.  And not a moment too soon.

Inquiring minds want to know -- what is 붕어빵?
 
Boong au Bbang is a fish shaped pastry, cooked on the street in a kind of waffle iron apparatus (whose
iron casings are the shape of a fish).  It's like a little bread fish whose texture is not unlike a crispy waffle and
is filled with a sweet bean filling.

There's not much to them, it's just a pastry shaped like a fish, except that every winter, people sell them on the street and it's a ubiquitous part of  winter street scenes in urban South Korea, where street venders are a plenty.
They don't taste anything like fish, they just look like a fish, hence the 어 which means fish.  And when it is cold
out and they are freshly baked in front of you, they are pretty tasty.

Well, yesterday was October 1st.  The humidity is officially gone.  Mosquitos are starting to die and while there will, most definitely be some warm days left in the year.  Autumn has officially begun and it will be cold soon.

I was riding around downtown yesterday and there it was -- the first 붕어빵 stand set up.   6 for 1000 won.  I didn't
buy any, I just thought, summer's officially over.  It's a sign.  Winter is on the way.

The thing about 붕어빵 (boong au bbang)  is that it is only sold in the Winter.  And it is not available in stores,
only on the street.  But that's the magic of them.  They are baked fresh right in front of you in the little fish shaped
waffle iron apparatus.

Okay the guy was a little early, but like everything else in Korea, things are very predictable.  In a scary kind of way.  You learn to expect things here.  Korean people can be read like a book.  There's no mystery to anything.
Everybody does everything the same way at the same time and you never see anybody on a tennis court wearing
cut off jeans and a teeshirt.  Everybody's got the full tennis gear.  You never see a bowler in an alley without a
wrist guard, you never see any mountain biker without the full mt. bike spandex pants, funny shoes, same
sunglasses and it's starting to get to me.

In all my years here, I've never done a midnight run, nor have I known anybody who's actually done one,
and I've never "broken" a contract, but for the past month or two, right around payday it crosses my mind.
Seriously.

Predictability.   It's the tool of the devil.