It's a

Korean

tradition to make seafood pancakes -- or buchimgae-- when it rains. There's two reasons for this. First is audible, the sizzling in the oiled pan sounds eerily like rain. Second is the cool calm that follows on a rainy day.

buchimgae

on a cool, rainy afternoon. If it's night then it doesn't feel as special because you're used to nights being cold. But it's on that odd afternoon when you were expecting yet another sweaty day you get gifted with a cool shower, and you can't help but consider that things are alright in the world. Not perfect. Far from that. But everything is alright.

My dad could never eat buchimgae without 

soju

. If we didn't have that around the house then he'd opt for a 

beer

and never fail to remark, how good a soju would be right then. 

I once asked him which he would choose for all the rainy days of his life. Would he rather have all the soju and beer he could drink... but no buchimgae... or would he rather have the buchimgae without any of the drink. He thought about it and said he'd rather have the drink, but kept coming up with alternative dishes that he would rather have with his soju and beer. These alternatives might as well have been just buchimgae, but then we got into an argument over what made buchimgae a buchimgae.