House on Wheels: Episode 3

by stroopwafel

We’ve had to say goodbye to one set of guests, but as our cast visits a new locale, a lovely new guest joins them. Their destination might be serene, but as ever, our cast finds themselves challenged by everything from simple tasks to Mother Nature.

EPISODE 3 RECAP

It’s the middle of the night and our trusty little house on wheels is trucking along in the dark. None of the cast are present, but the house is loaded onto a container ship, presumably to move on to the next location.

Home for the next few days is the beautiful island of Jeju — hence the need to haul Housie onto a ship. Our cast arrive in Jeju the easy way (by plane), and they’re reunited with their house in no time at a local port.

As they make their way to meet their guest, Dong-il gets a text from her but keeps her identity a secret from the others for now.

They park at a beautiful beach to wait for their guest, and the water is beautiful, all crystal clear and blue. Hee-won vacuums the whole house, but there’s something else that needs tidying: Dong-il points out that Hee-won’s nose hairs have “left the house.”

Dong-il helpfully uses Jin-gu’s phone as a mirror and takes photos to show Hee-won’s offending hairs. All the while Jin-gu is cracking up, and he finally puts a stop to the show by directing Hee-won to the bathroom so he can use the mirror in there.

Jin-gu is thrilled with the latest addition to his phone, up-close-and-personal shots of Hee-won’s nose hairs. Dong-il says it looks like something out of a cartoon, but we’ll have to take his word for it since the show mosaicked the photos lol. Unfortunately for Jin-gu, Hee-won has him delete all the photos and empty the trash can (I’ve never seen someone so sad about losing photos of nose hairs).

Nose and house all tidy, their guest gives them a call and it’s Dong-baek! Okay, so it’s actually Gong Hyo-jin, which is just as good. She takes the crew by surprise twice — once when she says she’s walking over to them, and again when she says she’s starving and wants to know if they’ve prepared anything for her. Aw, Jin-gu even stands to say hello over the phone.

Hyo-jin finds her way to the house and she comes bearing a gift: gimbap from a famous restaurant in Jeju. Dong-il says they should cook ramyun to go with the gimbap, and it’s like watching three big sloths trying to get their act together. They realize there’s no ramyun to cook, so it’s just gimbap for now.

Both Hee-won and Dong-il have worked with Hyo-jin before, while this is the first time Jin-gu’s ever met her. Hee-won asks Jin-gu if he finds her scary (lol) and Jin-gu quickly shakes his head no. Then Hyo-jin jokingly asks if there are rumors about her being a scary sunbae, and Jin-gu says no on that front as well.

After their snack time is done, Hyo-jin tries to help with the clean up, but Dong-il tells her to stay put and not do a thing. He tells her that their last guests didn’t do any work either — and then we cut to Ra Mi-ran doing some manual labor and setting up their tarp.

Hyo-jin seems like the diligent, bustling type, though, and watching her three turtles friends seems to really try her patience, but she manages to stay put.

They’re finally off to their final destination of the day, but it’s just going to be Hee-won and Hyo-jin. Dong-il heads out for a quick doctor’s visit for his bad knee (it’s a torn knee cap) and Jin-gu joins him.

Hyo-jin and Hee-won are off, and the conversation starts flowing steadily. Hyo-jin mentions Hee-won’s “dating” scandal from earlier in the year (a false story spread that Hee-won and Park Bo-young were dating). They touch on their variety experience, or lack thereof in this case, as both of them have only guested every once in a while.

Hyo-jin resolves to be less industrious while they’re all together, but Hee-won says she should be her natural self. They’re all so slow and need that push to do better. Hyo-jin has always been interested in the whole minimalism movement and camper car life, so she’s looking forward to the tiny house experience and adhering to a very green, “no trace left behind” way of travel.

When they reunite with the other two, Hyo-jin gives them a quick rundown of their convo and when she mentions Hee-won’s scandal, Jin-gu picks up his phone right away to look it up then literally gasps lol.

Hee-won’s not loving this direction of talk, though, and he jokes about bugs infesting the car and asks Dong-il to step out. Hyo-jin seems to be constantly hungry and they talk about what they’re going to have for dinner, which is fresh beltfish and black pork. Jin-gu’s going to cook again (I’m already a little worried) and Dong-il worries me even more when he says, in response to how much they should make, that serving sizes should be “adequate.”

They pull up to their location for the day, the lovely Hamo Beach. The water is sparkling blue and theres lot’s of sunshine. They overcome some parking issues, but little do they know, their troubles are just starting. They’re basically perched on an unsheltered ledge, and the wind is blowing hard from all directions. It’s so bad that Dong-il ushers/orders Hyo-jin inside to rest while they unhitch the house from the car.

As Hyo-jin keeps herself busy by tidying indoors, the men are outdoors, working at their usual (read: snail-like) pace. In addition to cleaning, Hyo-jin also asks the important questions, like where’s the pork?

Seeing them all together, everyone suddenly looks exhausted — except for Jin-gu, who made time for a wardrobe change. He apparently brought a ton of clothes along, which Hyo-jin finds adorable (join the club), and his bright, white and blue outfit is such a contrast to the ajusshis.

The wind isn’t letting up at all, so emergency wind blocking measures enacted: moving the car in front of the house to cut some of the wind.

Despite Dong-il’s insistence that she not do a thing, Hyo-jin pokes around and gets familiar with the kitchen so she can start cooking the rice. The other three work to set up the chairs. Once again, they’re super slow, but they manage to get them set up.

The sun’s still shining, so the next thing to take off their to-do list is setting up a tarp for shade. Jin-gu asks Hyo-jin if she wants help with the rice, but she asks that he help their sunbaes instead. True to form, they’re slow and no one can quite remember how to set up the tarp since Mi-ran set it up last time.

Dong-il leans on his new mantra: don’t panic in front of Hyo-jin. But that mantra goes right out the window as soon as Dong-il gets into a little tussle with the wind, as it seems to be trying to rip the tarp from his hands. His panicked calls for Hee-won to help go unnoticed until Dong-il really freaks out, and then everyone runs to help him. After wrestling with the tarp, Hyo-jin jokes that she’s just going to head home after having dinner.

The men hammer down pins, then pull them up, then hammer, then pull. This goes on for more than two hours. Hee-won notices the sun’s moved position in the sky and Dong-il actually tells them to wrap it up. After all that struggling, they’re shutting it down. It’s like the sun saw how hapless they were and decided to do them a solid.

The quartet sit outside and rest for a bit before Jin-gu pops up to make coffee in response to Dong-il’s offhand comment about feeling tired. As Jin-gu starts grinding his coffee beans, Hyo-jin brings out her housewarming gift. It’s a hand decorated apron with oven mitts attached to the front with velcro.

Jin-gu’s grind face is still on when their special delivery finally arrives. Dong-il does the honors and unveils Jeju black pork (which comes from a special Jeju breed of black pig), and a beltfish. The beltfish looks huge, shiny silver and about as long as Hyo-jin is tall.

Jin-gu takes one look at the fish and he exclaims, “Sunbae, how am I supposed to clean that?!” They have a quick snack before getting dinner started. Despite another refrain of “Hyo-jin don’t move an inch,” Hyo-jin’s not convinced they’ll get the job done. Hyo-jin takes the lead and starts to unpack everything that came in the delivery.

While Hyo-jin is being a busy bee, it looks like one is better than three in this scenario. Omg, Jin-gu is STILL grinding beans and working on coffee for Hyo-jin. He finally finishes and gets to work with Dong-il to prep the fish.

Jin-gu is such a hard worker, and he studied up how to clean and fish with his usual teacher, YouTube. Unlike the jjigae fiasco in Goseong, things are actually going well and he teaches Dong-il a few tricks. (Hee-won standing outside and watching, looking absolutely disgusted by fish guts will never not make me laugh.)

Jin-gu notices the hubbub and laughs that their guests become family thanks to the cast — i.e. the guests are forced to work as soon as they arrive because the cast members are so clueless.

Hyo-jin’s stress gets turned up a notch when the house starts to leak water. While she’s freaking out, no one else is actually worried — it’s like they’re expecting disasters to happen. Hee-won fixes the water leak pretty quickly, and not long after, Hyo-jin has success with the fire.

There’s another moment of panicked, feigned non-panic when Dong-il makes a mistake with the beltfish soup, but they remedy it pretty quickly. After letting it simmer for a while, everyone gets a taste and the soup gets a major thumbs up.

The soup taken care of, it’s time to throw the meat on the grill and we get a solid three minutes of food, just cooking away. I can’t decide if this is a visual seduction or a slow torture.

With the pork finally cooked, Hyo-jin takes her first bite and it looks like she might cry at how delicious it is. One by one, the cast take a bite of samgyupsal; Jin-gu takes off his glasses and Hee-won looks like he’ll faint.

Hee-won has a complaint ready though — they waited and worked for hours, but finished everything off in 15 minutes. LOL. As consolation, Dong-il says they can just keep eating for hours.

Dinner conversation turns to living situation and preferences. Hyo-jin and Hee-won are Team Solitude, as they prefer to spend time on their own for the most part. Dong-il is the opposite, and says he feels lonely if he’s alone. Baby Jin-gu gets asked his preferences, and says he’s not sure what he likes and still lives with his parents. Hyo-jin says he won’t know what he likes till he’s fully independent of his parents.

It turns out Hyo-jin’s independence is a quasi-independent life as she lives two floors down from her parents, so she pops back and forth between her apartment and theirs. She says she’s still on her own as her parents leave her alone and don’t tell her what to do. Dong-il nods, and Hee-won says Dong-il is much nicer to Hyo-jin than him.

If Hee-won had said that the same thing Hyo-jin had, Dong-il would have said, “Your parents abandoned you.” Video evidence seems to back Hee-won up as we get a bunch of clips with Dong-il giving Hee-won the Sparta treatment, while Hyo-jin gets the kid glove treatment. Hee-won sighs dramatically that he doesn’t know why he hangs out with Dong-il.

It looks like the perfect dinner party, and as they sit by the ocean they talk, and laugh, and eat till the sun goes down.

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