“Let's meet in the middle.” Parents and grown children still arrange it this way before a holiday. Two hours of driving each, a bowl of noodles at a motorway services, containers of food handed across, and then both of them turn round and drive home.
There was an older version of it. 반보기, banbogi. In the days around 추석, Chuseok — the autumn full-moon holiday — a married daughter and her own mother would fix a date and meet at a pass, or by a stream, about midway between the two houses. It had a formal name as well: 중로상봉, jungno sangbong, meeting on the road between.
Half a day and then you part, which is where the word comes from. Not a whole day. Not a night. Half.
They spread out what they had carried, still tied in its cloth — rice cakes, savoury pancakes, whatever they made the same way at home. Sometimes a mother met the baby on her daughter's back for the first time that day.
When the sun drops they get up and go back the way they came. The bundle is lighter than it was, and downhill is always quicker.