warpgirl

... Especially if you got a floor show with dinner each night! On Sunday night I met up with Karl, Florence, Chairman and Mrs. Hong and Dr. and Mrs. Lee of the Korea Customs Service for dinner. And not just any dinner, but a special dinner at a restaurant called Sanchon in Insa-dong. Sanchon offers temple cuisine, as in the cuisine that Buddhist monks would eat. It was all vegetarian, since the monks would pick the food from what was available in nature. Some of the flavors were exotic and a little bitter, others, like the peanut salad, were relatively normal. It was all very good. We sat on the floor again (my knees!) and dug right in. We also shared a couple bowls of makkoli- a milky rice wine that definitely had a little kick ... read more

What is this, Wild Kingdom or something? Is that bird paying room and board? We're not running a charity here! And if it's a male bird, then it should definitely be expelled for being on this floor. Sheesh.... read more

That's right, I used a Kenny Loggins song as my blog title. Word. Probably the coolest thing I've done so far in Korea- visiting the DMZ! You definitely feel like you're stepping into some weird "Twilight Zone"-esque last frontier. Maybe it's all the warning signs, or the threat of land mines, or the barbed wire and fences that run along the highway from Seoul, but you definitely get a sense that you are heading into a no-man's land- a war zone in many ways. The bridge we crossed into the DMZ area even had barriers strewn across it that the bus had to weave back and forth through. The closer we got, the more ROK soldiers we saw too. I went with the USO tour, which, although it's more expensive, allowed me to visit Panmunjon. We ... read more

I swear, they really need to make the Hongdae exit 5 bigger. That's the one closest to the main dining and shopping district. Every time I've been there, although that's only been two times, you have to get in line to climb the stairs out. Outside, there's tons of people milling about, waiting for their friends. I kind of stick out, so my friend Yewon had no trouble finding me in the crowd. She took me to a highly recommended Japanese noodle place on a back street of Hongdae. The food was really tasty, but you probably could have told me it was a Korean noodle dish we were having and I would have accepted it. It didn't have any particular "Japanesesy" taste and they gave us kimchi too, which just totally confused my taste buds. ... read more

I finally spent a night on the town on Saturday! As I may or may not have mentioned earlier, our dorm has a curfew from midnight to 5:30am. What this means in real terms is that we are locked out for 5.5 hours. Which is a really effective way to make sure you don't become a party animal while at Yonsei. Not that I'm a party animal, but still. Anyway, I planned for a week prior to Saturday to stay out all night. For someone like me who loves to sleep, that meant taking a disco nap the day of and mentally preparing myself to see the sun rise. It actually wasn't as hard as I thought it would be to stay up that long (can you tell I'm a lightweight on the party scene?). The ... read more