Showing posts with label made of win. Show all posts
Showing posts with label made of win. Show all posts

January 13, 2010

Japan, you should really just send gift-cards from now on

Following up it's influenzariffic Christmas present, Japan's birthday present to me: chest congestion. Mmmmm, phlegmtastic :\

The Interwebs' birthday present to me: INFINITELY MOAR BETTER 8D
Say what you will about ND's internal politics (and I have said a lot of critical things), we have the awesomest damn band in the universe.


April 17, 2009

Dude. Duuuuuuuuude.

Okay, add this to the list of reasons why I desperately want a grad school in the UK to accept me for fall 2010: Scotland, you now trump Warwick on my list

So about half of the bajillion rice fields across the road have been flooded in anticipation of the plantinating, and the frogs are going absolutely bananas. From around dusk 'til the early morning they sound like an army of kodama. Of course there are the usual froggy-noises, too, but apparently we have an abundance of clickity amphibians here in Isobe-"it's over nine thousaaaaaaaaand"-cho.

March 29, 2009

Absolutely Fabulous

It is nearly 3 AM and Nicole needs to sleep, and that's probably a good idea for me as well, so this will have to be brief.

The start of my first day in Seoul: was put into a police car.

The end of my first day in Seoul: schmoozed at a private party for the people behind Seoul Fashion Week at WooBar inside W Hotel, the ritziest venue in the entire city.

~*~*~*~
ADDENDUM [March 30]
Hmmm maybe I should explain that a lil' bit. No, Nicole & I were not arrested. Mr. Lee, the owner of the guest house where we're staying, gave us the name of a famous restaurant near Gyeongbok Palace and some vague directions, but once we got out of the subway and hit the streets we weren't all that sure of how to get there. Fortunately, Mr. Lee also wrote down the name of it in Korean, so we walked up to a police box and showed the paper and put on our best confused-foreigner faces. An officer motioned us out the door, so we figured he was just going to point us in the right direction, but no, he drove us there in his squad car instead.

Our streak of spectacular tourist luck lasted through the rest of the day and night, and has in fact continued on into today, but that's for another post. Last night culminated in our meeting one of Nicole's friends from our semester abroad in Japan and one of our Notre Dame friends, for catching up and drinks. We did not find out until the last minute - while we were in transit to the meeting place - that we would actually be meeting at the W Hotel, and that its famously schmancy WooBar was technically exclusively reserved for a Seoul Fashion Week party.

However, being the classy ladies that we are, we strutted right up to the front door, handed our coats to a smartly-dressed young lad, and assured the woman guarding the bar's perimeter that yes, we were guests of the party. I had a mojito so fresh and crisp I was sipping spearmint leaves through my straw. The four of us sat in egg-shaped chairs with techno-pop washing over us from the giant marble of a DJ booth in the corner. Probably the most hilariously surreal thing, though (I mean aside from the fact that we actually got into this place to begin with), was the giant, person-sized game of Jenga being played at the far end of the bar, next to a bay window with a spectacular hilltop view of Seoul.

At the opposite end of the social matrix, this morning I made friends with one of the clerks at a neighborhood grocer's down the road. I'm pretty sure the nashi he hand-selected for me was at least as big as, if not bigger than, the "large" ones being sold for 2,000 won, and I was only charged 1,000, which was the price listed for the "small" pears. Right now 100 yen ('bout a dollar) equals about 1,400 won. So, yeah, food, and everything else, is incredibly inexpensive here in one of the largest cities in the world.