Defeated Capitals and Hills of Tea

I'm back in my tiny room watching The Day After Tomorrow on TV after three days of travel.

We drove along the West Coast down to the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula and then back up to Seoul today just in time to see my cousin, Soo Min, in her Dae hang lo theatre premiere.

Dae hang lo is Korea's Broadway, so it's a pretty big deal for Soo Min, a college student, to have been cast in this professional production with a well-known director(whose amazing Korean adaptation of Our Town I saw at the National Theater last summer) and cast. It was pretty intense for a debut role: she played the ghost of a girl who had been gang-raped by seven of her boyfriend's friends, became pregnant as a result, and then committed suicide.

On our drive back up this morning, I finished the last few pages of Jane Austen's Persuasion, the only Austen novel I had yet to read. Every summer since my sophomore year of high school, I've read one of her novels during our summer family trips. Pride and Prejudice (2002) during a road trip to Mammoth Mountain. Emma (2003) while driving up to San Francisco for my cousin, Peter's wedding. Sense and Sensibility (2004) during a family road trip through Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Northanger Abbey (2005) in Honolulu. Mansfield Park (2006) in Maui. And, finally, five summers later, Persuasion (2007) was completed in Boseong, South Korea this morning. So, it's a kind of end of an era for me, but an era I'll get to revisit next spring, as probably the only male in Stefanie Markovits' Jane Austen seminar.

Some writing about the trip to come over the next few days.

P.S. I have my first interview--finally!--on Tuesday afternoon!