glamour girl

Last summer, I tried to spend time with my hal muh ni (grandmother) at least a few times a week. One day, we'd meet for for lunch or dinner somewhere around Seoul. One day, I'd stop by after work for dinner at my yeemo (aunt)'s house where she lives half of the week. And, every Sunday, usually, I'd go over and spend the afternoon with her at my sam chon (uncle)'s house where she spends the rest of the week.

Nosing around her apartment one Sunday afternoon, I discovered some old family photo albums and saw that my Mom was quite the glamour girl in her youth. In both family portraits, she's really the only one you could call glamorous, I'd say.

Even now, at fifty-eight, when she and I stopped at a bar to use the bathroom at 2 A.M. during an all night drive down from San Francisco, guys my age were offering to buy her drinks.

food, food, tea.

The Light Fellowship is a wonderful fellowship at Yale that sends one-hundred-or-so undergrads out to China, Japan, or Korea every summer for language study. I got one for study in Seoul last summer, and a couple of my Light friends got the fellowship again to come back this summer.

The Fellowship also sends Yale representatives to conduct site visits each summer, to observe the language programs Light Fellows have chosen and make sure Light money is being well-spent. This year, Kyle Farley, the Dean of Jonathan Edwards College and his wife, Veronica did the Light visit and we've been busy spending time with them(mainly eating) since yesterday evening. We started their trip off last night with three giant-sized yogurts at Milky Road, our favorite yogurt shop. From there, we went to see Subway Line 1, Seoul's longest running musical. Then, this morning, we were up early for a trip up to the DMZ, and finally lunch and tea in Insadong, the, "street of traditional Korean culture," according to the Korea Tourism Office.

The photo regulations on DMZ tours are, more or less, that you can't take any photos. So, I don't have anything from our tour. But, here is Kaila enjoying our feast at Sanchon, a Buddhist temple vegetarian restaurant(reviewed in the New York Times twenty years ago, they'd like you to know). We ordered a set meal that cost about 18,900 per person(roughly $20) and had maybe a dozen or so different dishes.


Including six different varieties of spinach!


Dean Farley feeding Veronica a clove of garlic


Phillip and Presca adding some glamour to the back alleys of Insadong


After lunch, we showed the Dean and his wife around Insadong for a bit before returning to a tea house next to Sanchon where most of us ordered traditional Korean cold teas--pear, cinnamon punch, rice punch and--and relaxed. One of the fun of the parts of this tea house is the birds they have flying around inside that may also poop on you. Here, Kaila is fanning Phillip.