Seoul!

I tagged along with my parents earlier this month to South Korea. My dad had a business trip to work with the military base there in helping the US withdraw forces by 2011 (here's to us being in Iraq and Afghanistan 'til 2050!).

If it sounds like a random, spontaneous trip, it definitely was. But how often do you get a chance to go to Seoul? It doesn't exactly make the list of vacation destinations.

Since my dad had to work during the week, it was up to my mom and me to figure out where to go and what to do during the day. Day 1 was spent wandering around the various palaces in the cities. I'm used to indoor palaces where it's warm and there's nice furniture and wall/ceiling decorations. In Seoul, palaces are mostly outdoor courtyards where you have to walk a bunch to the few indoor buildings only to find that they're completely empty!

Day 2 was Olympic day. We had originally planned to see the Olympic stuff in the morning and then something else in the afternoon, but we went the wrong way (3 or 4 times!) on the subway and then still got off at the wrong stop (you would think the main entrance to Olympic Park would be at the Olympic Park subway stop, but you'd be wrong) so it ended up taking the entire day. The park is actually really nice since they have sculptures scattered throughout, and I'm sure it's a great place to take a walk in the summer. However, when it's 20 degrees out and windy, and you have no idea where you are, and there's no one who can guide you, it's not so pleasant.

The next few days were spent wandering around the various markets. I'm not sure anything could have prepared me for the huge number of stores. Everywhere we went, there were literally thousands of small stores (most the size of an office cubicle) just packed with stuff. There would be one store dedicated to buttons. Stacks and stacks, and rows and rows of just buttons. Your could probably find every kind of button imaginable in that one store.

I think the most interesting specialty product was fabric. Here we have fabric stores. There, they had 3 or 4 floors of small, cubicle-sized stores all selling fabric. I don't know how people buy anything there. First, you have to pick one out of a thousand stores. Then, from that store, you need to pick one of 10,000 possible fabrics! I also think there was some understood system there about how to buy the fabric because we saw a bunch of teenage girls running around with these small notebooks with samples of fabrics. They seemed to be going to each store and collecting samples or something.

I thought the variety here was ridiculous. The amount of variety and choice available there gave me a headache.

Overall, the places we went to were very modern/Western. In fact, we only found a few stores that sold "traditional" Korean souvenirs/crafts. If it wasn't so clean and everyone wasn't so friendly, I would have thought we were still in America! Well, besides the fact that nothing was written in English, of course.

So, despite the fact that it was freezing cold, hardly anyone spoke English, and it was really hard to find vegetarian food, we had a great time!

TWoods

The whole Tiger Woods saga has completely shattered my world view.

The fascination stems mostly from what's not being said, and the fact that it's really people's imaginations creating the story.

This was a guy who people said could run for president. His public persona was one of an upstanding citizen who worked hard for everything he did, had a beautiful wife and kids, and was living a great life. I'm not sure if that whole image was one that he carefully managed or if this was the result of a great PR campaign, but either way, it was one that was held by a large majority of the public.

Stories like this make you step back and wonder how many other celebrities are guilty of projecting a public image that is very different (and in some cases, completely contradictory) to their own private lives.

Radio Recorder

There needs to be something similar to a DVR for the radio.

If you hear a song you like, you could press a 'record' button and it would store the rest of the song on a hard drive in mp3 format.

You saw it here first. Just like the light on a pen that I invented back in the 5th grade, and then was in a mall 10 years later.