All posts tagged: beautiful

Ihwa | mural village

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Ihwa Village is a controversial excursion to write a blog post about. There is currently a cold war playing out between selfie hungry visitors and those who call the area home. Obviously, as a human being, you want to side with the inhabitants. But, as someone who loves to look at street art and loves to put money into Korean crafts and stores, you can also see well meaning visitors’ sides. The issue arises again and again in Korea and makes me wonder: Can’t we tourists just stop being assh*les all the time?  So What’s the Controversy? Imagine living in a sleepy little village for most of your life. It’s underdeveloped and poor, but it’s home. One day a group of well meaning individuals decide to paint some colorful street art on the walls surrounding your neighborhood. It’s cute, sure, you might even like the whimsy at first. It’s supposed to bring tourism and money to your neck of the woods. Everything sounds great. And then, bam! Your village in overrun with loud mouth camera hogs desperate to get …

Reminiscing | Seoul’s Cherry Blossoms 2014

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Seoul’s on the edge of Cherry Blossom season. A little honesty- after 4 1/2 years here in Korea, I’m over it. I do not ever feel like fighting the throngs of couples lining every street that happens to have these beautiful, delicate trees to get the perfect photo op. Seeing the cherry blossoms are  a bucket list item, for sure, but once you’ve dumped it in your bucket, it’s not worth being tangled up in the mess. Go see them once or twice and then, let the couples get their 100 pictures. In 2014, my sister and brother in law visited me in Seoul. Not only was I thrilled because it the one and only time anyone from back home has visited me here, but I was excited just to show them everything I loved about Korea. They arrived at the end of April so I told them we’d be lucky to see any cherry blossoms at that point. My sister really wanted to see the trees so I thought we would head to the National Assembly, where I …

The Flying Pan White & Autumn in Garosugil

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We Seoulites can count ourselves lucky with all fingers and toes this year with how long we had a “autumn” in Korea. Some years it snaps by with a “see ya next year!” faster than I can get out and enjoy some colorful foliage. So with the beautiful weather all about and an empty stomach, my friend and I headed to Garosugil to walk through fallen ginkgo leaves and eat some brunch.  We weren’t disappointed with anything that day. The Flying Pan is well known brunch and breakfast spot in Itaewon where it is known as The Flying Pan Blue. But, it’s a chain and the one is Garosugil is known as The Flying Pan White. (There’s also a Red in the GT Tower near Gangnam Station and a Gold in Samseung-dong. ) They all have ALL DAY brunch. Here’s what White is all about: The menu has a great many options. If eggs aren’t your thing, they have pancakes, french toast, sandwiches, salads and dinner dishes. There are vegetarian dishes as well. We ordered two meals with …

|Lush| Bouquet

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For Teacher’s Day the mom’s of my students got my coteacher and I two huge bouquets of flowers because they are sweet, generous ladies. The problem with the bouquet (if you can call it a problem) is that the bouquet was enormous and I am a cat mother.   So Iggy freaking LOVES plants. He’d eat everything colorful and green in the world. He’d spill it all over the floor and rub his fat body around in the mess. He just loves them.  So I needed to break down the bouquet into more manageable parts. They make just as beautiful little bouquets as it did the huge one.