How's The Weather?

Fine, thanks for asking! The temperature has been mild the last few days, the sky clear and the sun, well, sunny. Friday night I took advantage of the fall-like weather by wandering across to the Blue Nine building and sitting outside at Hotsun Baked Chicken Restaurant.

In addition to providing baked chicken, Hotsun also, I'm happy to announce, has terrific grilled chicken, which is what I got. It's not quite up to the standard I provided at 150 Boone, but what is? Still, pretty damn tasty.

The gorgeous weather has continued, so on Saturday I took my current reading matter (The People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks) and made my way on line 9 to Yeouido Park, which is kind of the Korean version of The National Mall in Washington, DC.


Except Yeouido has lots more trees and benches, and the trees provide shade for the benches. With a gentle breeze, it is an easy matter to lose track of time in a good book, and so I did.

I came to, as it were, about a hundred pages later, feeling the pangs of hunger, and made my way to Itaewon for a bite and a few beers. While there, I fell in with a crew of editors of the English-language dailies, Korea Times and Korea Herald, who were commiserating over the latest typos and factual errors in their respective papers. Interesting.


I saw Karen about the time I was leaving, so I ended up having a few more beers than I planned, thus explaining why my Dear Readers did not get an update last night.

The weather today was also quite fine, 71 F and partly cloudy, so I took a long walk and ended up in my local Hangang Park (the banks of the Han River are lined on both sides by green space and official parks on almost its whole length through Seoul). Here, too, I found a shady bench and settled in to read more of Brooks's fictionalized account of the travails of the Sarjevo Haggadah--a sort of Jewish prayer book, created in fourteenth century Spain. It is considered one of the most valuable books in the world--the Haggadah, I mean, not the book about it. But it is a good read--the book, of course, not the Haggadah itself.