Wedding information and travel details

First of all, we want to make sure that you know how excited we are to see you in San Diego, India, or both. We're having a lot of fun planning what's sure to be an intercontinental adventure of the very best sort, and we'd love to have you join us.

Since many of our guests (and even the groom!) have never been to India, we're planning some very cool activities so you can see just what all the fuss is about. :) We'll be showing up in Bangalore on the 1st of March, and we'll be there through the 12th. You're welcome to arrive anytime you like (but plan a day or two for time adjustment!).

Here are the details:

San Diego, CA:

Saturday Feb 13th 2010 (5 pm)
Rehearsal Dinner
Location: HMS Surprise, San Diego Maritime Museum

Sunday Feb 14th 2010 (11 am - 4 pm)
Wedding Ceremony & Reception
Location: Hotel Del Coronado

Accomodation in Coronado closest to the wedding:

Hotel Del Coronado
Glorietta Bay Inn
Coronado Beach Resort
El Cordova Hotel
Coronado Village Inn

Bangalore, India:

Saturday March 6th 2010 (evening)
Pre-wedding dinner
Location: TBD

Sunday March 7th 2010 (evening)
Wedding Ceremony & Reception
Location: The Chancery Pavilion

Travel Information for India:

1. Tourist Visa

IMPORTANT: Everyone who is not an Indian citizen needs a visa to visit India.

If you live in the US: https://indiavisa.travisaoutsourcing.com/homepage
If you live outside the US: https://www.indian-visa.com/

2. Immunization and Health

Information is available at http://wwwn.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/india.aspx - we know this page looks a little scary, but don't worry, there's tons of tourists visiting India all the time and as long as you're a little careful, you'll have a great time.

3. Flights

Flying into Bangalore (airport code: BLR) from the US will require a stopover in Europe or Asia, depending on whether you fly Atlantic or Pacific - flight length is between 20-24 hours (when planning your travel dates, remember that you lose 12 hours flying from the US to India - basically, if you take off from the US on a Wednesday evening, you'll get to Bangalore on Friday morning).

Some convenient flight options are:
British Airways: Seattle (SEA) - London (LHR) - Bangalore (BLR)
Lufthansa: Salt Lake City (SLC) - Denver (DEN) - Frankfurt (FRA) - Bangalore (BLR)
Lufthansa: San Francisco (SFO) - Frankfurt (FRA) - Bangalore (BLR)

Tickets should ideally be booked around 3-5 months before travel to get the best rates.

Update: We'll be reaching Bangalore on the 28th of Feb at 4:50 am. We'll fly out March 13th at 7:50 am

4. Accomodation in Bangalore

The Kar family has blocked a bunch of furnished apartments near our house for wedding guests at a very low daily price, but there's a limited number of these and you may end up sharing - please let us know if you're interested. If you do share, we'll try and make great matches so please give us your preferences there as well.

If you prefer to book a hotel room instead, let us know and we'll send you hotel recommendations.

5. Getting around in Bangalore

Transportation will be provided to all major wedding events (see activity list below).

If you'd like to venture out on your own, do NOT attempt to drive. Auto-rickshaws are the best way of getting around - you can hail one down from any major intersection. Consider them an adventure.

6. Activities in India

Wedding group activities

- Sightseeing in Mysore (day trip from Bangalore, with possible stops at Somanathapur and Srirangapatna, both of which have interesting temples, March 3rd)
- Lion/Tiger safari (day trip from Bangalore, March 4th)
- Nrityagram dance village (day trip from Bangalore, March 5th)
- Ayurvedic massage, mani/pedi for girls, shopping for silks/sarees
- Bollywood movie night: I have no idea what's going to be playing but I guarantee it will be hilarious and you won't need to understand what's being said to know that.
- Taj Mahal: 3 day trip up to Delhi and Agra - planned itinerary: fly from Bangalore to Delhi on the 8th. Take the train out to Agra and see the Taj on the 9th. Fly back to Bangalore on the 11th.

Independent activities - these are recommended itineraries for people who are planning on staying longer and venturing further:

South West India: Bombay/Goa (expect to spend about 5 days)
South India: Kerala (expect to spend about 3 days)
North India: Further travel on the Golden Triangle (this continues the trip after seeing the Taj - expect to spend about 3-4 days in addition to the planned Delhi/Agra section above)
Near India: The Maldives

For any additional info, leave a comment here or contact us.

Ritu and Jon

I think I'll start

Blogging again....

Someday.

Tokyo!

This is a HUGE post because I'm uploading my notes from all four days in Tokyo all at once - I didn't manage to find a WiFi hotspot any time before this - finally got one at the airport. So here's the full report.

Day 1:

Landed in Tokyo a bit after noon - walked through the easiest immigration I've ever seen in any country - no questions asked at all. Then got on to the Keisei skyliner train to get to Ueno - I wasn't too sure which way to go from Ueno station so decided to play it safe and take a taxi - the taxi driver ended up being a total sweetheart - the final fare camne up to like Y1500, but he refused to take more than Y1000, saying I was a tourist and he wouldn't accept more. Wow!Anyway, the ryokan (Japanese inn) I'm staying at is absolutely gorgeous - it's got these little tiny rooms where you sit on floor cushions and sleep on floor mattresses and everything's all traditional and Japanese. Very quaint and I love it. It's called Homeikan and here's a pic:


Right after I checked in, I decided to go hang out at Ueno park, which is Tokyo's most famous park - there's a bunch of nice looking shrines in there and it's generally a nice walk. I'm glad I spent three weeks in Korea before coming here - I'm a lot more comfortable now with getting around in places where almost no one speaks English. It was really easy to figure out the subway system, for starters, and once you're comfortable with that and know how to get around, the rest follows quite naturally.After strolling around Ueno Park for a while, I decided to check out the Tokyo National Museum - rather impressive. Spent about an hour or so there.

Then walked around a bit on some pretty darned crowded streets and bought some rice cakes from this guy who was baking them in a very neat looking machine. It was about 6 or so when I was done seeing Ueno so I figured I still had enough time left in the evening to go check some other place out before my legs died on me - hopped on the train to Akihabara, which is the electronics district of Tokyo. That was QUITE something - they were selling all sorts of stuff at crazy discount prizes. I think I even saw this place selling Sony PSP's for Y900, which is like $10!!! At least, the posters looked like that was the price, but I'm sure there was a catch somewhere. There had to be! Anyway, it was still fun to browse around. I spent something like an hour in an anime store and ended up buying two little anime action figure dolls.

By then the stores were beginning to think about shutting down, so I started hunting around for dinner. There was an australian burger place that a lot of tourists were heading to, but I wasn't about to settle for something quite that tame on my very first evening in Japan! Eventually I found this quite little "noodle soup bar" with rows of silent office workers eating quietly, and it looked like an interesting experience, so I walked in. Unfortunately it turned out to be one of those places which doesn't really have a picture menu but you buy a ticket from a vending machine and then give the ticket to the chef, who dishes out what you asked for. Which was all very fine for everyone else, but the vending machine didn't have a single English letter on it. I stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, staring at all the buttons and words, wishing that by some miracle, if I stared at it long enough and concentrated hard enough, the letters would magically make sense. Sigh. Eventually I gave up and decided to play Noodle Soup Roulette. Pushed in some money, closed my eyes, and hit out blindly. Voila! I had a ticket and NO IDEA in the world what I was going to get. I figured that noodle soup of any variety would be reasonably edible anyway, and if I didn't like whatever meat/seafood was in it, I could push that to the side and concentrate on the noodles. Which is what I eventually ended up doing - there were two or three different types of meat in there - crab, which I didn't mind, something like anchovies, which I don't like at all, and some third unidentifiable thing which I tried a small bit off and decided to let be. The noodles and the soup were awesome though and there was a LOT of that, so pushing the seafood to the side of the bowl wasn't a big deal at all. I felt at the end of it like I had ARRIVED in Tokyo, so it was fun!

Just got back to the ryokan - they've given me a kimono to wear while I'm indoors, so I feel all dressed up! The footwear rules are also pretty intense - you take your shoes off at the entrance of the ryokan and get into their "house slippers" before you get inside the building. You take these house slippers off though before you enter your tatami-mat covered room. Anytime you leave your room, you put your slippers back on. You take them off again when you enter the "bathing area" and put on special "bathroom slippers" which you absolutely SHOULD NOT be seen in outside the bathroom. Even the gardens have special "garden slippers"! It's all very complicated and I have to make a conscious effort to make sure that I'm not at any time in the middle of a serious social slipper gaffe, which I suppose would send me to footwear jail.

Anyway, am totally exhausted so that's about all for now. More later...
Need to find an internet cafe so that I can upload this onto the net. For all its tech city reputation, Tokyo has a serious shortage of WiFi networks. I can't find ANY!

Ten minutes later:
ACK!! My pillow is a "sand pillow" - the thing is filled with sand!! It's hard as a rock!! This is insane! Whatever happened to goosedown? Or any down, for that matter! Or heck, even cotton? Wool? Shredded cloth? Paper??

Day 2:

The sand pillow and I didn't get along at all. It spent the night ignominiously on the floor. It's going to stay there for the next couple of days.

Went to Harajuku today - checked out the Meiji Jingu shrine first - it's the most venerable shrine in Tokyo and dedicated to Emperor and Empress Meiji. Along the way, I washed my hands at a sacred well, took pictures of some royal fish in the imperial fishing pond, walked through the most gorgeous Iris Garden, saw what seemed to be the last bit of a Japanese wedding (though I'm not sure if it was an actual wedding or just something for the tourists to gawk at) and checked out all the lucky charms that they were selling near the shrines - charms for long life, good health, luck, wealth, traffic safety (yes, traffic safety - it must be an issue in Tokyo if they actually need to sell CHARMS for it).

After the shrine, I headed to Takeshita Dori, which is this pedestrian-only street where all the teenagers in Tokyo hang out on weekends. It's for sure a fun street - I spent hours browsing through these little boutique stores there, indulged in some absolutely wonderful chocolate and whipped cream crepes and generally did a ton of people watching - the street is full of kids dressed in the weirdest of fashions - the Goth look seems to be REALLY big in Tokyo, along with the other extreme of baby pink lace and frills, and there were plenty kids showing off absolutely bizarre outfits quite proudly. After that I got to this Oriental Bazaar, and bought a few souvenirs - not too many coz I'm beginning to reach suitcase limits here so I've switched into "heartbreak mode" (don't buy it unless it breaks your heart to leave it behind).

Hours and hours of walking and browsing and walking and people watching and walking and walking later, I'm back at the ryokan. But my phone detected a WiFi network around a nearby Starbucks, so I'm going to tote my laptop over there and see if I can log on.

An hour later: I don't believe this - Starbucks doesn't have its own WiFi network! There's some lame LiveDoor network here and I can connect to it but I can't browse until I enter a livedoor username password. And I tried signing up as a new user but the whole darned website is Japanese - I even ended up finding the sign up page by trial and error but then I got totally stuck because my laptop doesn't have the language pack for Japanese installed - so while I could kinda navigate if the links were images, I can't for the life of me figure out anything on the signup page because all I see are garbage characters. Bummer! I just spent fifteen minutes trying to fill in the signup form, but I'm doing something wrong because I keep getting an error (RED garbage characters). So foo this and I'm going to go back to Seattle and just upload all these blogs at the same time. Which will kinda defeat the purpose of them acting as an update to the world, but guess it can't be helped.

I miss Seattle's ubiquitous connectivity.

I'm going to do several things once I get back home:
1. Walk all over my apartment with my shoes on. These slipper rules are getting on my nerves.
2. Stand in the middle of Capitol Hill, turn on WiFi on my phone and BREATHE in the internet.
3. Call everyone I know - I need to let the GSM networks know I'm BACK!
4. Take my car out on a long drive. Drive across the 520 bridge several times.
5. Watch a movie at the theatre - I don't care what's playing - I'm sure I've missed out on several summer shows, so there'll be plenty to pick from.
6. Spend a day at the Elliot Bay bookstore - I miss bookstores - I've seen only Korean/Japanese bookstores in the last month and it hurts to walk past a shelf full of books and not be able to browse.

Do I sound a bit frustrated? I guess I am - I'm tired and totally cut off from everyone I know - and I can't even get on the NET! I mean, cut me off from my phone - fine! Ouch, but fine - I can live with that. Cut me off from the internet in general - BIG BIG BIG OUCH!!! I think I'll just go back to the ryokan and sleep. I've got Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" with me so I guess I'll read a bit of that. I think on some level, this could be a learning experience - like learning how people lived before the Internet existed.

Shucks!

How DID people live before the Internet existed??!?!?

Odds and Ends:

Cars drive on the left in Japan. Like in Britain.
Taxi doors open and close automatically - a taxi driver could get confused if you try and open them manually, since he's simultaneously hitting the buttons that control them.
Rain in Tokyo is oddly like Seattle's rain - the kind you can walk through. Still, everyone has umbrellas.
The internet is very very very elusive (yes, I've said this before. It's important enough to reiterate.)
There are almost no buildings older than 50 years ago - the city was almost entirely destroyed during air raids in World War II - even the old shrines and temples are all remakes of the originals and were built in the 1970s.
The public transport is spectacular - there's a subway system as well as a monorail system, and between the two, you can get anywhere at all in the city.

Day 3:

Woke up very early today and headed out around 7 to catch the morning activity at Tsukiji fish market - it's the largest such market in Asia, opens at 5 am with the day's fish cargo and is apparently all sold out by 9 am. It was pretty crazy - I've never seen so much seafood type stuff in one place - there were a million kinds of fish, clams, mussels, oysters, octopi (octopusses?), squid, crabs, shrimp, lobsters, eels, weird bug-like things with whiskers, long puffy sack like creatures and other bizarre unidentifiable creatures from unimaginable depths of the Pacific Ocean.

It was also the PERFECT location for a million sushi restaurants, so I decided to turn Japanese and have sushi for breakfast. I picked a place at random (it looked awfully crowded, so I figured it would be good) and walked in - it was a tiny little sushi bar and seemed family run. There was a set menu of soup, green tea, 8 pieces of different kinds of sushi and three rolls - I only identified the salmon. I think there was also tuna and mackerel. I'm not sure what everything else was. But it was crazy fresh and therefore extremely good. With just one problem - in Japan, apparently, they put the wasabi INSIDE the roll, so you can't control how much you get. And normally, just the slightest touch of wasabi is enough for me. But this chappie was putting a merry dollop inside each one of my rolls. So every bite went straight through my head and I had to spend several minutes recovering. I'm glad there were only 3 rolls - I couldn't have managed more of those. The regular sushi pieces were just fine, so I liked those a ton more.

After that, I walked over to the Hama Rikyu imperial gardens - they only opened at 9, so I had to spend a few minutes waiting at the gate, but I got to be the first person inside. Which was very very nice coz I pretty much had the whole place to myself - spent almost an hour just sitting by this very beautiful lake staring out at a rather picturesque tea house, thinking about life, the universe and everything. Note to self though - the next time, try NOT to be the first person in a garden. The solitude is gorgeous, but the first person in the garden is ALSO the first person to walk through all the spiderwebs strung across the pathways by busy arachnids through the night. Not pleasant.

After about an hour and a half there, I hopped on a boat to Asakusa, where I spent the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon checking out Sensoji Temple (Tokyo's oldest temple - the original was built in the 7th century - this one, of course, is only a copy, but it's still very beautiful. It's a pity so much of Japanese history was destroyed in 1945. Heck, it's a pity so much of the whole world was destroyed around then.

I also got a "fortune" letter - you put a 100 yen coin in a wooden box, and then shake another box until a long bamboo stick comes out, and the stick has a number written on it, so you find that number on a set of wooden drawers and take your fortune, written in both Japanese and English, out of the drawer. My fortune doesn't make much sense to me, but it was kinda funny all the same to go through the whole procedure - it goes "The black clouds on the moon were cleared up, it get really bright again. Just like the moon and stars shine clear, everybody have calm mind with nothing to regret or worry about." Which I suppose is good.


Then spent a bit of time browsing Nakamise Dori, which is a quaint little pedestrian-only street outside the temple, lined with stalls selling all sorts of crazy stuff - souvenirs, kimonos, old swords, antiques, clothes, shoes, more souvenirs, fans, etc, etc.

Got back to the ryokan a bit before 4 in the afternoon - I'm not sure if I want to head out again today - I'm just so awfully tired and a little sleepy too, having woken up so early today. I think I'll take it easy this evening and try and get some rest.

More later.

Day 3:

So the plan was to go to the Ghibli museum today but I think I planned badly - it's closed. Bummer. Things in Japan follow weird holiday schedules - some places are closed on Sundays, some on Mondays, some on Tuesdays - it's impossible to figure it out.

Oh well.

So I decided to come back to Takeshita street in Harajuku to have another one of those absolutely sinful crepes that I had on Sunday.

The place is much quieter today - not so many students and tourists hanging out - I guess coz it's a weekday. I think on the whole, I've done all the sightseeing I want to do - I'm getting a bit saturated now. So I'll probably just walk around this neighbourhood and explore randomly with no itinerary whatsoever. I'm carrying my laptop with my in case I stumble across a WiFi zone somewhere - unlikely, because even the Starbucks here in the middle of downtown (which is where I am right now) doesn't have a network. I keep looking to see if I can spot anyone else with a laptop in a cafe or something, but nope - no such luck.
Well, it doesn't matter much anyway now coz tomorrow I'll be back in Seattle.

Day 4:

Wednesday. Waiting at the airport....

Do androids dream...

I met an android today. Her name is EveR 1 and she's beautiful! I wish I'd had my camera with me but I didn't - though she's famous enough that there's several articles about her online - and this is what she looks like:


So a bunch of us from work decided to walk down to the Coex center where Microsoft was having its Mobile and Embedded Dev Con for Korea - Jae, one of the devs from my team here was making a presentation so we figured we'd come and cheer him on. The same building was also where SEK 2006 was being held - that's the Solutions and Contents Exhibition of Korea, and it's supposed to be the largest info-tech exhibition in the country. EveR1 actually opened the exhibition, introducing some of the big participants and all that sort of thing - she was brilliant! She has facial expressions and smiles and blinks and everything. She can't walk but she talks and waves and it's pretty insanely cool!

The other exhibits were also pretty neat - tons of big companies had staked out their territory in this huge huge room and were showing off all their latest toys. The most elaborate display was by this company called Haansoft that's trying to directly compete with Microsoft by having an online version of office productivity software that runs on Java/AJAX and is completely free - it looks exactly like MS Office and they have exactly the same UI and the same sort of look and buttons and Word and Excel and Powerpoint - I'm not sure whether they're walking on very solid legal ground but it was fun to check them out. And they had these two gorgeous girls in gold glittery outfits playing rock'ed out versions of classical pieces on violins on a stage (kinda the Vanessa Mae style) so they were definitely drawing big crowds. Microsoft had its own corner too and a horde of respectful admirers sitting on the floor around some of our sales folks demo-ing Vista and Office 12. Felt pretty good to see that and feel a part of it. And letsee... what else - I drooled over portable media players, spent some time watching a bunch of college kids playing Dead or Alive on XBox kiosks, managed to stop myself from pocketing some gorgeous mp3 players, checked out cellphones of all shapes and colors and sizes, did hi-fives with the rest of the team every time we saw a Windows Mobile device, watched replays on huge huge gigantic screens of Korean footballers kicking past the Italian goalkeeper in 2002 and wild crowds erupting in red frenzy, bought myself a pineapple Fanta (nice, better than the standard orange), stood in front of a two wheeled robot chanting "Dae Han Min Kuk!", laughed at another robot with Einstein's head, decided I want to get me a new laptop - one of those ultra sleek ultra light ones, and generally spent a very nice afternoon geeking out.

Also had Korean bingsu for the last time today - if I ever ended up making a "Top 5 desserts of all time and space", then bingsu would definitely be in that list. It's definitely the most amazing thing I've tried out here in Korea - it's a bowl full of very finely crushed ice, almost snow, and then they pour fruits and ice cream or frozen yogurt and this amazing sweet red bean paste over that, and the final result is heaven! Specially if the fruits are like pineapple and kiwi and cherries, which are all my favorites.

Sigh...

I'm definitely going to miss that. Along with a ton of other things about Seoul - it's always sad to leave a city just when you start getting comfortable in it - I mean, I've just about reached a point where I don't feel lost and an outsider anymore and now it's time to leave. Although it'll be nice to go home too - I miss Seattle and it's going to be wonderful to see the crowd back there again. It's funny though how my mental state has oscillated from "Wow, this is so exciting" to "Where am I??" to "Hmmm... I think I'm beginning to figure this out" to "Bummer, no, I'm not" to "This is awesome fun" to "Sob, I wanna go home!" to "Ok, I'm finally getting this" to "Awww... now I'm going to miss Seoul!" through the past three weeks. But I'm very very glad I came and I think on the whole I had a fabulous time and I absolutely would love to come back here some day.

Anyway, gotta pack now - my flight's at 10 am tomorrow and it takes an hour and a half to get to the airport, so basically I've got to leave the hotel at some obscene time.

And my next update's going to be from downtown Tokyo.

So long, Seoul!

Hard to believe it's already time to leave - three weeks have gone by pretty darn quickly. And I've seen a ton of new places and tried out a ton of new things and met some really awesome people - on the whole, my trip's been rather a success.

Visited the Samsung offices today to make a presentation to the development team there - I think that went off pretty well - the dev lead was really friendly and had a ton of questions during and after my talk, which made the whole thing a whole lot more interesting than if I were the only one speaking for the whole hour. Greg later told me that he's normally very tough and he isn't always so nice, but I thought he was awfully sweet. The rest of the team was rather shy, but I was pretty impressed at the turnout - there were more than 40 developers in that room. I have to admit it was slightly intimidating at first, but then I kinda switched into TA mode and pretended I was back at UT facing my students, and it was ok after that. There was still definitely a thread in my brain going "ok, you're just blabbering - move on to the next slide" and I was also pretty worried about my throat - it's still a bit sore since my cold over the weekend, and when I'd done a dry run of the talk with the Microsoft team onTuesday, I'd had quite a bit of trouble - I could barely speak halfway into the talk and had to stop several times to let my throat recover. Gotta hate colds! Fortunately, everything behaved today, so it all went off well.

Got back to the Microsoft building around 4-ish or so - the team had planned a "graduation party" for me, so we went out to this totally amazing Korean barbecue place for dinner - Korean barbecue rocks! And I think it's a fitting end to my cuisinary adventures in Seoul. I don't think I've eaten so much in ages.

Pics:

Here's all of us at work before heading out:

And here we are at dinner - I love how we sat on cushions on the floor and cooked everything on grills built into the table. And after spending the whole day in 5.5 inch heels (I had to dress formal for the talk) it was such a joy to take those darned shoes off and just sit down. For sure everybody said they looked great, but why does looking nice have to come at such a painful price - my feet aren't going to forgive me for weeks! The agony!!!

Anyway, here we are at dinner:

Ok, my mom's buzzing me online, so I'm going to scuttle for now. Tomorrow's my last day here at work, and then it's off to Tokyo!

More later...

Monday Update

Not bad - Korea tied France in the game last night! Very very cool!

Overslept a bit today, but fortunately by the time I woke up, my visiting virus had decided that I sleep way too much and it wasn't having any fun. So it left. My cold's gone! I must say that was the shortest real cold I've ever had - I say "real" coz I've had a few "pretend" colds where my throat goes "I might I might not" for an evening and then all's quiet after that. Those don't count. A "real" cold is when you're actually sniffing and you can't pronounce your P's and T's and M's and your head feels like a train station in 1879 and you thank all the powers that be for the fact that human beings don't breathe cutaneously. Ew!

Anyway, just four more days left on my Seoul trip. And then I'm off to Japan. Yu-jung's charted out an itinerary for me in Tokyo - with pictures and instructions on where to buy tickets and everything. That's just totally amazing - she is an absolute sweetheart! I'm going to miss the group here - they've all been so very sweet. I do hope they visit Redmond sometime. We went to lunch today at a place that was having some sort of a football promotion and one of the devs picked up a "Go Korea" scarf for me. I told them I'd wear it in Tokyo - the rivalry between the two countries is rather strong. The cheering around here when Australia beat Japan in the World Cup game a week or so ago was about as loud as if Korea had won! Although, that was SOME game - 3 goals in the last 12 minutes! Woo!

And I'm off - more later...

Sniff....

Wend do Inzadog agaid doday. Ab dowd wid a bad gold. Don'd dow where I bigged id ub, bud id'z very irridading. Hobe id goes away zood.

Oh bubber.

Yep, unfortunately, I've decided to pick up a cold here - I guess it's not very surprising considering that my immune system isn't used to such a different environment. But man, it's such a pain to have to spend a weekend feeling crappy. I did still go out today - it was a lovely sunshiny day, so I went to Insadong again - I think that is easily my favourite street in all of Seoul - it's just so much fun to browse around in all the art stores. I bought a few more souvenirs and some gifts for friends, and then I went and had really spicy burning hot oyster tofu soup, which did make my sinuses feel a lot better for a while. By sunset though, I was beginning to feel ehhhh again, so I spent the rest of the evening as a couch potato - I'm on my third consecutive movie right now. I think I'm going to try my "sleep 18 hours at a stretch in a really warm room and bore the cold out of your system" therapy tomorrow - it always works!

This bug has gotta go.

More later...