My partner and I went to Seoul last weekend for the hell of it. A dear friend warned me that as a vegetarian I should bring a stash of saltine crackers with me on the plane. I chose to ignore her advice. And I lost one kilo because of it.

Koreans have never met a pig they didn’t like. You see barbecued hog jaws piled on top of each other at outdoor markets. They love their cows too. At most local restaurants, you sit Indian-style on the floor and inhale a feast of cow inards and side dishes that include tiny, whole fish seasoned with what looks like diarrhea juice. Yummy!

During our day trip to the DMZ, our tour bus stopped at some fly-infested, Korean barbecue dive for lunch. On the way there, the tour guide asked if anyone was a vegetarian. I was delighted that she asked this question and was happy to discover that there were two other herbivores. So the totemo genki tour guide pranced over to my seat and asked if egg was okay. I said yes and she smiled like I had just told her that she had won a million Yuan.

Egg. Hmmm, egg. How would it be served? Scrambled? Hard-boiled? Sunny side up? No, silly goose. Raw! My bowl of veggies came with a raw egg in the center.

It’s hard for me not to get “that face.” “That face” that my partner says annoys him until the cows come home. And I mean this quite literally as the waitress placed before him a sizeable portion of beef. “That face” that he says makes him see red. “That face” that says I’ve become Joan Collins on Dynasty.

My partner asked if I was going to eat my lunch. I looked at him with “that face” and said, “I’m not going to eat a fucking raw egg in some fly-infested shit-hole!” The men at the next table looked up from their dead cow. I said that I was going for a walk and quickly left. But my baby new that “going for a walk” was code for I was going to find some beer.

There was a gas station next door. I bought a can, sat at a table outside, contemplated my behavior and thought about the DMZ. I downed the tall boy quickly so that I would not get caught. You can’t visit the DMZ if you’ve had a drink earlier that day. Not even one. That’s like telling me I can’t have chocolate chip ice cream when I go to Baskin Robbins. Plus, I hate anyone telling me what I can and cannot do so it was my mission to have a drink before I stepped foot on North Korean soil.

Thank God I opted for the hotel room with executive lounge access. With the exception of one lunch, I ate all my meals at the exec lounge in the Westin Chosun. Scrambled eggs with salad for breakfast. Cheese with salad for dinner. All three days and nights. Now that I weigh 70 kilos, I’m two kilos away from my flat stomach, summer weight. I should go back to Seoul for a week!

Two things you might not have known — Japanese LOVE kitsch and the prime minister’s wife has a blog. If you’re wondering what those two have to do with each other, check out the photo of the Barney cushion on it.

You may wonder what that thing is. Please, let me enlighten you.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Japan’s First Lady decided to give the wife of the leader of the free world, aka Mrs. Bush, on her first state visit to the White House. Barney is their dog’s name. If it looks hand-made, it’s because it is. She says in her blog that she asked a friend of hers to make it. She also says Mrs. Bush loved it.

I, for one, would love to know what she really thought. Okay, I admit that I give people hand-knit sweaters as baby gifts (fyi: I’m a good knitter so it’s none of that lopsided stuff). And, maybe, just maybe, I would consider giving one to a muckety muck, who has everything in the world that I could afford. But a cushion???
It’s not even big enough for the dog!

Please let me know if anyone has seen this dumped in the garbage somewhere. Or would they burn something like this to make sure no one will find out and it doesn’t turn into an international incident?

If you walk around Tokyo these days, you’ll find that a lot of the kiosks (newsstands) at JR stations are closed.
You may think it must be a holiday or something, but no. I was watching the news one evening when I found out why. Japan Railways went a little bit overboard with its restructuring and discovered too late that it fired, I mean downsized, too many of the part-time workers, who man the stalls. One in three stalls are closed, as a result, which means Japanese commuters won’t be able to readily buy their drinks, candy, and “sports newspapers” aka dirty magazines. I’m trying to think of something clever to say about this situation, but I really can’t. Sometimes, the news speaks for itself.