Wooden Spoon Grab Bag

 • Sung-sil and Oh Sun, two of the super-fun women teachers driving me to dinner.

Me: “You guys seem to really love each other.”

Them:  “We do. Sometimes.”

Me: “Sometimes love. The only kind there is.”

• Another 25-bowl dinner at a vegetarian restaurant with a beautiful lotus pond outside.

The delicious brown rice was purple.

• Stop at a Daiso $1 store. My contribution to the Korean economy? A wooden soup spoon.

• Tangent: When I first moved to San Francisco, I bought a wooden spoon at the Zen Center sale for 25 cents. Along with an orange plastic bowl, some chopsticks and a few thrift store pots and pans, this was what I brought to the house I moved to with my then-girlfriend, now-wife. She had a Pinto car, real furniture and kitchen appliances, I had the wooden spoon.

I still do.

Well, now I have two.

• Going to the airport, we drove over the Incheon Bridge. Our host thought it was the longest bridge in Asia and it felt like it. However, further research (thanks, Google) shows that the longest bridge over water is in Louisiana and 23 miles long. The longest road bridge is in Thailand at 33 miles and the longest bridge in general ( a rail bridge) in China over 100 miles long! The Incheon Bridge was 11 miles. Just in case you were wondering.

• Line for foreigners entering at airport customs. Some 800 people.

  Line for citizens. Eight.

  Sometimes it pays off to be an American citizen.

• Numbers Nerd says: “Yesterday my 600^th blog since I started it in Korea two and a half years ago."
Time to collect the greatest hits in a book?