Testing my blog/Facebook connection… Ignore this post; I’ll be deleting it momentarily.

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Today Haley and I went to the beach with my friend and her son. She and I put on our SPF 45 waterproof sunscreen at home, so it would have lots of time to soak in before we went swimming. When we got there, the weather was lovely — nice and overcast (though still hot). Because it was a much less popular beach on a weekday, there weren’t too many people 🙂 We were there for maybe two hours total. And, like I said, it was overcast for most of that time. Alas, 45 times my natural sun protection is still zero 🙁

So when we first moved to Korea, I thought they had the noisiest, crappiest power lines on the face of the planet. Then I found out that that terrible, incessant noise was made by insects, not the power lines. We don’t have cicadas where I’m from, but they’re these big bugs, kind of like giant grasshoppers. They make a whirring, droning noise that is louder the hotter it is. They can also fly, and I’ve woken up a couple of times in the middle of the night because Hooligan was going nuts trying to get the cicada taunting her from the other side of the window screen.

What I didn’t realize is the sheer variety of noises that cicadas make. Most of the noises I’ve thought were birds have, in fact, been cicadas. Here, listen for yourself to the cicada in this tree (and his friends in neighboring trees…)

Between packing for my business trip to Hong Kong and getting ready for tonight’s dinner party, we made time to come down to the river. The water has warmed up a lot in the last week; it was pretty cold right after the big storm, but now the reservoir has been warming in the sun. Haley is finding litter to remove from the river.

I was a little unsure about the hotel when I heard it was in “the bar district,” but it turned out to be really nice and had a beautiful swimming pool that Meg and I had all to ourselves at ten in the morning:

While in Seoul we also visited the Changdeokgung Palace, which dates from 1405.  Here is Meg in the palace and me in front of the main gate:

Afterwards, we walked to a traditional Korean spa near the beach.  We were the only Caucasians in the spa.  It was a women-only naked spa and it was clear to the rest of the women that we didn’t know the protocol, but they were very welcoming and helpful to us (I think partially because they could see that we were a mother and daughter together.)  One scrubbed down very, very clean in showers before entering the spa area where there were soaking pools from very, very hot to very cool and saunas of varying temperatures.  It was clear that it was a place for female bonding, with all ages from little toddlers to grannies so stooped over they needed to be helped to walk.  Meg loved it and would have stayed the whole four hours allowed if I hadn’t tired of it sooner.

It was altogether a wonderful visit!