September 2004 Archives

minae, seungjin, and i headed off to the guggenheim via central park. minae was absolutely blown away by the artwork while seungjin and i sat back a bit ... confused. :p

the guggenheim

right next door was the cooper hewitt design museum, which, for $10, wasn't really worth all the neo-fascist ikea-looking furniture...

nearly a month after saying goodbye to all the samsung interns last month, a handful of us met up at a little diner near columbia university for brunch last saturday. it was a bit strange seeing them all outside the confines of s.a.i.t. (samsung advanced institute of technology), but nevertheless awesome. everyone got to meet my brother and minae, and i finally got to meet doeun's boyfriend, a really nice guy...

joohan, jungkwan, me, doeun, and soojin in front of the diner

paul and minae (doeun and soojin in the back)

we're off to college!

doeun, me, and minae

paul, doeun, doeun's boy, and joohan

haha, what is everyone looking at?

this could've come straight out of a catalog for columbia! korean students unite!

while southern cuisine doesn't suite my palette all that much, one thing that i do enjoy is sweet tea... they really only make it in the south, and it's like sweetened iced tea, but kicked up a notch about twenty bazillion times.

a cozy romantic dinner at "top of the hill" brought to minae's lips her first glass of sweet tea, which, from that point on, is pretty much the only thing she drank the entire weekend. between that and my not-so-chocolate-chippy cookies, her blood sugar level must have been off the charts~ and while i thought she was hyper all weekend b/c of me, it was probably all that sugar :p

minae's first glass of sweet tea

another first was p.f. chang's, america's apology for bastardizing chinese food. we ordered perhaps the two best main dishes - mongolian beef and dan-dan noodles, and of course, all minae drank was sweet tea...

notice her twitchy chopsticks from her shaky hands... too much sugar i tell you!

who dat?

saturday night, minae prepared an awesome dinner for me and shu (but i made the rice! . . . but kind of failed at that too :( ) and it went a little something like this:

the kalbi marinates in minae's secret recipe special technique must be used to the 계란마리... ... for it to look like this (fried tofu on the left, the egg dish on the right) minae prepares the 돼지불고기 (korean pork bbq)... ... as i set the table for 3 kalbi grilled on the portable gas stove ... korean style!

not shown here was a dish of 됀장찌개 (bean curd soup) and a cucumber side dish, made from scratch, of course... culinary genius, i tell you!

i was dragged to this place THREE times!

joyce, me, doeun joyce, doeun, me... again half-a-joyce, soojin, me, and jihyun seunghoon, joyce, minae, and me

i've finally gotten all settled here at my new apartment at duke, and this time i promise to stay here more than six months (since four years ago i've been moving an average of once every six months...)

after all the times i've moved, i've finally gotten a handle of how to properly interior decorate my place... i'll first start of with my kitchen - the kitchen is an open kitchen, which originally looked over a big open space. so i decided to add a kitchen island (from ikea), surrounded by three comfy stools (from target). add a picture in front of the sink and voila~ a nice cozy kitchen warmly lit by a row of overhead track lights.

me kitchen

the next major room in my apartment is, of course, the bedroom, which i wanted to keep simple and free of any distractions, like my computer which i would normally have put in, which freed up a lot of room. so i bought a queen size malm bed (which, by the way, kay decided to copy), hung up a few pictures, and lit the place brightly with a 100 W overhead light and a 50-100-150W lamp. my apartment faces east, so every morning i have the sun shine on my face, unlike my old bedroom, which didn't have a window to the outside at all.

me bedroom

so where's my desk, you ask? since my living room is pretty large, i decided to put my desk next to the wall opposite of what is soon-to-be-delivered hdtv... now if only shu would hurry up and decide on a plant to put next to the futon for me...

the living room

once my tv comes in, i'll snap a picture of the other side... last, but certainly not least, is the bathroom. it actually has two doors that lead into - one from the bedroom, and one from the kitchen/front-entrance area, giving the entire apartment a really open feeling. the tiling on the floor is the similar to the stained stone tiling in the kitchen, which gets warm fairly quickly from the track lighting.

me throne

well, that's it for now~ i'll snap a pic of the new samsung TV i get once it gets here, and a shot of the double-door window in the living room -- it's pretty sweet!