Paris

OK, let's summarize my life right now.

A year and a half ago, after graduating from Biola University with a degree in journalism, I finished up an internship and headed east to South Korea. I taught English outside of Seoul and had the time of my life living abroad, eating exotic food and meeting incredible people.

I planned to move to Mexico for six months with my best friend, but things took a turn when I got an e-mail from some long lost relatives living in Paris. Right around the time the third baby will arrive, they're moving back to the States and offered to pay for my ticket out to help them out for a few months. After thinking about it, rolling a dice and consulting bird signs, I decided I couldn't turn down a free trip to Europe. So I'm going for 4.5 months, come mid-February, to the country of style and fashion. Continuing my love affair with beautiful churches, I'm intensely anticipating seeing Notre Dame and soaking in as much European architecture as possible. This prolongs my longterm job hunt -- again -- but to all you people working the 9-5 grind, I say, "See ya, suckas!"

The Cambodian Girls + 1

I haven't decided whether the rewards of traveling alone outweigh traveling with friends. One one hand, there's safety in numbers and it's cheaper to split a $7 room.

Then again, the benefits of flying solo are unending when it comes to meeting local people, a utopic dream I think every good traveler has.

I was taking it easy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and decided to give the see-ya salute to the flocks of tuk-tuk drivers on every corner and instead scout out the city on foot. My first stop, the National Museum, was right around the corner from my guest house. What's usually an annoying hiccup of traveling alone -- asking someone to take a picture for me -- turned out to be the ticket to one of the best days I've had in this country. I ended up hanging out with two awesome Khmer college students for the whole day after I asked them to snap a quick photo.

I like to think the adventure began when all three of us squeezed onto Than's little moto and whizzed over to a tiny vegetarian place for a delicious $1.25 lunch -- cheaper because it wasn't for tourists. Then it continued as we wove through craaazy traffic to the Russian market, which is pretty much exactly like other markets, except it has a more interesting name. It was there that I learned that Cambodians love their sugarcane. Glasses of freshly crushed cane juice and chunks of tender, dripping cane can be picked up for a quarter.

But how do you eat sugarcane?

Yeah, I thought you swallow it, too. The more I chewed, the more the juice was gone, the more it felt like I was chomping on, you know, wood. Probably because I was. I followed Than's cue and spit it back out before quickly going for the next bite.

Hoeun left for an appointment, so Than and I continued our grand tour around the city as we headed toward the Royal Palace. Right in the throbbing heart of downtown, surrounded by a French colonial wall, the immaculate gardens, pagodas, halls and art are magnets for nomad backpackers, tour groups and locals. I could have sat around the beautiful gardens and halls all day, gazing at the detailed architecture.

Wat Phnom was next, the pagoda the founding lady of the city erected on a hillside park, which coincidentally is covered with...MONKEYS! Monkeys are fun to watch -- from distance. They are known to be heartless when angry and I believe it. One guy almost got a close up view of some razor-sharp incisors when he offered up a piece of gum two inches from a monkey's face.

I got another taste of life as a local when the girls got me onto this river cruise past downtown Phnom Penh for a non-tourist price. I was the only white person on board and liked it that way. I'll never forget the generosity and warmth of these two Cambodian women. As unlikely as it is that I'll see them again, if there's one thing I've learned this year, it's that the world is small, so maybe, just maybe I'll get to return the favor of hospitality.

Baseball: As Korean as Kimchi

From the fond memoirs of father-son trips to Wrigley Park, to the black and white footage of Babe Ruth waddling 'round the bases, it's always been a given: baseball is the American sport.

But the truth is, the baseball cards are getting dusty in the attic and attendance in stadiums around the country are free-falling. Not so in Korea. The most popular sport is celebrated in a very American way, with beer, popcorn and warring fan cheers.

I can't tell you the first thing about baseball, but when my friend Raeann invited me to a game pitting the LG Twins against the SK Wynverns, there was no refusing.

When I left my apartment, it was 2:30 on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I was happy, even stuffed like a sardine on the subway, in a moshpit-like tangle of people. Some say that if you look at the contents of a woman's purse you can tell a lot about her life, but I'd say the same is true of Seoul's subway system. But I wasn't thinking about the beauty of diversity when I got off at the wrong station, nor was I thinking about how great Seoul's public transportation is while I waited for the next express train -- for 20 minutes. It wasn't like I was going off the beaten path in some rural adventure. I just sucked at decision making that day. I would have sprinted up the stairs to meet Raeann and her Korean friend, Jeong, if the boiling ocean of people had let me. But there we finally were, 2 hours later, beside the 2002 Olympic Sports Complex, about to see two amazing teams go head to head. And I was happy. Within minutes of settling into our seats by first base, I started to inspect the people around us. The atmosphere was a throwback to what I imagine American baseball games were like in its heyday. The stadium was packed with young families and couples, everyone intent on the game. Cute moms in baseball hats carried jersied babies and a father held his son's hand as they screamed the cheers in unison. The cheers were a big reason why I couldn't stop thinking about the U.S. In the tradition of the Asian stance on copyright, songs like "It's a Small World" Eminem's "Without Me" and Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You" were hijacked with team slogans. Yeah. Let me tell you, I had way more fun slaughtering Korean lyrics as I stood shoulder to shoulder with LG Twins fans than at any American sports game I've been to. So whether American baseball is really dying, I don't know, but be assured that the game lives on in Korea.

The details of the contest that night are a blur, but I came away knowing we lost, the caramel popcorn was mind-blowing and we were way better at cheering than the other team.

Cutesy in Review: Couple Tees

Seoul hasn't been short on "cutesy" fashion since cell phone charms and Hello Kitty. The couple tee trend, however, pushes style to a sickening level.
The question everyone has when they see sweethearts in couple tees, is ...really? Of course. How else would attractive young couples declare their togetherness? As the name suggests, affectionate lovers sport shirts with just one slight difference: one has a boy teddy bear, the other a girl teddy. Just to keep things straight.

I met this cute couple in their matching tee get-up on a leisurely tour of Gyeongbukgung Palace downtown. They had clearly answered the, "Do I like you that much?" question and assumed that everything else would fall into place. I was so delighted to see them that I forgot to take a picture of the teddy bear. Not every couple tee has teddies -- some have Mickey and Minnie mouse, some are more sports jersey-like, but the bears get my vote for their brand of cutesy cheese, hands down.

Apgujeong Bowling

"If anyone told me I'd break one hundred, I'd have told them they're crazy," I said, standing on the slippery bowling lane in my retro blue and red shoes.

Hiddens in the maze of Apgujeong's streets, in the basement of a hotel, is a small, ill-functioning bowling alley where about 100 people from New Harvest Ministries met for a night of fun and backslapping. Ages ranged from 18 to 40-somethings, but the skill level was the same -- terrible. I've noticed that Koreans view leisurely fitness time as a debit against their studying hours, so I shouldn't have been surprised that the high score of the night was about 160.

It's bowling with the people in my Bible study that makes it fun -- the crazy faces, ball wars, smack talk and one-upping each other with new tossing styles. With all that, I did, in fact, manage to break one hundred, but can I do it again? You're probably crazy.