Christmas Cookies!

Mad thanks to recipe-providing cookie heroes Cousin Lis (via Facebook) and my mom (via telephone call at 6:30 AM EST). The sugar cookies on the left are my great-great grandmother's recipe, which, according to my mom's calculations, have now been made in three different centuries on three different continents. Asia, represent!

East Coast, Day 3: The Beach

At last, the third and final installment of our East Coast photo posts. Amazing how easy it is to get behind on these things when you're actually using your free time to do something other than sit around and watch slingboxed college football while trying to recover from last week in time for next! We've also got some photos from our Royal Asiatic Society trip to Yeoju, but on that count I'll have to keep you in suspense . . .

Anyway. The third and final day of our Thanksgiving excursion to Sokcho/Yangyang was spent, for the most part, trekking back across the country, though this time by the faster and less-scenic southern route. However, as we drove south along the beach, my lovely wife reminded me that I had never touched (any branch of) the Pacific, so we persuaded our convoy to stop for an impromptu romp at the seaside.First, we spent a while scampering about some rocky tidepools at one end of a small harbor, where your very own Nana suddenly transformed into amateur marine biologists, while I hovered above, furiously clicking the shutter.
The finds included some starfish and one particularly pointy sea-urchin, which Naomi said would have been delicious, had we not already had our fill of half-dead sea creatures earlier in the weekend.
After the tidepools, then, we took a stroll on a lovely beach, where the brilliance of the sand and the beauty of the waves were marred only by the rusting barbed-wire encircling another of the ubiquitous bunkers--long-disused since defection became the popular avenue of infiltration for North Korean spies (though they still keep the beaches spotlit at night).



Still, even this reminder that we were only a day's march from the edge of the free world couldn't keep us down on this bright, clear November day. See how Nana throws geopolitical caution to the wind as she frolics in the waves!
Now, it was all fun and games until Nana stumbled upon a chilling sight while searching for seashells by the seashore . . . Nefarious instrument of the international communist conspiracy, or innocent pair of nail-clippers? You be the judge:Also, the day did NOT end well for the four delicious ducks our party ate for lunch. YUM.