Heart and Seoul

Still here in South Korea, and still enjoying time with our newest grandson and big brother. Everyone is doing great and I'll have more to say about our little men another day, but today I want to talk about Seoul. 

Hubs and I spent three nights in the city last week to give the family of four a little time on their own and also give me a chance to see the sights. I absolutely loved Seoul! The city is clean, modern but still old world in places, friendly and so interesting. Also, the women here are beautiful, and oh so chic! I wish I could pull off trendy the way some of the Korean women do. 

My daughter lives less than an hour's train ride from Seoul Station and we booked tickets ahead of 

time online so easy peasy.  More or less. Once we got the hang of the system it was easy peasy. Bonus they assign you a seat which I appreciate. 

Once we arrived in Seoul Station we hopped the metro in the direction of our hotel, got a little turned around and ended up taking a cab a short distance. People like to say English is everywhere, but not true. Yes there is some English here but there's also a fair amount of pantomime and finger pointing at menu pictures or your neighbor's plate to get what you want. 

We stayed in Aloft Seoul Myeondong and I would highly recommend. The location was perfect, and the staff was wonderfully helpful and kind. Probably the best front desk experience I've had in a hotel in a long while. From our hotel we could walk to several nearby metro lines and to many of the city's best known sites. And walk we did. According to my phone app we walked 20 miles in three days which was probably a good thing because see below-

Once we were settled into the hotel we made a bee line for one of our favorite foods-Mandu aka Korean dumplings aka pure deliciousness. After lunch we ventured into the subway and more or less figured out which line to take (with a bit of help) to get us to our destination-Gyeonbokgung Palace. 

The original 'Palace of Shining Happiness' was completed in 1394 and was the main royal residence of the Joseon Dynasty.   

Side note-traveling somewhere new always reminds me how much I don't know about so many things particularly in this part of the world.  

In the early 20th century much of the palace was destroyed, but since that time the original palace continues to be gradually restored. 

The complex also contains the National Palace Museum of Korea and the National Folk Museum, the latter of which we visited and really enjoyed. 

On the down side, we've all been fighting colds and in my case the cold is winning so by late afternoon I was running out of steam. We went back to the hotel to rest before walking to dinner at a nearby spot the hotel staff recommended, then called it a night soon after. The end of a fun full day in this fabulous city. 

Tomorrow Seoul Tower (or how I always end up riding a cable car in a foreign city) the lantern festival and more...

...because there always is on From This Side of the Pond. 

Brilliant! Remember you heard it here first...British Words from A to Zed (Week 6)

So….ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL??? I’m pretty sure you have to yell whenever you use that phrase. And let me go ahead and call it by its pet name here and rephrase that question…ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTIE??? Not quite the same, is it? Footie sounds like a game you play with babies but here when we say footie we mean football and by football we mean soccer if you’re an American and, if you are and you refer to football as soccer you will not win any friends.

Daugher1 and a friend met two British boys one evening as they were riding into downtown Greenville on their university’s shuttle bus. These two boys are attending her university in South Carolina on a footie scholarship (‘cept I’m pretty sure in South Carolina they call it soccer). When daughter1’s friend realized these boys were British she told them that my daughter lived in England so a conversation followed. And when I asked Daughter 1 what they said she reported, ‘You know mom...the usual questions…where am I from and who do I support? And I said, ‘Did you make sure you looked at their clothing before you replied?’ Because when you live in the UK it is critical to know who you support. As in which UK football team do you follow because you must follow a football team if you live here. I’m pretty certain it’s a requirement for obtaining a resident visa. And my two girls can do a brilliant rendition of the Manchester United cheer but you don’t want to break into the Man U cheer if your audience is full of Arsenal fans…or Chelsea fans…or fans of anyone other than Man U. And just fyi, my girls never want to break out in the Man U cheer and will only do their totally brilliant version in the privacy of our home when my hubs and I beg and plead with them because they’re so cute when they sing.

And speaking of brilliant…that word comes a close second to gobsmacked in the listing of my all time favourite British words. I bet I hear the word brilliant at least seven or eight times a day. And it may be used to describe a football match, an economic summit, or a fine Cheddar. And often it’s ‘brill’ as opposed to brilliant. Actually as much as Americans love slang I’m really surprised they haven’t latched onto the word brilliant. I think I’m going to use it once I’m back in the US… I’ll let you know how it goes. If you start hearing it around America you’ll know where it started.

Rugby is also huge here and I’ll go ahead and admit that I find it a lot more fun to watch than football (that’s soccer people!) I like to call it rugger because that’s the informal word for rugby here and I’m all about keeping the blog friendly-like.

Then there’s the sport known as Cricket which is officially England’s national game. If you’re going to a match you must go with someone who understands the bazillion intricacies of this sport because I gotta say the game is a bit confusing. It’s not anything like baseball with the exception of the fact that there are bats and balls and great uniforms. Sometimes a Cricket match can last more than one day. Huh??


One last thought about sports…my girls attended an International School and our sports teams were part of an International league. This means they competed against other International Schools in places like Munich, Brussels, Paris, Franfurt, and even Cairo. Daughter2 was on the swim team and twice went to meets held in Egypt…if you tell kids the championship meet will be held in Cairo suddenly lots of kids are trying out for the swim team!

Daughter2 is funny. We couldn’t wait for her to ring us to tell about all she was seeing on her visit. (Did you notice I said ring and not phone? It’s always ring here…as in ‘I’ll ring you later.’) Anyway, when she finally did ring she was very excited. We asked if she had seen the pyramids and her reply was, ‘Yeah, yeah, but guess what???!’ And we’re on pins and needles waiting to hear something fabulous and she says, ‘Guess what they have here….Cinnamon toast crunch cereal!!!’ What? You’re in Egypt and you’re most impressed by the fact that the family you are staying with is feeding you cinnamon toast crunch cereal??? It’s important to note here that we cannot get Cinnamon Toast crunch in the UK and that it is her favourite.

My cutie pie is second from the right smiling really big. It might have something to do with the fact that she is in Cairo with her friends.

Or it could be the memory of her breakfast cereal.

You know what they say...You can take the teenager out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the teenager….or something like that.

viva la France

Okay….back to France…Saturday morning we were greeted by our mini bus driver and Laurent who gave us a ‘to go’ bag of warm croissants (naturally) for the ride and then we were off to tour some of the champagne houses in the region. Let me just tell you that when you see the cellars of even one house you realize pretty quickly that a whole lot of champagne is consumed around the world. We visited just three houses and the number of bottles is staggering.

Our first stop was Moet and Chandon which is also home to Dom Perignon. Perignon was a Benedictine monk who was cellar master of the Abbey at Hautvillers near Epernay, a role in which he apparently excelled. The abbey doubled its vineyard holdings under his management and he is buried in a section of the Abbey normally reserved for abbots.

The tour began with a short film and then we headed into the wine cellars with our guide who explained the process as we walked. When they talk about wine cellars here they are talking about caves. There are literally miles of caves and thousands of bottles tucked into every nook and cranny.

The champagne houses have precise procedures they follow to ensure quality…bottles are hand turned or ‘riddled’ by someone whose job title is actually ‘The Riddler’. There may have been a Batman joke or two at this point in our tour. And we’re sure the riddler must have some serious carpal tunnel.

After leaving Moet we went on to a small house known as LeBrun where we sat in what felt like a family room and tasted three varieties of their champagne before driving into Reims for lunch. The cathedral in Reims is a World Heritage Site with stained glass windows designed by Chagall.

We had lunch and a stroll around town before heading to the final champagne house of the tour, Tattinger, which we all pronounced as spelled but were told it should actually be pronounced ‘tatt-en-zhay’. The cellars here are positively amazing. The oldest parts of the chalk caves were first excavated by Gothic slaves under Roman occupation in the fourth century. A few centuries later the caves were enlarged by the Abbey monks who used them to store the champagne they traded. The Abbey was destroyed during the French revolution but portions remain, including a bit of the chapel and some interesting staircases. The monks actually carved stairs into the ceiling so when they came down at night (oh yeah, no electricity) they could put their hands up and feel the steps to know where to put their feet. Those monks were pretty industrious and pretty clever too!

As an aside, whenever I think of monks (which isn't actually all that often) I remember a postcard Daughter2 sent to her friend back in the states from a trip to France we took shortly after arriving in the UK...it was blustery and after visiting an abbey her postcard said this. 'Hi...it's really cold here. We saw monks. Love, M.' She's too cute. I miss my girls. Sigh.

Where was I? Oh yes, back to now...after Tattinger we returned to the inn because it had been at least four hours since we'd had any bread and cheese. We really enjoyed getting to know our hotelier Laurent. He had quite a sense of humor and told some great stories. I especially loved it when he told us about the 'crazy' boulanger (baker) in town and added. 'I like crazy though...how could we laugh if there wasn't any crazy.' And he said it in his charming French accent all while wearing a tres fashionable scarf.

On Sunday we drove slightly under an hour out into the beautiful French countryside to visit just your typical French chateau…Vaux Le Vicomte.

The chateau is located in Maincy and was built from 1658-1661 for Nicolas Fouquet who was court financier to Louis XIVth. Fouquet only lived in this magnificent home for three weeks before he was arrested. Seems King Louie didn’t appreciate an underling having a grander home than the king and found a reason to have him imprisoned for the remainder of his life. Not saying he was a choir boy but many of the charges were made up and the punishment was more for daring to build a home better than the king’s. In fact, Louie took the architect, landscaper, and painter who worked together on Vaux Le Vicomte and moved them over to Paris to create his home in Versailles.

Vaux Le Vicomte’s biggest claim to fame though has to be its gardens. The landscape artist trained as an architect and this is apparent in the terraces, fountains and lakes around the chateau. You can rent a golf cart type vehicle to tour the 60+acre property but we just took a nice long walk which was a lovely way to end our weekend in France.

Sunday we were back on the chunnel train for the ride home to England. Hubs drove so I could snooze and pretend we weren’t approximately 328 feet under the English Channel.

And the moving company is coming today to survey our goods and see if they will all fit in our allotted sea and air shipment and I’m pretty sure it will stress me out and I may just decide to think about the French countryside instead.

Why are French women thin?

I’m sure I don’t know. In fact I’m a little concerned that no amount of time spent in the gym this week is going to make up for all the bread and cheese we consumed while in France last weekend. Fabulous bread and cheese are served everywhere you go and you are not allowed to say no thank you. I maybe didn’t try too hard but really you can’t say no. And we for sure didn’t want to…we were in the heart of Brie country for goodness sakes. Did you know that in France they often serve their cappuccinos with a ginormous dollop of whipped cream on top? Yikes!

We had such a wonderful weekend seeing the Champagne region. We stayed in a teeny tiny village (more like a street actually) called Saint Ouen sur Morin in a charming ‘auberge’ (inn) owned by Monsieur Laurent and his lovely (and thin- even-though- she eats- bread –and- cheese) wife. Let me just say that Laurent could rock a scarf like nobody’s business. Turns out prior to being a hotelier he was a fashion designer in Paris. All the guys on our trip discussed whether they could get away with the same look as Laurent and all the women pretty much agreed that they could if (1) they were French and (2) they were former Fashion designers so basically, no, they couldn’t get away with the look.


I’m going to break the weekend into deux posts (there’s my awesome French again) since we managed to pack a whole lotta fun into three days. Three couples of the five arrived Thursday evening and then two more couples joined us the next day. On Friday we piled into a couple of cars and drove about a half hour out into the French countryside to the medieval town of Provins. Before I tell you about Provins I must tell you that the Champagne region at the beginning of May is absolutely breathtaking. Fields of rapeseed are blooming literally everywhere you look and really a photograph cannot do it justice but I tried.

Rapeseed is used to make canola oil and also bio diesel fuels. There are also magnificent rapeseed fields in the UK but when we left Thursday the fields in England were just a little bit later in the bloom cycle than those in France. All over the Champagne region we drove thru miles and miles of countryside surrounded by nothing but fields of yellow mixed with fields of bright green farmland. Every once in a while you’d pass a tiny village with stone buildings and sometimes a cathedral but mostly it was just the lush landscape.


The town of Provins is one of the best preserved medieval cities in France. The upper town (Ville Haute) is located within high 12th century ramparts. Eons ago Provins was famous for its fairs which were the most important in Europe. The city was also one of the first financial markets in Europe but that changed at the beginning of the 14th century because of new commercial routes, wars, and plagues…you know…typical medieval ‘stuff’.

Tour Cesar (the castle) towers over the town of Provins. This is a keep complete with turrets and a pyramid shaped roof which my husband and I climbed all the way to the tippy tippy top of (no small feat!) all while sucking in our stomachs. Let’s just say it’s a good thing we hadn’t eaten more bread and cheese than we did or we would not have fit thru the staircase, if you can even call it that. Narrow does not begin to describe the passageway.

Apparently alot was happening under the city too back in the day and one of the underground spaces is now a bookstore. Of course all the books are in French but it’s really pretty incredible to see. And it also makes me grateful I didn’t live in the Middle Ages. I've concluded after living in Europe that I’m more of a 21st century kind of girl.

We had a lovely day in Provins...

...the lovely day of course included lunch at an outdoor cafe which of course included cheese and bread. Late afternoon we meandered back thru the countryside to our quaint little inn. We drove to a neighboring small village for dinner that evening and had a typical four course meal…and by typical I mean naturellement, that one course was cheese and bread. And I also mean it was fabulous.

In part deux of this post I will write about our day touring some of the champagne houses and Sunday’s visit to a nearby chateau…tres tres magnifique! Au revoir pour maintenant.

Underwater Driving

Well, technically maybe I wasn't driving underwater but I did drive my car onto the Chunnel train on Thursday and then sat in that same car while the train engineer drove the actual train with me and my car in it across to France. And the Chunnel train does indeed run under the Channel and it's only a 30 minute ride from shore to shore. They post the 'escape route' on the wall in case you have to evacuate as you're crossing but I try really hard not to think about that.

Taking your car on the Chunnel is actually a fantastic way to get from England to France. You book your space online, show up 30 minutes before departure, drive up to the immigration window to show your passport, and then literally drive your car right onto the train. And you just sit in the car while the train crosses under the sea and you drive out of the train on the other side. Voila...you're in France. It's tres cool. My French is pretty impressive isn't it?

The really important thing to remember on this excursion is that when you exit the Chunnel train on the other side of the Channel you are in France and in France they drive ON THE RIGHT. And I'm in my British car so I'm sitting on the right hand side of the vehicle and there is a roundabout almost as soon as you come out of the train station and I have to say outloud about 100 times...GO RIGHT, GO RIGHT...LOOK LEFT, LOOK LEFT..yes, you know how to drive!

My husband had a meeting in Paris all last week so he arranged for a car to bring him out to the hotel we are in for the weekend. We are visiting the Champagne region of France with four other couples and our hotel is about an hour and a half outside of Paris as long as your driver doesn't go thru the center of Paris during Friday night rush hour and also if your driver doesn't get lost en route in which case it may take you four hours to get to that same hotel. He wasn't frustrated or anything though and if he had a blog I'm sure he wouldn't mention it at all.

This is another Bank Holiday weekend in the UK and I've said before that Bank Holidays are ideal for short breaks. I will write about our weekend once I'm back in the UK but for now let me just say that the French countryside in Springtime is almost as spectacular as the English countryside. And let me also just add that in the French countryside there is French food...and cheese...and champagne. There's an awful lot to love about the French countryside y'all.

In Bruges...just like the movie, only not

One thing we’ve discovered in our travels as new almost empty nesters is that we have to be in all the photos. When our girls travel with us they like to say we torture them with all the picture taking. These days though it’s just my husband and I so we spend a lot of time saying, ‘No, I was in the last one…you get in this one.’ We also spend a lot of time saying, ‘I wish the girls were here.’ Especially when we’re having lunch in a lovely outdoor café and we’re served this…

I’ve posted this picture especially for Daughter1…mussels are her absolute favourite. And Belgians claim to have invented the ‘french fry’ and may I just say they have those down to an art. Mussels and fries or moules et frites are served in just about every restaurant in Belgium. They always serve their frites with mayonnaise and they are yummy.

Good Friday we woke to sunny skies and after breakfast we hopped on a train to the town of Ghent. We took the first train we could find that said it stopped in Ghent but turns out it also stopped in about 10 other little burgs in the Belgian countryside so it took a little over an hour to get there. It was that darn language thing….we managed to decipher which was a quick train back to Brussels at the end of the day and it was only about 40 minutes. Course I insisted we ride the tram from the centre of Ghent back to the train station and that took us on a circuitous route around the city. As my husband mentioned (about 25 times) we could have just taken a taxi. He says tram is short for ‘Trying Reallyhard to Annoy Me’ but we did see a lot of the neighbourhoods around Ghent this way and it was great for people watching.

Ghent is a charming Flemish city filled with medieval buildings and famous for its huge gothic cathedral and its ancient Castle of the Counts. The River Leie runs thru Ghent and is dotted with the pretty old guildhouses and lots of restaurants and cafes with outdoor seating.

Our first stop was the castle-Het Gravensteen built in 1180 although apparently a wooden castle was sitting on this same spot even earlier.

It was home to the Counts of Flanders until they were no more and was later used as a courthouse and a prison. Castles becoming prisons is a recurring theme in Europe.

We wandered next down to the incredible Gothic cathedral known as St. Baafskathedraal, built in the 1200’s.

In a small side chapel inside this cathedral is one of Europe’s most well known paintings. The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by the brothers van Eyck, dating back to 1432, but with color so amazingly clear and bright it looks like it was painted yesterday. It is essentially the perfect painting to view on Good Friday as the centerpiece of the many panels is the Lamb, representing Christ’s sacrifice.

On Saturday (also bright and sunny and as I’ve mentioned before I’m all about the weather) we ventured onto the local trains once again, this time to the city of Bruges. This very lovely little town was at one time the center of the international cloth trade and lace making is still done here today.

Like Ghent, Bruges is also a medieval town with beautiful buildings, cobblestone streets and picturesque canals winding throughout…we spent the day visiting lovely old churches, shopping in the quaint little shops, and sitting in outdoor cafes just watching the people go by.

We were back in Brussels for dinner Saturday evening. There is a famous street in Brussels called Rue des Bouchers but what we might call restaurant row. Servers stand in all the restaurant doorways and try to coax you inside for a meal.

Since my husband is in Brussels quite often we went to a place called Vincent’s. One of the things I love most about my husband is that he makes friends wherever he goes and Brussels is no exception. This is our server for the evening standing beside my husband’s new Belgian friend whose name is Steve (although he told me I should call him Steve McQueen).

Anyway, we were going to eat at Vincent’s on Thursday evening but Steve McQueen told my husband he was going carp fishing that day and we should come Saturday instead. So that’s what we did. We had a traditional Belgian steak which was served with a sauce that was flambéed just before presentation. A perfect ending to our ‘short break’ in Belgium.

And one more thing I’ll add here about short breaks…

...they are always way too short!

Brussels…and I’m not talkin’ sprouts

My hubs travels to Belgium fairly often on business and since he was there last week for a meeting we decided to make a weekend of it and I would join him. They have a name for trips like this in the UK-they are called ‘short breaks’. Good Friday and Easter Monday are ‘Bank Holidays’ here which essentially means banks are closed as are most businesses. I caught the Eurostar from London to Belgium last Thursday-it’s a fast train and from the center of London you can be in the center of Brussels in only two hours. I’d love to tell you something interesting about the train journey but I pretty much sat down, listened to some instructions in English and woke up 2 hours later to someone speaking French. The Eurostar goes under the channel and the idea of that freaks me out a little bit so I love napping the journey away. If I’m being honest I pretty much love napping anytime.


We stayed in a hotel in Brussels and then took local trains to the towns of Ghent and Bruges over the weekend. I’m going to write about those cities in part deux of this post. Belgium is unusual in that two languages are spoken and what you hear will depend on where you are in the country. Some areas are French speaking and some are Flemish. Let’s just say that trying to navigate trains and timetables in Flemish adds an element of adventure to the whole experience. We’re very comfortable travelling around over here but even so we forget sometimes that English is not used everywhere…you do remember that fact pretty quickly however when you are standing in a train station in a foreign city trying to get to another foreign city and none of the signs have anything even remotely like English on them. I’m always impressed at the ease with which my friends from other countries are able to switch between the two, three, or four languages they speak. Impressed and a little bit envious. Multilingualism is a skill I wish I possessed.


Anyway, I arrived in Brussels Thursday afternoon and my hubs met me at the train. We spent Thursday evening walking around the town, looking in the shops and planning what we would eat. They excel at chocolate, waffles and mussels in this country so it did require some planning. Honestly, there are shops like this one every few feet-

And there are kiosks like this all around the city too-

And little booths making smoutebollen which are sugared donuts, and in fact the whole shopping street closest to the Grand Place smells like someone’s mama has just pulled a tray of sugar cookies out of the oven. Good thing we walked about 45 miles this weekend.



The Grand Place is the main square in Brussels and it is magnificent. Beautiful buildings all the way round with lots of outdoor cafes where you can sit and enjoy the view. The centrepiece is the Hotel de Ville which is Brussels Town Hall.

The spire on this building was built in 1449 and stands 315 feet high. It is also slightly crooked.

More beautiful buildings flank the Hotel de Ville including Le Renard which was at one time the guildhouse of the haberdashers and La Maison des Boulangers with it’s very beautiful dome topped by a dancing golden figure and also Le Roi d’Espagne which offers a great view of the square.

Of course we walked down to the very famous Manneken Pis which is a funny little statue of a boy happily relieving himself into a small pool outdoors as little boys everywhere apparently love to do.

There are a few theories as to how this statue came to be but one of the most popular says that during a battle sometime back in the 1100’s the troops put the young son of a duke into a basket and then hung the basket in a tree to encourage the men. From this tree the little boy relieved himself onto enemy troops who eventually lost the battle. This is probably a whole lot more than you want to know about the little statue but it is a must see for everyone who comes to Brussels. In fact the Manneken has taken on a life of its own now and at different times of the year is dressed in costumes from around the world. Heads of state visiting Brussels have been known to bring miniature versions of their national dress for the statue and he now has over 400 outfits including an Elvis costume.

And I’m thinking that anything I write now cannot possibly compete with a cheeky little boy statue with his own Elvis costume so I’ll save the rest of our short break fun for tomorrow’s post.

Happy Easter...Joyce