"Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

at one point

you ran a marathon
and i ran away to
live a second life and a third life
where i wore makeup everyday
and rode the Tube to walk over
a city full of Cadbury bars and galleries
and reading Zadie Smiths' White Teeth
for a class where the professor only wore
one t-shirt that said Johnny Cash
in block letters and talked of modern
literature about drugs sex and money
and where I learned about the jam-and-cheese sandwich
from a boy who ate bread stuffed with potato chips,
to live out of a suitcase, actually two suitcases,
to fly on airplanes and get stamps on my passport,
and live again, where I jumped off a bridge and found

solitude

of nature, of mountains, of deserts, of sun and
find you, who gave me so much and a
cat at my bed and a dog that used to
escape, into the streets and make us
go look, and now I am
here, maybe here forever, in a reality that seems
unending, fraught with the haunted whispers of
a past, whose hearts I have
broken, whose traces now make me
with nothing to look back to but pictures
and the emotions breathing at my neck,
to face tomorrow begrudgingly because it
is never-ending and so tiring.
thank goodness I have you
because you let me look
at you.

this is nuts.

literally.

hehe..

-silly sunday

nutcracker suite

whole nuts: pecan, walnut, almond, hazelnut (left to right)

nuts, naked: pecan, walnut, almond, hazelnut

Here's another winter foodie past-time! We have a whole bag of whole nuts to crack open this winter: pecans, walnuts, almonds. My favorite is the hazelnut, it has a sweet creaminess to it, on top of the crunchy bite. My uncle says the walnuts and pecans look like brains - he's an orthopedic surgeon, please excuse the comparison.

pecan

walnut

almond

hazelnut

uncle and daughter, cracking nuts

"DearLord," he said, "let me be like Aron. Don't make me mean. I don't want to be. If you will let everybody like me, why, I'll give you anything in the world, and if I haven't got it, why, I'll go for to get it. I don't want to be mean. I don't want to be lonely. For Jesus' sake, Amen."
- Cal's prayer, John Steinbeck's East of Eden

jumping off a bridge

"If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?"
YES!

A spur-of-the-moment decision: "Okay, I'll tag along with you guys to Stormsriver!"
Two of my friends were buying bus tickets for a trip to Stormsriver, which is on the eastern side of South Africa. I wasn't planning on doing anything particular for the week we have free before classes start (on Friday). And after some hesitation, I decided to tag along. I don't usually do things like this, I like to know everything and plan everything beforehand. But, this is Africa, and plans just do not work.

So, we book a bus ticket to Stormsriver. We leave at 6:45PM on Saturday, we arrive at 4:30AM Sunday. We get picked up by our hostel driver - a big dude in a pink sarong... (who's also "mysteriously" happy at the ungodly hour of 4 in the morning).
We sleep a bit in the hostel.

We wake up at 9AM. We are driven to the Bloukrans River Bridge, where the world's highest bungy jump is. It's actually a bridge that goes over a deep valley, and the fall from the bungy point in the center of the bridge to the bottom is 216m. I heard someone say it's 120 floor building, maybe not.
So I'm there, to jump or not to jump. Well I'm here, I might as well jump.

We walk over a mesh pathway to the bungy point. I don't know how I did it, but I jumped. I think my body just responded without thinking. "4,3,2,1, bungy!" and ooh, my feet sort of pushed off the platform!

There are mixed responses, but I liked the first free fall part. It was fun! I thought it'd be like going in a rollercoaster ride, but it wasn't! No butterflies in your stomach, just... trees and a black river down below and NOTHING else. It was an amazing feeling, actually. To be completely alone, in almost palpable silence between two huge walls of trees and "nothingness". Gorgeous exerience. Completely alone. It was fun :)

Some people said their head hurt from the blood rushing downwards, but no, I was fine. I liked dangling there waiting for the guy to come pick me up, actually. It was peaceful :)

So that's pretty much day 1.
Day 2: we lounged in the hostel, because the weather was horrible. It was raining all day. In the afternoon, we decided to trek to the Big Tree, a 36m yellowood tree nearby. So we walk along the highway, do a short walk to the tree and take pictures.
And we got drunk for the night.

Day 3: big hike in Tsitsikamma National Park
We get up in the morning, get driven to the Park, where we went on a hike to the waterfall. It's a very peculiar spot, where the waterfall from the mountain meets the waves from the ocean. Cool place. We did have to climb over some sharp-looking rocks to get there, though.
After lounging at the waterfall for a while, we ambitious young people decided to hike up a bit more. So we hiked up some more rocks and muddy paths and steep steps until we ran into a hut, where we took advantage of its toilet facilities, and found out that the middle section of the hike path had been closed. So we walked down the highway for some while, and resumed our hike on the right trail. Hmm, not easy, but good fun. I have not enjoyed nature this much in a long while.

So there it is, my long blurb about my short weekend-and-a-half trip.

Oh, almost forgot. HOT BARTENDERS at the hostel. Whoo!

Pictures, as always, are posted on google. (www.picasaweb.google.com/Choi.HyeIn) I didn't end up taking my camera to a lot of the places, so other people have more pictures. I'll post them up as soon as I can get hands on them.

Love, Hye In :)

excerpt from Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth

Pulchritude. From the Latin, pulcher, beautiful. That was the word that first strcuk Joyce when Millat Iqbal stepped forward on to the steps of her conservatory, sneering at Marcus's bad jokes, shading his violet eyes from a fading winter sun. Pulchritude: not just the concept but the whole physical word appeared before her as if someone had typed it on to her retina - p u l c h r i t u d e - beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till.
(Smith, White Teeth 317)