Bleeding Money

Not looking forward to my credit card bill for March.

Piano, new glasses, hair, new clothes, dentist appointment, high cell phone bill, plane tickets, and I still owe money. Yikes.

A New Piano

I've been waiting for this moment. My own portable digital piano! After watching Once, I got sheet music for Falling Slowly, one of the movie's soundtracks and the piano part looked really pretty. Then I decided to actually get a piano, after not having played for about 5 years. I did some research online, checked out a few different ones at several shops yesterday, and picked out Casio's PX-110 DK. It got delivered earlier today and I played for over five hours!

Before buying the piano, I stopped by Goguma, absolutely the most unorganized and awesome used book store I had ever been to. I had so much fun looking around and actually got some really great music scores. One of my new favorites spots in Seoul.

Spring is Here!

I was out today for about 3 hours running errands, and spring is finally here! It felt like one of those days at Cornell in late March, when the air starts to feel breezy and warm against your face. On the way home, I picked up some greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and sliced almonds to make a nice light salad for dinner. Now that reminded me of those summer nights in Ithaca. (Awwwwwwwwwww I miss Cornell :D)

Distance and Mind

마음이 지척이면 천리라도 지척이오
마음이 천리오면 지척도 천리로다

우리는 각재천리(各在千里)오나
지척인가 하노라.

A Question

To you, what is fun and what is important?

MSN Messenger -- Terrible

• I don't like how it displays IMs.
• I can't even share a folder with more than two people. That is lame.
• I can't even find the Add button.
• The stored conversations are not integrated into my Hotmail account. Why would I need to search my buddy list? If they want to add an useful search function, make my IM logs more easily searchable! Right now they are stored as .xml files in "My Received Files" folder. Wow.
  
• Has graphic ads!
• Horrible menu design. I can never find what I want. The icons are too small. Do they even have a user experience team or just design things for kids / teenagers?

Ugh. Google needs to add video chat to GTalk ASAP so I can ditch this thing.

Life in a Big City

Matt has been talking about his weekend trips to Rasputin, one of the biggest used music stores in the Bay Area, and it intrigued me to see if there were any in Seoul. There were a number of online stores, but I much prefer going through old CDs (or books) one by one, not having any particular artists in mind.

I kept googling but only found a few LP stores, which seemed to have a bad reputation for being overpriced and unfriendly staff. Then I started looking up used book stores and ended up finding this big thrift store chain called "A Beautiful Store". There were over 20 stores listed, with some of them being just regular thrift stores and some carrying mostly CDs and books. I can't wait to check them out next weekend!

Oh, I also found an used book store called "Goguma", which means yam in Korean. I will have to stop by :-P