Adoption - it's everywhere!

Adoption came up twice in conversation tonight.* My friend who was adopted from Korea as an infant invited me to her Korean adoptees meeting and then later on I spoke to a friend who had some exciting adoption news to share. She has 9 sisters adopted from the U.S. foster care system or through domestic private adoptions and her parents have recently decided to adopt another teenage girl. She's super excited about it, and I'm so happy for the whole family!

*To be fair, adoption comes up quite a lot in my conversations - partly because a few of my best friends are adopted and partly because I won't shut up about it I'm interested in adopting sometime in the future.

P.S. How is it that I spent 18 years not knowing ANYONE my age who had more than 1 sibling and now most of my closest friends come from large families? Most of my friends all have at least 3-10 brothers or sisters - two come from families of 8 children and two come from families of 11. The other two come from families with 4 and 5 kids. I have one other close friend who only has one sibling like me :-P I can honestly say that (at least in my experience) my friends who have grown up in large families are some of the most interesting, intelligent, and awesome people I have ever met.

Back in Boston!

After two delightful weeks in North Carolina, I am back in Boston. I'll try and post about some of my awesome experiences in the next few days - I had an amazing time and I'm looking forward to sharing it with y'all. Right now, I'm unpacking and attempting to run errands/apply for jobs/reconnect with friends.

In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a cool thing that happened today. About 4pm, the sky started to get really dark, the wind picked up briskly, and the air started smelling like rain (btw, am I the only one who can smell approaching rain or do others do it too?). I suddenly heard the sounds of a torrential downpour occurring, but when I looked out the window the pavement was dry and there was no rain. Further up the block, however, the rain was heaving down by the bucketful. As I watched, a solid wall of rain moved up the street - there was a distinct line which divided heavy rain from dry pavement, and the line was pushing ever forward. I laughed out loud with sheer delight at the miraculous nature of the storm because it was a truly wondrous thing to see. Cool, huh?

Guess What?

I'm posting this blog post from the airplane! They're running a WiFi trial, so there is free internet for the duration of the flight. Cool, huh?

A deep fried pickle

Today, while I was at the airport in Charlottesville eating lunch, I bit into a random fried object on my plate and discovered that it was a deep fried pickle! I'd never even heard of such a thing. It wasn't my favorite thing in the world, but it wasn't bad either! The tartness of the pickle cut through the grease. The meal in general wasn't bad - quite delicious, in fact, despite the fact that it was airport food. The mashed potatoes were fresh and buttery, and the baby back ribs were mighty tasty. It was also a lot cheaper than most airport food - my plate which included a half rack of baby back ribs, mashed potatoes, collard greens, and corn bread only came to $11. Wow! I know that at Logan airport in Boston the food is much more expensive and less tasty. Maybe things are cheaper in the South?

Here I am!

I arrived safely in North Carolina and let me say, it is beautiful here! I'm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about an hour and a half away from Asheville. Everything is so green and lush and refreshing. The food is great too!

One really interesting thing that happened in the airport is that someone came on over the intercom and announced that they were leading a call to worship in the airport chapel! I've never heard of an airport having a chapel with it's own chaplain in it, but Charlottesville airport does. Too bad we had a plane to catch, or I totally would have gone :-)

Also, the plane we flew on from Charlottesville to Asheville was tiny and was so small that it had actual propellers. I'll post the pictures when I can. My window was right next to one of the propellers, so I got to see them in action (and boy are they loud).

Flying tomorrow!

Tomorrow I'll be heading down to North Carolina for 2 weeks to work in a letterpress studio for a summer course. I'm super excited about it because I'm going to be staying in the mountains and it's supposed to be beautiful there. I've also never been to the South, barring Florida (which somehow doesn't seem southern to me in a way that North Carolina or Louisiana or Virginia do), so I'm excited to see what it's like there.

I'll try and take lots of pictures as well as blog about it, but there is limited internet and patchy cell phone service, so I may not get the chance. Could be a good thing, actually - maybe I'll break my email/internet addiction :-P

Hilarious!

I just found out about this video tonight, and I've watched it a bunch of times already - it's hilarious! (That, and the singer is really, really good looking :-P ). It's worth a watch!