Florida

While I still miss California and friends and am sad that I didn't get to go back to Santa Barbara at all this summer, I'm beginning to warm up to Florida. For one, it has great beaches! The water is gentle and warm, and because it's also rather shallow, you can wallow far offshore to find mollusks, starfish, and sand dollars. I also like the weather a lot. During the summer, it rains every day, and the clouds from morning to night are like a dramatic show. Early in the morning, it's usually clear blue skies, then white puffy clouds start to form and grow vertically very rapidly, and by dusk, it's either rained or about to rain, and often I can spot rainbows, lightning, and the splashes of sunset all at the same time, depending on which way I'm looking. Being a big fan of clouds, Florida's skies are absolutely magical.
I also GET TO SWIM everyday! Coming back from the Mediterranean, with a serious swimming addiction, Florida is a good place to land.

mom and I being matchy at the beach with white sunglasses


Meet Ray and Cindy, my new (younger!) friends. We have so much fun together! They use me as their "adult supervision" to satisfy their parents, and then we just play together like friends. I'm such a kid.



Other than swimming, I spend most of my days watching dramas.
I started off with a Chinese drama called Summer's Desire （泡沫之夏), but it was too much--too dramatic, too possessive to the point of being unrealistic, and too many flashbacks (are they trying to save money by showing the same scene 10 times? or do the producers think the fans all have short term amnesia?). So I quit the show, and happily picked up my first Korean drama, which was the First Shop of the Coffee Prince. THE BEST SHOW EVER! I watched it with English subtitles, but even if I missed out on some of the subtlety of the dialogue, the actors were so superb that I was absolutely entranced in the plot (which by the way, is a story of a tomboyish girl who is mistaken for a guy, and then plays along so that she can get a job to help support her family. She and her boss eventually end up liking each other, but the boss has a difficult time because he still thinks that she's a boy.) I've never liked a show so much, I just want to watch the show over and over again. It's like that feeling that I had after watching Amelie for the first time. I think The Coffee Prince was also very popular in Latin America, maybe I'll watch it in Spanish so that I can pretend that I'm "learning". Sigh, BEST SHOW EVER! I love you GONG YOO!


Lastly, I tried Boys before Flowers, another Korean drama, but the Coffee Prince is a hard act to follow, and the chemistry between the main female and male characters just wasn't there. Also, the guy had a ridiculous haircut, and the girl whined a lot and constantly needed to be saved. Even though it received very good ratings, I just didn't like it.