Author: Andrew
The Drama of Weddings
Sunghee’s brother in Korea is almost 30, her father is almost 60. These are important numbers if the son is not married yet. There has been a huge push this year for him to get married and it’s been a pretty wild ride.
His profession is as a twe kwon do teacher. In the same building is a young woman who teaches piano. They have a student exchange program that works out well as the parents of the childern in the classes can get two classes in one place. They get engaged and start to rush a wedding for September, before Sunghee’s brother turns 30. This catches Sunghee totally by surprise as the original plan was to have the wedding in May 2006 so Sunghee could actually go.
Wrinkle 1: Sunghee’s brother has to move the twe kwon do school to a larger building due to the larger class sizes. Another twe kwon do school moves into the old space and the new twe kwon do teacher tells the young girl that he knows Sunghee’s brother, and that the pictures of Sunghee and CJ in his wallet are aren’t really his sister and nephew but of his wife and son.
Wedding is called off, bride and groom hate each other.
All is quiet for a couple of months until last night when Sunghee’s mother calls and says the wedding is back on for early September. And the girl’s family did feel bad about Sunghee not being able to make it, but now their son, the bride’s brother, is in Japan and cannot come back in time so it’s even because no siblings are coming. I don’t quite understand this logic, neither does Sunghee, but she thinks it’s because she’s been here too long. 🙂
Atlantic City 2005 (#2)
So I get a call that The Showboat is opening a poker room in the New House of Blues section of the casino, but they’d like to give the dealers some experience before the official launch. Would I like to come down and play for a couple of days and give them some feedback? “Well, are you going to stake me?”, I asked. “No. But we’ll give you some rooms.” “Alright then.”
We headed down on Friday night and stayed at Harrah’s on the Marina. The hotel rooms there are quite nice and very modern with dark wood floors. The new room is nice and the dealers are capable. Now onto the Showboat. First off, the tables: They’re red felt. $5 chips are red. The backs of one of the decks is red. Red is not a good color for the table. There’s also some logos for the WSOP on there with four aces on it (Including a BLACK Ace of Diamonds) which I would keep including in the board cards (“Oh! I flopped a ace! oh wait, that’s the logo”). They also have those deck shufflers which I was told cost $11,000 each. I was there within five hours of the room opening and they would break down once an hour or so. The dealers are very very green. Very nervous and some of them don’t even know how to make proper change let along control the table. I actually had to take in a couple of sessions at the Trop to make sure I didn’t end up killing one of the dealers.
The play was very soft though. Normally there was one fixed game (3/6, 4/8, 5/10) going on and one NL game (1/2). I stuck to the limit game. I’m assuming that these people also got called in, but some of them could’ve just wandered off the street, either way, I want to thank the Showboat for putting them on my table and letting me take their money.
And then onto the rest of the trip. Sunghee ended up with a nasty sunburn on her back on Sunday while I was splashing around in the ocean. We actually went to the hospital for some burn cream on Monday before we headed home.
On Sunday night we also ate at Carmine’s at the Trop. So so good. The Chicken Parm was amazing.
Camping
On the day before my birthday (Saturday), we planned on going camping. Sunghee had heard about Silver Lake, which was a mile or so hike from the camp she used to work at. I popped Silver Lake into my the GPS and “Silver Lake State Park” came up. Alright! Lets go! Now, the camp Sunghee went to was in Ripton, which normally we would get to by driving north up Rt. 7, the GPS wanted us to go east on Rt. 4, then north on Rt. 100. I figured that the State Park was on the other side of the lake or something. After we ended up in Bethel I concluded that whoever told Sunghee that you could hike from Ripton to this Silver Lake was out of their minds. It was about 50 miles or so away. We had arrived at about 7:30 and the State Park was pretty well filled up with campers so we looked at the map and found that yes, indeed, there are TWO Silver Lakes in VT. One is near Bethel, VT and the other is near Lake Dunmore. That’s not too confusing. It was about 8:15pm and we were running out of day light rapidly. I popped in a randon Ripton address in the GPS and started off. We were directed up over the mountain on some dirt road. Quite exciting.
We were driving along the Green Mountain National Forest and found one pull off with a trail head on it that looked pretty good. We hiked about 1/4 mile into the woods looking for a nice flat place to setup camp when I thought I heard police sirens. “Wow, I thought we were out in the middle of nowhere, but I hear sirens”. Sunghee then said “No, those are coyotes.” And yes, they were. Lots and lots of coyotes. We quickly turned around and went back to the car. By this time it was 9pm and I wasn’t too keen on hiking to Silver Lake from Ripton on some unknown trail so we headed back towards Killington and decided to get on the Long Trail at Kent Pond, the we decided to forget the long trail and setup camp in the picnic area since it was almost 10pm and we were tired. I cooked some ravioli over the stern-o stove placed on the concrete picnic table and Sunghee make ramen noodles. Such is “roughing it” in our lives. We were awoken at around 1am by someone driving down to the pond then turning around. Also awaken at 3:15am by someone driving up with a boat, putting it in the water, then taking it out and driving off. I think they came back at 6:15 and actually left the boat in the water this time. We got up at this point and tore down camp in about 5 minutes (love the new tent!) and headed back home.